August @ Amii | Funding Announcement & A New Training Opportunity for Business Leaders

Hi there,

I hope you’re finding time to enjoy the fantastic summer sun! Members of our team are making the most of staycations and exploring all the wonderful hidden gems our home cities have to offer; all while working on new industry engagements with partners around the world. 

We’re also gearing up for an exciting fall, with two new programs announced last week: 

• The Government of Alberta has awarded us $5 million to enhance emissions reduction efforts in Alberta. Program recruitment begins on September 9, 2020.
  Christy Holtby, Managing Director of Investment and Partnerships, is available for early conversations on how to get your company involved.
• Registration is open for the new AI Strategy and Management Course, an 8-week online course focused on providing the knowledge, skills and tools to support business leaders as they look to adopt AI technologies. 

Both of these programs serve our mission: to make AI the primary driver of sustainable growth for Alberta’s economy – through world-leading research, advisement and education. We look forward to delivering these programs, and seeing the impact they will have down the road.

With September just a few weeks away, our Fellows are gearing up for what will be a very different back-to-school season and finding new ways to engage bright minds at the University of Alberta. Their dedication to making sure students eager to explore AI and ML are supported and have channels to progress their learning during this challenging time is inspiring. 

As always, thank you for your ongoing support and your contributions to growing Alberta’s AI ecosystem. 

See you over video chat soon, 

Cam

August Highlights: Research, Industry and Training 

Industry Updates:

• As part of the Government of Alberta’s Ministry of Environment and Parks TIER Program, Amii has been awarded $5 million over 2.5 years to enhance emissions reduction efforts in Alberta.
• We have kicked off our FunnelAI partnership, welcoming two interns to our community as part of an eight-month internship.
• Congrats to our community partners AltaML who announced their new applied data science internship program last week, supported by the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund.
• The 2020 Cybera Data Science Industry Fellowships program has begun, helping emerging data scientists gain employment opportunities by providing them with real-world data science experience.

Research Updates:

• Amii Fellow Lili Mou co-hosted a tutorial on stylized text generation at ACL 2020; one of only eight tutorials featured at the international conference.
• CIFAR has published the AI4Health Report/Strategy, a result of a roundtable discussion between AI and health innovation leaders from across Canada to understand Canada’s opportunity to advance AI for health.
• The AI Seminar video series continues with Amii researcher and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Greiner Lab (UAlberta) Neeraj Kumar.
• Week Three and Week Four of the Tea Time Talks are up, including talks from Kris De Asis, Andy Patterson, Junfeng Wen, Vincent Liu, Negar Hassanpour and Yangchen Pan.

Education Updates:

• There’s still time to apply for the Fall 2020 ML Tech I Certification program! Demand for AI and ML skills is growing, and this 13-week online program will give you the expertise to meet this demand. Due to new opportunities available to Amii, applications for financial support close on August 14, 2020.
• The 2020 CIFAR Deep Learning + Reinforcement Learning Summer School took place August 3-7, with over 300 international learners and mentors attending online from 45 countries. Thank you to the Amii Fellows that shared their knowledge with all of the learners, and to Rapid Fire Theatre for showcasing the strength of our local AI ecosystem with a special presentation of Improbotics.

Upcoming Event

September 17: Virtual AI Meetup

Gather with the brightest minds in the AI community from Edmonton and beyond at Amii’s Virtual AI Meetup! Learn about the latest tools and techniques in machine learning, and explore topics that researchers and industry professionals are thinking about or working on.

Register today!

Research Conversations & Initiatives

• Amii Fellow Dr. Nathan Sturtevant continues to conduct research on content generation for puzzle games; if you’d like to participate in this study, you can play four levels of the game Snakebird and take a survey (estimated time to complete is 1 hour).
• Amii Fellow Dr. Levi Levis is still trying to understand how solving puzzles in different orders affects a person’s ability to solve new puzzles; if you’d like to participate in his study, you can play The Witness puzzle game (estimated time to complete is 15 minutes).
• Some Fridays: the UAlberta AI Seminar also goes online for lunch hour presentations by UAlberta (and sometimes visiting) researchers.
• Mondays thru Thursdays: the Tea Time Talks gathers the RLAI Lab and visitors at the end of summer days for short talks on technical topics.

AI Strategy & Management Course

We’re thrilled to announce that registration is now open for our Fall 2020 edition of our AI Strategy and Management course!

This 8-week online course is focused on providing the knowledge, skills and tools to support business leaders as they look to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) as a competitive advantage for their organizations. Developed with non-technical managers and executives in mind, the AI Strategy and Management course takes a project-based approach, giving graduates the ability to draft an AI adoption strategy, identify opportunities to apply AI in their organization and interact with and manage technical teams. Classes begin on September 16, 2020.

Our instructors take a comprehensive approach – developing your strategy, reasoning and mathematical skills so that you can approach AI adoption with confidence.

The full course is $2,995 + GST (CAD) and requires as little as 8 hours of your time per week. Curious about just one of the areas of curriculum? You can select individual modules for $595 + GST (CAD) and work your way towards an AI Strategy and Management certificate at your own pace.

Learn more and Register!

Career Opportunities

• We’re looking for a Machine Learning Project Manager here at Amii! If you have exceptional business and project management skills, visit the job posting.
• Amii and UAlberta has an immediate opening for 1-2 Postdoctoral Fellows to work with Professors/Amii Fellows Russ Greiner and Nidhi Hegde to use ML and probabilistic graphical models for modeling and forecasting population-level COVID-19 infections.
• Csaba Szepesvári’s research group at UAlberta CS seeks 2-3 Postdoctoral Fellows for work involving original theoretical research, collaboration with, and supervision of PhD and MSc students.
• Our friends at FunnelAI are looking for an Edmonton-based Machine Learning Team Lead! If you have a deep understanding of ML and a burning passion to help businesses grow, take a look at the job opportunity.

Recommended Readings 

• Researchers turning to social media to study mental health concerns during the pandemic
• Amii researcher develops ML model to detect depression in text

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