Getting their share

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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’ 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 poachingtalent 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 rebranded version of the Oculus lab