New institute aims to make Toronto hub of AI work
Google-backed Vector intends to retain, repatriate research talent
Toronto will host a new institute devoted to artificial intelligence, a major gambit to bolster a field of research pioneered in Canada but consistently drained of talent by major U.S. technology companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The Vector Institute, an independent non-profit affiliated with the University of Toronto, will hire about 25 new faculty and research scientists. It will be backed by more than $150 million in public and corporate funding in an unusual hybridization of pure research and businessminded commercial goals.
The province will spend $50 million over five years, while the federal government, which announced a $125-million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy in last week’s budget, is providing at least $40 million, backers say. More than two dozen companies have committed millions more over10 years, including $5 million each from sponsors including Google, Air Canada, Loblaws, and Canada’s five biggest banks.
The Vector Institute will focus on deep learning, which has seen remarkable results in recent years, particularly in image and speech recognition.
Geoffrey Hinton, considered the “godfather” of deep learning for the breakthroughs he made while a professor at U of T, has worked for Google since 2013 in California and Toronto. He will return to Canada to lead a research team at the tech giant’s Toronto offices and act as chief scientific adviser of the institute.
“It’s certainly the case that there will be other researchers who will want to come back from the States — I’ve had inquiries from quite a number,” Hinton said.
Researchers trained in Canadian artificial intelligence labs fill the ranks of major technology companies, working on tools like instant language translation, facial recognition, and recommendation services. Academic institutions and startups in Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal and Edmonton boast leaders in the field, but other researchers have left for U.S. universities and corporate labs.
The goals of the Vector Institute are to retain, repatriate and attract AI talent, to create trained experts, and to feed that expertise into existing Canadian companies and startups.
“We want those firms to grow to be a great worldwide supplier of AI capability, so that we turn this into a service export to the world, and not have a situation where all Canada does is produce PhDs and send them south,” said Ed Clark, chair of the Vector Institute board and adviser to Premier Kathleen Wynne.
“We want Toronto, Ontario to be one of the core intellectual centres of artificial intelligence research in the world.”
Some members of the institute will focus on research. “We don’t really know where the new big breakthroughs are going to come from in this area,” said Richard Zemel, the institute’s research director and professor of computer science at U of T.
Hospitals are expected to be a major partner, since health care is an intriguing application for AI. Last month, researchers from Stanford University announced they had trained a deep learning algorithm to identify potentially cancerous skin lesions with accuracy comparable to human dermatologists. The Toronto company Deep Genomics is using deep learning to read genomes and identify mutations that may lead to disease, among other things.
Intelligent algorithms can also be applied to tasks that might seem less virtuous, like reading private data to better target advertising. Zemel says the centre is creating an ethics working group and maintaining ties with organizations that promote fairness and transparency in machine learning. As for privacy concerns, “that’s something we are well aware of. We don’t have a well-formed policy yet but we will fairly soon.”
The institute’s funding pales in comparison to the revenues of the American tech giants, which are measured in tens of billions. The risk the institute’s backers are taking is creating an even more robust machine learning PhD mill for the U.S.
“They obviously won’t all stay in Canada, but Toronto industry is very keen to get them,” Hinton said.
“I think Trump might help there.” Two researchers on Hinton’s new Toronto-based team are Iranian, one of the countries targeted by U.S. President Trump’s travel bans.
“We hear from the community that Canada is a beacon, a beacon for openness and diversity, but also for our respect for research, science, and evidence-based decision making,” said Kirsty Duncan, federal Minister for Science, speaking on Tuesday about the pan-Canadian AI strategy.
Hinton’s team is an extension of Google Brain, a research group that has made advances in speech and image recognition underlying tools like Google Translate and image search.