Facebook—whose chief Mark Zuckerberg has been on something of a charm offensive in Germany—has confirmed plans to donate 25 “state-of-the-art” GPU-based servers to a myriad of European research institutions.
Klaus-Robert Müller of the Technical University of Berlin will be the first benefactor of the new Facebook AI research project. His team will receive four GPU-based servers to assist them in two areas of research: image analysis of breast cancer, and chemical modelling of molecules.
“This partnership comes at exactly the right moment for AI research in Germany,” said Dr Müller. “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,” he added.
Academic and research institutions working on artificial intelligence, and machine learning have been invited to submit applications to the initiative to gain access to similar donations. Interestingly, it looks like preference will be given to groups working with systems research, unsupervised learning, memory networks, game playing or computer vision. Additionally, Facebook said that recipients will be required to “publish any novel code or algorithms developed as part of their research under an open source licence within the limitations of privacy requirements.”
