Facebook has continued its investment in AI research and engineering with the opening of a new AI research lab in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The research lab forms part of Facebook AI Research (FAIR), and joins the over 100 scientists Facebook already has at labs in Menlo Park, California, New York, and Paris working on AI.

Facebook says that the Montreal lab will be home to scientists and engineers working on ‘a wide range of ambitious AI research projects’, while also having a special focus on reinforcement learning and dialog systems. The lab will be led by Professor Joelle Pineau, co-director of the reasoning and learning lab at McGill University.

The FAIR site will engage with the broader research community through publications, open source software, participation in technical conferences and workshops, and research collaborations. In addition, Facebook is launching partnerships with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), McGill University, and Université de Montréal.

“Montreal already has an existing fantastic academic AI community, an exciting ecosystem of startups, and promising government policies to encourage AI research,” said Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Facebook. “We are excited to become part of this larger community, and we look forward to engaging with the entire ecosystem and helping it continue to thrive.”