April News: Attabotics Partnership, End ALS Challenge & More!

The end of March marked the close of our 2020-21 fiscal year, and I could not be more proud of our team's stellar performance and their singular focus to increase the level of AI expertise of our clients, partners, and learners. Expect to see some highlights of our accomplishments in the coming months! In the meantime, here are some exciting things that are happening:

• Amii is pleased to announce our partnership with Attabotics Inc. – the 3D robotics supply chain company – and AltaML – a leading Canadian applied AI and ML company – to bolster AI and ML capabilities for supply chains. Through this partnership, we continue to support the growth of Calgary and Alberta as an innovation hub.
• AI4Good Lab, the ML program for women that we are bringing to Alberta alongside CIFAR and OSMO, recently released the partner list of organizations who are leading the advancement of diversity & inclusion in AI.
• The Roche Canada Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence (AI CoE) has launched a new initiative on Kaggle.com -- a digital competition to tackle ALS! The AI CoE is the first industry collaboration combining the expertise of all three institutes under the CIFAR Pan-Canadian AI Strategy (Amii, Mila and the Vector Institute).

We are ramping up for a productive spring and summer and would love to hear from you about how we can support your AI adoption efforts. 

See you over video chat soon, 

April Highlights: Research, Industry, Community and Training

Industry & Community Updates:

• Check out the recap of our March 18 Virtual AI Meetup, featuring Reg Ouellette & Alex Trad of Chata Technologies Inc. and Salome Perez, PhD Student from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln! The talks covered the importance of high-quality training data for successful AI development, as well as innovative cybersecurity solutions in emerging Android and Internet of Things - Arduino based applications.
• “We have a new Alberta advantage – and that’s AI.” Read our interview with Ashif Mawji (Director, Invest Alberta Corporation) on improving Alberta business leaders’ understanding of AI adoption.
• Get professional coaching, access to investors from around the globe, and a chance to win $10,000 in funding -- submit your Inventures Startup Pitch! Apply for free by May 14.
• The Alberta Economic Development Leaders’ Summit & Conference (EDA Xperience 2021) happens next month! Amii CEO Cam Linke will be speaking on the subject of technology and fintech alongside three other experts. 
• Cybera has teamed up with advocates, academics and individuals from across the province to form the Alberta Rural Connectivity Coalition, with the aim to address the internet access and pricing issues that plague thousands of Albertans. Alongside ISAIC, Cybera is also hosting Bridging the Connectivity Challenge, a data science hackathon. 
• Nominations for the first YEG Startup Community Awards are open until May 10! This community-driven initiative celebrates the individuals and companies who make the Edmonton startup community so vibrant. Nominate someone today!

Research Updates:

• A paper by Amii Fellow & Canada CIFAR AI Chair Levi Lelis was featured in a recent Synced article. The paper proposes Policy-guided Heuristic Search (PHS) -- a novel search algorithm that uses both a heuristic function and a policy while offering guarantees on the search loss that relate to both the quality of the heuristic and the policy.
• Dr. Kiri L. Wagstaff (Principal Researcher in ML at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory & Associate Research Prof at Oregon State University) spoke at the February 26 AI Seminar, describing how Mars rovers can use novelty measures to help select observation targets with the goal of accelerating discovery.
• The AI Seminar on March 12 featured Kamalika Chaudhuri (Assistant Professor at University of California San Diego), sharing two case studies in inferential and differential privacy.
• At the March 26 AI Seminar, Dustin Morrill (Amii researcher & PhD candidate at UAlberta) explored a sound alternative to Nash equilibria for game playing and how it can help us to design stronger sequential decision-making algorithms.
• On the April 9 AI Seminar, Zaheen Farraz Ahmad (Amii researcher & PhD candidate at UAlberta) explored marginal utility for planning in continuous and large discrete action spaces.
• CIFAR profiled Alona Fyshe (Amii Fellow & Canada CIFAR AI Chair) last month for World Happiness Day, including her research analyzing social media data for population-wide mental health research.

Training Updates:

• We officially began the Kickstart Program this week! We were so excited to welcome 81 individuals to our first event.
• Our second cohort of ML Tech students graduated recently -- congratulations, grads! 
• Are you interested in learning about AI & ML but don't know where to start? Get a crash course at ML Foundations 1. Our next class takes place May 6 -- register now!

If you’ve already taken ML Foundations 1, build on that knowledge with tools, strategies and more technical knowledge at ML Foundations 2! Register now for the May 13 class.

Upcoming Events

April 29: AI Seminar – Bill Leslie

Dr. Leslie is Professor of Medicine and Radiology at the University of Manitoba. His talk, entitled “Automated Bertebral Fracture Recognition from Clinical Images'', discusses his experience with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automating vertebral fracture recognition from low-resolution DXA images.

RSVP now

April 30: AI Seminar – Ismail Ben Ayed

Ismail Ben Ayed is an Associate Professor at Ecole de Technologie Superieure (ETS) Montréal (Université du Québec), where he holds a research Chair on Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging. His interests include computer vision, optimization, machine learning and medical imaging.

RSVP now

May 11: Mind the Gap – Bridging Human Creativity and Machine Learning

Will AI and machine learning augment or replace human creativity? How do we teach creativity to the next generation in a world of AI and machine learning? And how do we ensure teaching creativity and innovation in this world remains inclusive? Join speakers Matthew Guzdial (Amii Fellow & Canada CIFAR AI Chair), David Cropley (Professor of Engineering Innovation, University of South Australia) and Val Walker, PhD (CEO, Business + Higher Education Roundtable) at this RCI Science event.

Register now

May 20: Virtual AI Meetup

Gather with the brightest minds in the AI community from Alberta and beyond at Amii’s Virtual AI Meetup! Each meetup features two presenters; at the end of each presentation, participants will have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session. Speakers TBA.

Join Alberta's growing AI community!

See a full list of Amii and partner events on our Events page.

Career Opportunities

• Join our team! We are looking for a Machine Learning Intern to work with technology company Instrumar. Apply by April 30!
• We’re also looking for a passionate Program Coordinator - Startups to create exceptional experiences for Amii’s clients and program participants.
• Lastly, we're seeking a brilliant Director of Marketing Operations to lead, plan and execute on all facets of marketing operations, product marketing and brand management.

Recommended Readings

• Working with Amii, Alberta-based residential service company Green Drop was able to establish a base of AI & ML knowledge and explore potential applications. Learn more about their experience -- read our latest case study.
• Episode 6 of AI4Society Dialogues features Nidhi Hegde (Amii Fellow & Canada CIFAR AI Chair), speaking about Privacy, Ethics and AI -- listen now! 
• Martha White (Amii Fellow & Canada CIFAR AI Chair) speaks to The Gateway about being named one of the top 10 AI researchers to watch in the world by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers -- read it now.
• Matthew E. Taylor (Amii Fellow-in-Residence & Canada CIFAR AI Chair) co-authored an article for the Harvard Business Review on Why AI That Teaches Itself to Achieve a Goal Is the Next Big Thing.

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