Thursday\u2019s awards bring the total number of AI chairs, which help AI institutes and schools pay for faculty and their labs, to 143 researchers. \u201cWe have reached our absolute critical mass,\u201d said CIFAR executive director Elissa Strome, adding that the program is \u201cbringing in really excellent people from around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\t \t The chair positions have five-year terms, taking this batch to the end of the program\u2019s 10-year funding cycle in 2031.\u00a0<\/p>\n CIFAR and the three national AI institutes had asked<\/a> the federal government last July for another $186 million to extend the program to 2036. Ottawa did not immediately agree to that request, instead announcing<\/a> plans for a broader update to the national AI strategy, expected in the coming weeks. That\u2019s been enough to tide the research program over till now, Strome said. \u201cIf there had been no conversation about AI for the last nine months, we would be in trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n CIFAR\u2019s July proposal had warned Canada would soon have \u201cno instrument in place for additional AI talent recruitment.\u201d By expanding the program, the group argued, Ottawa would send researchers a strong signal that they should choose Canada amid an \u201cunprecedented global war for AI talent.\u201d<\/p>\n All the current chair positions are funded until at least March 2027, so if the program is extended sometime this fiscal year as part of the impending AI strategy update, it will be able to renew those awards, according to Strome. \u201cThere\u2019s no gap,\u201d she claimed.<\/p>\n Three-quarters of the positions announced Thursday are tied to the Edmonton-based Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Renewed chairs there include Michael Bowling, Patrick Pilarski and Richard Sutton, a trio of renowned University of Alberta (U of A) computer science professors who previously led DeepMind\u2019s since-closed<\/a> outpost in the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n New appointments at the school include Blair Attard-Frost, a prominent voice<\/a> in Canadian AI policy debates; programmer Jocelyn Chen and cognitive scientist Erin Grant, both recruited from New York University; and biologist Russell Dinnage, who came to U of A from Florida International University.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amii\u2019s recent recruitment push has focused on researchers from outside computer science, who can instead bring AI to their fields of study, CEO Cam Linke said in an interview last August. \u201cPeople who are bilingual\u2014who have a foot in two different domains\u2014are going to be really core drivers of the impact of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n Mila scientific director Hugo Larochelle, a Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al professor, also had his chair renewed. So did two prominent Vector Institute faculty members in David Duvenaud, who works on AI safety at the University of Toronto and Jeff Clune, a University of British Columbia professor who recently co-founded Recursive Superintelligence, a startup trying to develop<\/a> self-improving AI valued at US$4 billion in its first funding round.<\/p>\n AI Minister Evan Solomon said the appointments \u201cwill ensure that the AI of tomorrow is developed and deployed right here in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n Canada\u2019s chairs program \u201cis one of the strongest AI research clusters in the world,\u201d Strome claimed. While Silicon Valley firms are offering a lot of money, she said, some of the field\u2019s top talent is still choosing Canadian academic positions because of the quality of life here and the chance to join a network of researchers. \u201cThere is such diversity of expertise across the country,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada\u2019s program to recruit and retain top AI researchers has allocated all its funding ahead of the federal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":686204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,994,64,61],"class_list":["post-686203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-research","tag-tech","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/686204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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