Facebook Inc. today announced the launch of a new Facebook AI Research lab in Montreal, making the social media giant one more of several major tech companies to open an artificial intelligence lab in the Canadian city.

“Montreal already has an existing fantastic academic AI community, an exciting ecosystem of startups, and promising government policies to encourage AI research,” Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun said in a statement. “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.”

The FAIR Montreal lab will work with Facebook’s extended AI team, which includes more than 100 employees at offices around the world, including New York, Paris and Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Joelle Pineau, director of the Reasoning and Learning Lab at McGill University, will lead the new lab, but LeCun noted that she will also maintain her role at the university.

“We think the talent we can attract will bring valuable expertise and new perspectives to our work, and under Dr. Pineau’s leadership, we will continue to invest in this team and in the Canadian research community as a whole,” LeCun said.

According to LeCun, the FAIR Montreal team will contribute to the greater AI community by publishing research, releasing open source software, participating in conferences and workshops, and collaborating with other research organizations. Facebook will also be investing in several local academic institutions, including McGill University, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms and Université de Montréal.

In the last few years, Montreal has become a hub of AI research activity, with both highly regarded academic programs, such as the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, and company-owned labs such as Google LLC’s DeepMind and Microsoft Corp.

“This trend isn’t exactly new,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said today during a press conference that was streamed on Facebook Live. “Generations of innovators and thinkers have built Montreal into the city it is today, a city where new ideas are welcomed, where talent thrives and creativity flourishes.”

Trudeau, who himself is a Montreal native and McGill University alumnus, added that Canada is “the right place to shape the future” and that “as much as AI is about the future, it’s already shaping the world we live in today.”

Photo: Facebook (Pictured, from left: Yoshua Bengio, director of Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms; Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer of Facebook; Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada; Joelle Pineau, director of FAIR Montreal; Alan Bernstein, president of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; and Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist of Facebook)