Facebook Donates Servers To Boost Up Artificial Intelligence Research

On Thursday, The social media giant, Facebook announced that the company will be donating computer servers to a number of research institutions across Europe, starting with Germany, to accelerate research efforts into artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The Facebook founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg was in Berlin to receive a prize from German publisher Axel Springer and announced that the group would donate a total of 25 servers.

According to the company’s post, the first donation will go to Prof. Klaus-Robert Müller of The Technical University of Berlin, currently occupied with machine learning at the university’s Institute of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science. Müller’s immediate scope with the new equipment, which will also come with technical support, will be research into image analysis of breast cancer and the chemical modelling of molecules.

Dr Müller commented in the announcement “This partnership comes at exactly the right moment for AI research in Germany. It will help us as we study two very hard and computationally intense learning problems around image analysis of breast cancer and chemical modelling of molecules. The new servers will help us speed up our research cycles and do better AI research much faster.” In addition to the provision of the GPU servers – technical details of which have not been revealed yet – Facebook will work with the EU recipients to ensure that the partners have suitable software to run the servers, and will envoy researchers to participate in the new server-based projects.

The initiative comes through the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) program, which was set up in 2013 and handles a wide variety of interesting projects, most particularly in the subject perhaps dearest to Facebook’s corporate heart – image recognition.

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Facebook is opening the 'program up' to the broader European community, inviting research institutions to make application proposals for GPU donations by submitting a one-page proposal to gpuapplication@fb.com. The criteria for applicants can be found here, and includes the stipulation that participants must publish data sets resultant from their GPU research, and that the institutions, which must be publicly funded, academic or governmental in nature and must already have a laboratory or research group working on problems of artificial intelligence. Institutions with a reputation for collaboration within the wider scientific community will receive further preference.