June News: Meet our newest Canada CIFAR AI Chairs

Hi there,

It's the season of celebration as hundreds of students are completing their undergraduate and graduate studies at UAlberta.

From all of us at Amii, congratulations to the Class of 2021!

I'll submit my best wishes to all of the grads here, and I encourage you to do the same. 

At Amii, we work alongside our Fellows and Canada CIFAR AI Chairs as they mentor and guide these students in their research. I want to thank each of them for the countless hours of support they offer the next generation of AI researchers and industry leaders.

Over the past month, we've welcomed five new Canada CIFAR AI Chairs to the Amii family. This continued investment in fundamental research furthers our global standing at the forefront of scientific discovery in AI. 

The upcoming weeks are packed with opportunities to learn new skills, connect with the AI community, and catch up on exciting research and applied AI publications.  

See you over video chat soon,   

We are honoured to welcome five new Canada CIFAR AI Chairs to the Amii family: Neil Burch, Jacob Jaremko, Marlos Machado, Mijung Park & Danica Sutherland. These exceptional individuals are already leading research in reinforcement learning, privacy-preserving machine learning and AI for health, and we can’t wait to see the brilliant work they will accomplish in the coming years!

Last month, Amii Fellow-in-Residence & Canada CIFAR AI Chair Russ Greiner received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC) for his outstanding work developing and improving applications of ML in medicine. As one of four UAlberta researchers who had a hand in establishing Amii, Russ has greatly helped shape the culture of AI excellence we see in Alberta today.

June Highlights: Research, Industry, Community and Training

Industry & Community Updates:

• Our May AI Meetup featured AIMSS Co-President Sarah Davis on the organization’s efforts and UAlberta MSc student Varun Ranganathan on HOPLoP, an algorithm that uses ML to derive new facts in a knowledge graph. 
• We joined MDA, the Canadian Space Agency and the National Research Council of Canada on May 13 for a webinar and panel discussion about TRAIL, MDA’s Training AI Laboratory, and their new dataset, which will enable the development of collision avoidance strategies for Canadarm3.
• The Uniting The Prairies agenda is up! Check out the talks, panels and speakers that you'll take in on June 24. 
• Applications are now open for TECTERRA’s HIRE Program! Hire qualified business or technical personnel to grow your business, and TECTERRA will cover up to half of their salary.
• In August, the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) is holding the Math^Industry Workshop! If you are a company with an interesting math challenge, consider submitting it for teams to work on solving during the workshop.
• Congratulations to all award winners at the inaugural YEG Startup Community Awards!

Research Updates:

• In May, Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii Osmar Zaïane delivered a keynote speech at the 34th Canadian AI Conference on the subject of associative classifiers. 
• We're happy to celebrate the publication of this paper, co-authored by Amii ML Science Lead Luke Kumar and our friends at OKAKI! Read Safe opioid prescribing: a prognostic machine learning approach to predicting 30-day risk after an opioid dispensation in Alberta, Canada.
• On April 30, Ismail Ben Ayed (Associate Professor at Ecole de Technologie Superieure (ETS)) gave an AI Seminar presentation on the subject of learning with limited labels.
• Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian (Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo) gave an AI Seminar presentation on the subject of mean-field reinforcement learning on May 14. 
• Co-Founder & CTO of Health Gauge, Bruce Matichuk, presented at the May 28 AI Seminar with a review of GPT-3 and how the organization uses the model to develop their Health Coach platform.
• Borealis AI has announced their 2021 Fellowship recipients! Congrats to all of this year’s recipients, including Amii researcher Vincent Liu, a UAlberta student who is studying reinforcement learning under Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii Martha White.

Training Updates:

• Join us this July 8 for ML Foundations 1! The class offers foundational AI & ML knowledge, including the definitions of AI, ML and data science, and how they all fit together, what automation is and where it’s effective; and how a company arrives at an AI solution.
• ML Foundations 2 picks up where the first-class leaves off, introducing you to tools, strategies and knowledge regarding data and ML. Join us on July 15!
• Take a look inside the AI4Good Lab’s Industry Night in this piece by BorealisAI! The evening matched the AI4Good Lab’s 50+ participants to industry experts, exploring participants’ fields of study, their goals and ambitions, and future career opportunities in the field.

Apply Now for Supply Chain AI West

Are you an early-stage startup that is building (or looking to build) AI-powered supply chain products or solutions? Apply to our Supply Chain AI West accelerator stream! We’ll provide your team with hands-on training and coaching and help you create the disciplined environment required to establish an AI strategic direction and begin execution.

Get a sneak peek at the program and the current cohort in our latest blog post! Mike Allen, President & CEO of Calgary-based Routique, had this to say:

“The Supply Chain West program will help us take the AI/ML capabilities of our talented team to the next level, as we continue to enhance and evolve our use of cutting edge technologies to give our customers the advantage of supply chain supremacy.”

Take a sneak peek inside the program

Upcoming Events

June 17: 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. Speaking this month is Faraz Amjad (Research Engineer at Ntwist) presenting on ML solutions to real-life problems, as well as Shaunaugh Whelan (Program Founder, Technology at NorQuest College) introducing the Machine Learning Analyst diploma program.

Join Alberta's growing AI community!

June 22: Supply Chain AI West Accelerator Program Info Session

We're on the search for early-stage startups! With Supply Chain AI West, we look forward to working with nimble startup teams to provide hands-on training and act as their coach as they build AI-powered supply chain products and solutions. Join Amii’s Adam Danyleyko (Product Owner, Startups) to explore the tangible opportunities of this program and how to become eligible with a successful application.

RSVP Now

June 23-24: Uniting the Prairies Conference

Uniting the Prairies (UP 2021) is a virtual conference that brings together the top startups from across the Prairies to connect with global investors & tech leaders and collectively elevate the Prairie Tech Community. The format includes Match UP on June 23 and the public UP Conference on June 24.

Get Your (Free) Ticket

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

Recommended Readings

How the ML Tech I Course helped one engineer turn his programming hobby into a career: Amii’s ML Technician I Course allowed Alejandro Coy to turn his passion for programming into a career! Learn how his experience in the ML Tech Course resulted in a Senior Data Specialist position at AIMCo in our latest student profile.

• Our next cohort of ML Tech starts on September 21, 2021
• Public registration opens on June 28, 2021
• Sign-up to receive in-depth info on our live online cohort approach!

AI4Society Dialogues Episode 10: Richard Sutton speaks to the AI4Society Dialogues podcast on the subject of reinforcement learning and the future of AI.

Innovation in Edmonton: Learn about the incredible organizations driving innovation in Edmonton! This Edify Edmonton video features our own CEO Cam Linke alongside our friends at DynaLIFE, Health City Edmonton & Alberta Innovates.

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