Canada tries to turn its AI ideas into big dollars
By Steve Lohr
TORONTO: Long before Google started working on cars that drive themselves and Amazon was creating home appliances that talk, a handful of researchers in Canada - backed by the Canadian government and universities - were laying the groundwork for today's boom in artificial intelligence.
But the centre of the commercial gold rush has been a long way away, in Silicon Valley. In recent years, many of Canada's young AI scientists, lured by lucrative paydays from Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies, have departed. Canada is producing a growing number of AI startups, but they often head to California, where venture capital, business skills are abundant.
"Canada is not really reaping the benefits from this AI technical leadership and decades of investment by the Canadian government," said Tiff Macklem, former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, who is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Now bringing AI home is a priority for the Canadian government, companies, universities and technologists. The goal, they say, is to build a business environment around the country's expertise and to keep the experts its universities create in the country. And they want to build on the tenacity of veteran researchers like Geoffrey Hinton, Richard Sutton and Yoshua Bengio, who developed techniques that opened the door to remarkable improvements in an AI technology called machine learning, even as many computer scientists and the tech industry considered their work to be an unpromising backwater. There are encouraging signs, including new government funding, big company investments, programs to nurture startups, and the changing habits of homegrown entrepreneurs and American venture capitalists.
In its new budget, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged $93 million to support AI research centres in Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton, which will be public-private collaborations.
The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, announced two weeks ago, will be one of them. The institute begins with commitments of $130 million, about half the money coming from the national and provincial governments and the other half from corporate sponsors like Google, Accenture and Nvidia, as well as big Canadian companies like the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and Air Canada.
Major technology companies, like Google, Microsoft and IBM, are also adding to their AI research teams in Canada.
TORONTO: Long before Google started working on cars that drive themselves and Amazon was creating home appliances that talk, a handful of researchers in Canada - backed by the Canadian government and universities - were laying the groundwork for today's boom in artificial intelligence.
But the centre of the commercial gold rush has been a long way away, in Silicon Valley. In recent years, many of Canada's young AI scientists, lured by lucrative paydays from Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies, have departed. Canada is producing a growing number of AI startups, but they often head to California, where venture capital, business skills are abundant.
"Canada is not really reaping the benefits from this AI technical leadership and decades of investment by the Canadian government," said Tiff Macklem, former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, who is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Now bringing AI home is a priority for the Canadian government, companies, universities and technologists. The goal, they say, is to build a business environment around the country's expertise and to keep the experts its universities create in the country. And they want to build on the tenacity of veteran researchers like Geoffrey Hinton, Richard Sutton and Yoshua Bengio, who developed techniques that opened the door to remarkable improvements in an AI technology called machine learning, even as many computer scientists and the tech industry considered their work to be an unpromising backwater. There are encouraging signs, including new government funding, big company investments, programs to nurture startups, and the changing habits of homegrown entrepreneurs and American venture capitalists.
In its new budget, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged $93 million to support AI research centres in Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton, which will be public-private collaborations.
The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, announced two weeks ago, will be one of them. The institute begins with commitments of $130 million, about half the money coming from the national and provincial governments and the other half from corporate sponsors like Google, Accenture and Nvidia, as well as big Canadian companies like the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and Air Canada.
Major technology companies, like Google, Microsoft and IBM, are also adding to their AI research teams in Canada.
