Indianorigin professor driving Canada’s artificial intelligence innovations
TORONTO: Professor Ajay Agrawal feels like he’s back in 1995. That year, the first major commercial Internet service providers like AOL went online and Yahoo’s search engine became available to the public. It was an inflection point for the Internet and, Agrawal believes, artificial intelligence or AI may now be nearing that stage.
Agrawal, 47, is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, but he also happens to be the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL). He has emerged as a prominent figure in the field of machine learning, with CDL’s AI stream.
The programme launched in 2015, and the 2016 batch has 50 companies engaged in AIrelated enterprises. “To our knowledge, having 50 AI companies represents the greatest concentration of AI companies on any programme on earth,” Agrawal told HT.
Agrawal, who was born in Vancouver, is also the cofounder of NextCanada, which started NextAI last year. NextCanada’s mission is to “increase national prosperity by providing an ecosystem to support the country’s most exceptional entrepreneurs and innovators”.
He said AI “is a prediction technology, it’s a way to taking data, voice, text, all data captured by sensors, all cameras, heat sensors, lights sensors, and converting that into predictions, whether it’s predicting traffic or weather or what website you’re going to click on or what movie you’re going to watch.
“I’ve been interested in intelligent machines for a long time. I became interested in the economics of artificial intelligence about four years ago and then launched the AI stream of the CDL two years ago and then launched
NextAI in late 2016.”
Playing the part of guides at the CDL course are leaders in AI technology, such as Cambridge, the Englandbased William TunstallPedoe, founder of Evi, which was acquired by Amazon and became “an integral part” of Alexa; Barney Pell, who managed an 85-strong team at NASA that flew the first AI system in deep space; and Russ Salakhutdinov, Apple’s director of AI research.
As Agrawal plays a pioneering role in building AI talent in the country, CDL will increase its intake to 75 companies in 2017. The “big thing” that will occur is that while 50 will come in “classical machine learning”, they will “launch the world’s first seed stage programme in quantum machine learning”, featuring 25 companies.
This programme will be in partnership with Vancouverbased D-Wave, believed to be the maker of the world’s first commercial quantum computer, purchased by the likes of Nasa and Google.
The 2015 batch of the AI stream, the only one to have “graduated”, has already seen nearly half of the companies funded. As Agrawal said, “We’ve brought intelligent investors into the Canadian eco-system.”
While the first two batches have no Indian companies, Agrawal hopes that will change. “I imagined when we launched this new quantum machine learning, that students at places like IITs might be interested. For many it will be the only place where they will be able to access a quantum computer.”
Rather than using binary bits as in conventional computers, quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits to encode information, enhancing the power of the system.
Agrawal expects the next five years to witness a surge in narrow applications of AI. After that, he said, “It will become more interesting. Rather than having narrow prediction applications, we’ll see things that feel like real intelligence embedded into inanimate objects.”