Academics, industry and government have joined together, setting the stage for Canada to become a research and development powerhouse in AI.
Governments can have a pretty dismal track record when it comes to predicting the next big thing. Tax dollars spent on visionary projects are often, it seems, tax dollars thrown away. But, this past spring, Ottawa might have made its best bet yet with the $125 million it has set aside over the next five years for a Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
That money will go to three academic centres: the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII) in Edmonton, and the new Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in Toronto. In return, the three organizations are to hire more scientists, do more research, train more students and – the important bit – nourish a growing ecosystem that will provide Canadian jobs, products and services based on artificial intelligence, or AI.
By itself, that money is not a huge sum. But consider that the Quebec government has allocated $100 million to its AI community in Montreal; Ontario has set aside $50 million for Vector; and, in September 2016, the Canada First Research Excellence Fund gave $93.6 million to a trio of universities – Université de Montréal, Polytechnique Montréal and HEC Montréal – for cutting-edge research in an area of AI called deep learning.
That’s not all. A host of companies – from local start-ups to established tech giants like Google and Microsoft – are pouring millions of dollars into Canada for AI research. Just this past September, Facebook announced it was setting up an AI research lab in Montreal to be led by McGill University computer science professor Joëlle Pineau. The giants are setting up branch offices, hiring Canadian-trained experts, plowing time and cash into applications of what is widely seen as an advance in science and engineering that will be as transformative as the internet. And the start-ups are aiming to be the next tech giants, but this time based in Canada.
Altogether, it’s been quite a year. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, recently tweeted that Canada is smart to “quadruple down” on AI, referring to push from governments, universities, large companies and start-ups.
Why Canada, you ask, and why now? To answer those questions, one needs a definition and a bit of history. First, the definition: despite everything you might have read or seen, the robots are not coming. Do not expect the civilized and well-mannered “positronic robots” from the fiction of Isaac Asimov, the aggressive and violent Cybermen of Dr. Who, or the prototypical Tik-Tok of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. AI is “very different from what people see in science fiction, that’s for sure,” says Yoshua Bengio, director of MILA and a professor of computer science at U de Montréal. “It’s not so much robots but computers becoming smarter, thanks to progress and research in what’s called machine learning and especially deep learning.”
If you want an example of AI, Dr. Bengio says, take out your cellphone. The speech recognition system – iPhone’s Siri, for instance – depends on machine learning systems developed in Montreal that allow the computer program to turn the sound of your voice into words. “We take that for granted because we can all do it,” Dr. Bengio says, but it’s not easy to build a computer program that can mimic that basic human ability.
The phone systems, of course, don’t really understand meaning, but once sounds are converted to words, the underlying program can undertake actions based on them – things like finding yesterday’s baseball scores or searching the web for a cookie recipe. It seems as if the phone has understood but it’s an illusion. The goal for AI, Dr. Bengio says, is to have a range of programs that mimic a human level of understanding in various spheres.
