THE VISION BEHIND TORONTO COUPLE’S $100M GIFT TO AI INSTITUTE.
Schwartz, Reisman donate $100M to U of T
When Gerald Schwartz showed Heather Reisman an article about the idea for a University of Toronto artificial intelligence innovation hub at the corner of College Street and University Avenue in downtown Toronto, the couple was excited to be involved.
Reisman is founder, chair and CEO of Indigo Books and Music Inc., and Schwartz is the founder, chair, and CEO of Onex Corporation; they both have a personal interest in artificial intelligence — so much so that Reisman spoke on a panel at the Uoft Rotman School of Management last fall about Indigo’s early efforts to use AI to transform their retail business.
But between that initial idea to get involved with the building proposal, and Monday’s announcement of a landmark $100-million donation to build the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Centre, Reisman and Schwartz suggested another idea to incorporate into the building.
“The part that was really exciting — and which we brought to the ambition — was to recognize that this amazing complex would not just be about technological-inspired innovation, but that it would be deliberately exploring the interface between AI and other advancing technologies and people and society and humanity,” Reisman said in an interview Tuesday.
The building, to be constructed in two phases starting this fall, will house the Vector Institute, Toronto’s main artificial intelligence commercialization organization, along with space for entrepreneurs and researchers working in both artificial intelligence but also cutting-edge biomedicine.
But Reisman said it was the idea of finding space for the social implications of technology that excited her.
“I think we’re drawn to it because what we know is that Ai-based technologies are just advancing at warp speed, but the human brain just changes so, so slowly,” she said.
“U of T is uniquely qualified as it has such strength in the humanities, in philosophy, in law. There’s huge strengths that the university has, so the notion of combining the brilliance that’s happening at the Vector Institute with the other strengths of the university, I mean, it’s magical.”
Reisman and Schwartz’s idea dovetails with what a lot of Canadian policymakers are talking about right now.
Canada is actually a global leader on artificial intelligence. Much of the pioneering work on deep-learning neural networks, the hottest field in machine learning today, was done by Geoffrey Hinton, who is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery will announce that Hinton, along with University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio and New York University professor Yann Lecunn, has been awarded the A.M. Turing Award for their work, roughly equivalent to the Nobel Prize for computing.
But since the deep learning breakthroughs of a decade ago, other countries have embraced the technology and now the United States, China, and other countries threaten to leave Canada behind.
Prominent voices within Canada have suggested that grappling with the complex ethical and societal impacts of artificial intelligence is a natural fit for Canada, and a way to remain relevant.
Vivek Goel, the vice-president of research and innovation with the University of Toronto, said the expectation for the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society is to become a source of globally leading ideas for how AI is used.
Reisman said she thinks that kind of role is in the DNA of Canadians.
“We want this institute to be socially engaged,” Goel said.
“It’s not about just trying to do the solutions for society. It’s about ensuring that we generate new theories, new ways of thinking about these whole problems that we’re facing as a society.”
As an example, he said he imagined that researchers could foster a conversation on how corporations use public data, including proposals like the technology-driven Sidewalk Labs smart city project proposed for Toronto’s waterfront.
“We want to pay attention to what the big issues in society are, and pick a couple of those to tackle in the first few years,” he said. “So without prejudging where they’ll go, if you were to ask me today if there was something we should try to tackle, I would say this whole issue of data ownership, and who benefits from the algorithms based on data.”