Dec 28, 2016 12:30 PM EST By Julia Ramirez, UniversityHerald Reporter

Facebook Inc's hardware development division officially released a statement regarding a collaboration with Harvard, Princeton, and 15 other universities aimed to speed up partnership on technology research projects.

Facebook's Building 8 and the educational institutions agreement is an offshoot on Facebook's seeking ways to research new revenue streams in artificial intelligence and virtual reality, as reported by Reuters.

The pace in which research collaborations between universities and companies usually is slow to facilitate. However, with this new agreement, the usual period of nine to 12 months is now decreased to weeks regarding collaboration on new ideas, in a statement released by Regina Dugan, who heads the new Building 8 unit.

Details regarding on how the partnership is sped up was not divulged by Dugan. However, it does take several months to set up traditional negotiations between universities and companies.

Facebook AI Research (FAIR)

The goal of advancing the science of artificial intelligence prompted Facebook to create Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in 2013. Its aim was to concentrate on the field's unsolved problems.

Solving problems in AI will require a huge amount of time and lots of theoretical and applied research. Furthermore, it will also need extensive collaboration with the community, according to a post by Facebook.

Facebook acknowledges that there is no monopoly of knowledge. Research requires collaboration between researchers. The progress of a certain field advances quickly when diverse and many researchers collaborate their work.

This goal has prompted Facebook to initiate FAIR. The program aims to donate 25 state-of-the-art GPU-based servers to European Union research institutions. These servers will be used to hasten the research efforts in AI and machine learning. Furthermore, FAIR will team up with the beneficiaries to make sure that they have the needed software to run the servers.

Facebook is stepping up as a leader in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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