Canada to host G7 conference in December

Canada will be hosting a G7 conference on artificial intelligence in Montreal on Dec. 6, as part of the Neural Information Processing Systems conference.

The conference is one of the results of Canada’s G7 presidency, and the summit of world leaders that came together in Quebec earlier this year.

“Artificial Intelligence is a key part of our government’s economic growth strategy. It presents new opportunities to generate prosperity for Canadian families through new and innovative highquality jobs,” Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains said in a news release Wednesday afternoon. “The G7 conference in December will help us focus on the responsible adoption of AI and explore business opportunities related to AI.”

In recent years, Canada has positioned itself as a world leader in artificial intelligence technology, with Google, Facebook, Uber, Microsoft and Samsung all doing significant work on machine learning in the country. In particular, Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton have become hubs for AI research and development.

The federal government is putting significant funding towards this initiative, including $125 million as part of the Pan-canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. Moreover, the $950 million innovation supercluster program includes several regional projects that have an artifi- cial intelligence component, including the Montreal-based Scale.ai supercluster, which is focused on artificial-intelligence-enabled supply chains.

Earlier in the day, Bains was speaking at the Fortune Global Forum in Toronto, and he was asked about increasing competition in the global artificial intelligence game, with both the United States and China trying to position themselves as world-leaders in this area, based on the pioneering research of academics like Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto, and Yoshua Bengio in Montreal

“From our perspective as a government, we realize this is the area where we can continue to succeed,” Bains said.

“We’re betting on our No. 1 resource, which is our talent.”