Amii’s Virtual AI Meetup Recap – Jan 21, 2021

On January 21, 2021, participants gathered digitally to watch and participate in the first AI Meetup of 2021. The event featured:

Crys Vanier

Executive Director, Industry Sandbox and AI Computing (ISAIC)

33% of organizations plan to implement artificial intelligence in some capacity over the next year; 20% already have (451 Alliance).

If you’re one of those interested organizations, are you aware of the options for computational resources and local, supported cloud computing? And that as a principal cost in ML adoption (TWIML), compute is often under recognized? Or that risks of IT divorce, data egress costs, and data location are generally unknown at the onset of an AI/ML project – yet can be disruptive and value-eroding in later stages?

On January 21st, Crys Vanier, Executive Director, introduced Industry Sandbox and AI Computing (ISAIC) at the University of Alberta. As a local, high-performance computing and sandbox resource, ISAIC enables experimentation, scale, and powering the A.I.mbition of western Canadian businesses pursuing AI/ML adoption.

Brittany F. Davis

MSc Student, WSU

The most successful reinforcement learning algorithms today are complex, and can be difficult to decipher. This means these models remain mostly novelties, leading to a pressing need for explainable models to realize RL’s full potential. Explainability is a quality which allows understanding of how a model works, and why certain decisions are made by the model. If we can make reinforcement learning more explainable, our RL algorithms can be appropriately trusted, debugged more efficiently, and interact more with everyday people.

Thanks to all who were able to join us! If you missed our January Meetup, watch it now:

Join us on February 18 for our next Virtual AI Meetup! Register here.