McGill
professor Jackie Cheung to act as
academic advisor
TORONTO, Nov. 21, 2017 /CNW/ - Continuing its
investment in the Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem,
Borealis AI, an RBC Institute for Research, today announced that it
will open a lab in Montreal, one
of Canada's most prominent AI
hubs. Borealis AI has partnered with McGill
University Professor, Jackie
Cheung, as academic advisor for the lab and will work
closely with the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA).
The team anticipates opening the doors of the new location early in
the new year.
"Montreal has emerged as a
global centre for research in artificial intelligence and I'm
excited to be participating in this community," said Dr.
Foteini Agrafioti, head, Borealis AI
and chief science officer, RBC. "We're committed to helping advance
the field through the creation of intellectual property and look
forward to providing new opportunities for the enormous talent
already doing exceptional research in the region."
Professor Cheung is an expert in the field of natural language
processing (NLP). NLP, which is the computer's ability to
understand human language, is considered one of the key focus areas
of AI research. Its applications to financial services and other
industries have the potential for ground-breaking solutions in
areas of impact, like the analysis of unstructured text that is
prevalent in public and RBC proprietary datasets.
Montreal has emerged globally
as an AI powerhouse, buoyed by research institutions like the MILA
and a rich AI startup ecosystem. Borealis AI will collaborate
closely with MILA and Professor Yoshua
Bengio, and continue to grow its research partnerships with
McGill University and the Université de
Montréal.
"The MILA is delighted to see a major Canadian business
investing in AI research, particularly in long-term difficult
questions, and opening a lab in Montreal," said AI pioneer and head of MILA,
Professor Yoshua Bengio. "The
collaborations this will bring are not just between MILA and RBC,
but also involve other actors in the ecosystem, which is important
for the country's ability to compete internationally. There are
plenty of difficult AI research questions of interest to RBC which
can have major impact on many sectors of the economy, so this goes
well beyond the banking sector."
RBC was also announced today as a partner of the Creative
Destruction Lab Montreal (CDL-Montreal). The result of a
partnership between HEC Montréal and the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, CDL-Montreal is the
city's first world-class startup support program focused on
capitalizing its expertise in AI.
About Borealis AI
Borealis AI, an RBC Institute for
Research, is a curiosity-driven research centre dedicated to
achieving state-of-the-art in machine learning. Established in
2016, with labs in Toronto and
Edmonton, Borealis AI supports
open academic collaborations and teams up with world-class research
centres in artificial intelligence. With a focus on ethical AI that
will help communities thrive, the machine learning scientists
perform fundamental and applied research in areas such as
reinforcement learning, natural language processing, deep learning
and unsupervised learning to solve ground-breaking problems in
diverse fields. For more information please see:
www.borealisai.com.
About RBC
Royal Bank of Canada is Canada's largest bank, and one of the largest
banks in the world, based on market capitalization. We are one of
North America's leading
diversified financial services companies, and provide personal and
commercial banking, wealth management, insurance, investor services
and capital markets products and services on a global basis. We
have approximately 81,000 full- and part-time employees who serve
more than 16 million personal, business, public sector and
institutional clients through offices in Canada, the U.S. and 35 other countries. For
more information, please visit rbc.com.
RBC helps communities prosper, supporting a broad range of
community initiatives through donations, community investments and
employee volunteer activities. For more information please see:
http://www.rbc.com/community-sustainability/.
SOURCE RBC