article

montreal is leading the world AI takeover

[WHAT]

] by Simon Hudson @ cloudraker.com - with the largest group of independant AI researchers(IVADO) including pioneers(Yoshua Bengio) of 'deep learning', government funding(93M), access to multiple universities(PolyTechnique, Montreal, ) and an incubator(Element AI) for AI researchers and a 10 year head start - will Montreal become the silicon valley of AI?

[WHY]

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[WHERE]

] READ THE FULL ARTICLE

] http://www.cloudraker.com/en/cloud-co/montreal-is-leading-the-ai-world-takeover

[WHEN]

] 2016-01-18

[EXAMPLE]

AI is now the technology shaping our world more than ever before. Montreal is at the center of this movement, the next/new SV of AI

Why not New York, London, Boston, or even Silicon Valley? What does Montreal have that they don’t? As it turns out, the largest concentration of independent AI researchers in the world.

at center of group of researchers is - Institute of Data Valorization (IVADO), which is a collaboration between the universities Polytechnique, Université de Montréal, and HEC.

10 years ago, IVADO recognized the need for a new kind of data scientist, one who combined the disciplines of management research, analytics, and machine learning.

Valérie Bécaert, puts it, it’s “not just using what is called automatic learning to give intelligence to the data, but to automate complex decisions with these data.” These complex decisions she’s referring to are what are behind automation in cars, translation (soon to be dialogue), pharmaceutical research, and many more applications.

scientific director Yoshua Bengio. He is considered one of the pioneers of “deep learning”,

about 10 years ago that this unpopular method began to be the hottest area in AI research. But most of the serious funding came from big tech companies, who drew nearly all of the talent out of the universities and into their private research groups.

Bengio, however, has brushed off the offers to go private. Instead he has focused on attracting and developing an independent group in Montreal, which is now the biggest in the world.

While the private research groups have been able to come out with powerful applications of AI, Yoshua has said “I’m hoping that we can provide services that maybe don’t have any commercial value but are going to be useful to people."

He’s not only looking to surpass human expertise, but also distribute it. Even if a machine can’t beat the top 1% of doctors at identifying cancer, that’s still better than most doctors in the world.

This vision for making an impact with AI is what’s helped draw much of the talent to Montreal rather than big tech. This last fall, the Canadian government gave IVADO $93 million and seven years to make Montreal “an internationally renowned center for artificial intelligence.”

Another advantage of Montreal's is its cluster of academic institutions, rivalled only by Boston.For instance, those working on AI applications in medicine benefit greatly from having some of the top health science experts right next door

This also applies to the development of ethics around AI. Humanitarian design needs to happen from the bottom up, so a concentration of authorities in the social sciences makes a well-rounded academic foundation needed for an AI ecosystem.

Bengio described IVADO as a “kernel”, a seed that would grow to connect and develop all the parts of an AI ecosystem. It’s come to act as an “interface” between researchers, as well as industry and government.

Element AI is an incubator for AI researchers with an entrepreneurial spirit to tackle data problems that businesses bring to them. (investor Jean-Sébastien Cournoyer of Real Ventures, Montreal’s main venture capital firm.)

Montreal has a number of large global companies ready to apply these tools and are happy to have the close access: CAE, AirCanada, Merck Pharmaceuticals, and Pratt & Whitney,

Bengio “I believe AI is going to be one of, if not the, largest growth areas of the economy over the next few decades. It has been growing very fast in the last few years but I think it's just the tip of the iceberg…. We can be here in Canada, and Montreal in particular, at the centre of the action if we take the right decisions now.”

[HOW-TO]

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[REFERENCE]

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comment mine

aryehof 3 days ago [-]

Has AI advanced from the 1990s? Or has there been a change in the environment it can be applied to, with the rise of big data, big infrastructure - big everything?

thedevil 3 days ago [-]

They learned how to train deep nets ten years ago (and are getting better fast as new techniques are invented). As a result, neural nets started taking over.

Big Everything is important, but without the new techniques for deep nets, AI would not be so sexy right now.

edblarney 3 days ago [-]

This should not be downvoted, he is essentially correct.

'AI' has always been around, but the 'big leap' we've seen recently is entirely due to researchers finally able to make Neural Nets actually work :).

'Deep Learning' really refers to a specific kind of Neural Network.

The first application was image recognition. It's also used a lot now in voice recognition - and they're trying to jam it into everything possible.

I think it's basically fair to say that at least in 2016 AI pretty much boils down to Deep Learning / Neural Nets to move something more classical along in terms of capability.

What 'AI' means changes over time, but I think it's safe to say the renewal and hype is based on the 'big eureka' in Neural Nets and their relevant applications.

_delirium 3 days ago [-]

Even that I don't think involved much of a "eureka" moment, but mostly incremental improvements due to the environment changing. A lot of neural-net techniques from the '80s and '90s that didn't work that well at the time, now work well because we have sufficient data and computation power (especially via GPUs) to make them work. There have been improvements as well of course, but they're evolutionary improvements, while the big breakthrough was big data + big compute.

tossaway322 3 days ago [-]

aryehof asks>"Has AI advanced from the 1990s?"

No.

But lots of progress in pattern recognition & classification. So whatever AI exists can see better, hear better, speak better.

Unfortunately nothing remotely approaching the intelligence of a cat or dog, much less a human being, has appeared except in very limited domains.

AlexCoventry 3 days ago [-]

nothing remotely approaching the intelligence of a cat or dog, much less a human being, has appeared except in very limited domains.Even machines with the intelligence of a fruit fly or lizard are useful, if you can industrialize the application of them. That is essentially how Alpha Go works.

Dzugaru 3 days ago [-]

Computers are far better now in solving complex tasks widely considered as requiring intelligence like video captioning and speech recognition, automatic driving and playing complex games. The change is due to hardware engineering that enabled enormous computing and data acquision/storage power compared to 1990s and a possibility to conduct machine intelligence experiments at unprecedented scale and speed which lead to better algorithms.

If, instead, you want to know when or if AI will match human intelligence or become self-consciuos - sadly no one knows that. We may be "advancing" in totally wrong direction.

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