Facebook’s new artificial intelligence research lab in Pittsburgh will take over a space on Carnegie Mellon University’s campus that has been vacant since February, when The Walt Disney Co. vacated its research post there.
Two CMU professors with expertise in robotics will head the lab, but Facebook maintains that their new positions will not distract from their current responsibilities — nor should the new roles impede or supersede any university-affiliated research.
Jessica Hodgins, a professor at CMU’s School of Computer Science and a researcher at the Robotics Institute, will head Facebook research in the university’s Collaborative Innovation Center in Oakland, said Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist for Facebook.
Ms. Hodgins’s research focuses on robotics, with an emphasis on systems that learn continuously over years; teaching machines to reason; computer vision; and computer graphics.
She’s joined by Abhinav Gupta, an associate professor of robotics who specializes in human-robot interaction in addition to computer vision and perception.
Both will retain their teaching posts at CMU, at a time when tech firms have been criticized for poaching talent from universities.
In 2015, Uber hired away 40 researchers from CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville for its Advanced Technologies Center in the Strip District.
Mr. LeCun of Facebook said its researchers’ “dual affiliation” with both their university and the company usually means they spend 20, 50 or 80 percent of their time working for the tech company. He would not characterize that as poaching, he said.
He did not give specifics on Ms. Hodgins or Mr. Gupta’s time commitments.
In May, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based tech giant confirmed it was in the process of setting up artificial intelligence labs in Pittsburgh and Seattle, joining its existing research posts in Menlo Park, New York City, Paris, Montreal and Tel Aviv.
In total, Facebook now employs 170 researchers for AI-related work.
It’s not the only company opening research labs.
Google has AI-driven labs in Ghana, China and France, and Samsung Research is set to open research labs in Cambridge, Moscow and Toronto.
Mr. LeCun expects Ms. Hodgins and Mr. Gupta’s contributions will also prove fruitful for its “Facebook Reality Lab,” a re-branded version of the Oculus lab in Oakland.
Any research conducted on behalf of Facebook is published openly, Mr. LeCun said, because the company can’t solve all AI-related issues on its own.
Facebook is not possessive of this intellectual property, he said, which makes it easier to work at the intersection of academia and industry.
Research conducted on behalf of Facebook is not usually something the company would pursue a patent for, he added, because its labs don’t create actual products, but scientific processes. So if the boundaries between university research and Facebook research do cross, universities can do essentially whatever they’d like with the intellectual property, per an agreement with Facebook.
That maximizes the chances that the intellectual property will be actively used, Mr. LeCun said, which is a net postive.
Facebook is also funding some of its researchers’ on-campus projects so that they spend less time writing grant proposals, he said.
While the company did not provide specific financials on the new Facebook labs — Mr. LeCun only wrote in a blog post that the company is “providing millions in funding to the schools from which we’ve hired” — the tech firm invested over $7 million in a lab that opened in Montreal last fall, according to the Montreal Gazette. That research post is expected to grow to 30 people.
The company also didn’t specify how much researchers like Ms. Hodgins or Mr. Gupta will be paid.
Robotics experts are in hot demand and short supply, and can secure multi-year contracts from business and tech behemoths willing to dish out millions.
Manuela Veloso, who headed CMU’s machine learning department, took a leave of absence in May to lead artificial intelligence research at J.P. Morgan Chase.
Facebook is emphasizing robotics in its Pittsburgh AI research, Mr. LeCun said, because almost all exciting advancements in AI and machine learning have been by people who work on robotics applications for the real world. He said that in the future, robots will bring people together.
Mr. LeCun pointed out that upper management, like CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has called for expanded research in robotics and artificial intelligence.
When Mr. Zuckerberg testified before Congress in April, he claimed artificial intelligence could combat “fake news” and help spot hate speech in the future.
“We think our role should be to accelerate the progress towards those goals,” Mr. LeCun said. “It’s going to take the combined efforts of the entire research community around the world.”
Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.
Updated at 5:30 p.m. July 17, 2018.
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First Published: July 17, 2018, 4:36 p.m.
