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MONTREAL — In a sun-lit lecture space at Ecole Polytechnique, Joelle Pineau explained how a machine can create a recipe from a photo of a tourtiere.
It’s not easy as pie, but rather the fruit of 12 months of experimentation at Facebook’s new artificial intelligence lab, which she heads up in Montreal.
“I would like the robot that goes with it and then makes the recipe,” joked Pineau, an associate professor at McGill University.
Facebook’s lab has already expanded to 20 specialists from four since its launch in September 2017, with plans to move to a bigger facility come January. Microsoft Corp. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. have both launched Montreal-based AI labs in the past two years, and aim to hire scores more researchers in the next year or so.