September News: Impact Report & We're Hiring!

Hi there,

September is one of my favourite times of the year! The start of the school year sees us welcome hundreds of new students to study under our Fellows and Canada CIFAR AI Chairs at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In addition to celebrating the efforts of so many young researchers and educational professionals that are diving into their studies; I would like to take a moment to recognize the incredible dedication of all of our parents on the Amii team. They, like so many of our clients and partners, are navigating the challenges of the back-to-school season with grace.

This past year has been an amazing one for Amii and AI in Alberta. Our teams have worked to inspire world-changing machine intelligence in our clients, partners and the world’s AI community. With so many successes, we are proud to present to you our Impact Report 2020-21.

The report features stories of researchers, companies and individuals from the Amii community – from training talented individuals to guiding and supporting businesses, and working with startups and multinational corporations. We’re also excited to present our vision of what the future will hold as we continue to work towards leveraging AI for economic recovery and growth.

I hope you’ll join us not only in celebrating Amii’s successes this past year but also in creating the future of machine intelligence right here in Alberta. Read our Impact Report 2020-21 today!

See you over video chat soon,    

September Highlights: Research, Industry, Community and Training

Industry & Community Updates:

• CIFAR’s 2020/2021 Impact Report shows how the CIFAR community responded to global challenges with resilience and ingenuity, inspired new directions of inquiry and drove profound change.
• The Vector Institute, our peer AI institute in Ontario, just published their 2021 Annual Report! Discover how Vector is promoting the application of AI in businesses, strengthening Ontario's AI talent pipeline, and solidifying Canada's leadership in AI.
• What promise does AI hold for the energy industry? Read our article on how companies are currently using AI to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• On August 26, 2021, we convened a panel of experts to discuss the future of methane emissions management and how technologies such as AI will impact the energy sector -- watch the recording.

Research Updates:

• Amii researchers had their work featured at the 2021 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), which happened August 2-13. Nathan Sturtevant (Fellow & Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii) was awarded a silver medal in the People’s Choice Best System Demonstration Award for his work developing Demos for a Course in Single-Agent Heuristic Search.
• Alona Fyshe was a guest on a recent episode of the TWIMLAI podcast, talking about using brain imaging to improve neural networks.
• The July 30 AI Seminar featured Dustin Morrill (Amii researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Alberta) on hindsight rationality, an approach to playing general-sum games that prescribes no-regret learning dynamics for individual agents and further describes jointly rational behaviour among multiple agents with mediated equilibria.
• Daniel Haight (President and co-founder of Darkhorse Analytics) proposed a structured approach to data wrangling and demonstrated different data visualization techniques at the August 6 AI Seminar.
• James R. Wright (Fellow & Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii) shares his research interests in behavioural game theory -- specifically, modelling multi-agent systems in which some or all of the agents are people -- in the fifth talk in the AI in Video Games series.
• In the sixth AI in Video Games talk, Kevin Leyton-Brown (Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii) describes his work in ML for thinking about game theory and designing better optimization algorithms.
• Levi Lelis (Fellow & Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii) discusses program synthesis at the seventh AI in Video Games talk – the task of having a computer program write programs for us – and his work that seeks to unpack insights hidden within ‘black box’ systems such as deep neural networks.

Training Updates:

• Get a crash course on AI & ML basics at our ML Foundations 1 live online class! Take the first step in your learning journey -- register for the next class on October 7. 
• ML Foundations 2 continues to build on the teachings of ML Foundations 1 by introducing you to tools, strategies and knowledge regarding data and ML. Join us on October 14!

Impact Report Highlights

Amii’s 2020-21 Impact Report profiles the people, companies and projects driving AI research and innovation -- meet a small selection of those featured this year:

“Even though I lacked the technical knowledge at the time, Russ saw my Biology background as a strength to help add more diversity to the research group.” 

As an undergrad pursuing a Biology major, Sarah Davis began to seek research experience. After being accepted into the Greiner Lab, their interest in CS bloomed; they are now pursuing an MSc in the area, ​​with a research background in patient-specific survival and hospital readmission prediction, NLP-assisted cancer pattern recognition, and statistical heritability.

“This is a way to unlock that missing dimension from existing data sources, which may help us understand, monitor and address issues such as social inequities and racism in Canada.”

Kai On Wong, working with Yutaka Yasui (Fellow at Amii and professor at the University of Alberta) and Osmar Zaïane (Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii and professor at the University of Alberta), developed a machine learning approach to predicting ethnicity using personal name and census location in Canada. Machine learning can help uncover missing information about ethnicity and indigenous status, key social determinants of health that often go unreported in large databases.

ISL Adapt worked with experts at Amii and the University of Alberta to develop a reinforcement learning-based pilot project located in the Drayton Valley Water Treatment Plant. The system aims to produce cleaner, safer drinking water, lower energy emissions and reduce chemical usage by identifying, predicting and responding to trends in all stages of water treatment.

Read the full report

Upcoming Events

October 1: AI Seminar – Yang Wang

The AI Seminar is a weekly meeting where researchers discuss a wide range of topics related to AI, from foundational theoretical work to innovative applications of techniques. This week, Yang Wang discusses self-adaptive visual learning and presents applications from several computer vision applications.

RSVP Now

October 18-22: Edmonton Startup Week

Join us for five days of workshops, socials, and events celebrating the vibrancy of the startup community in Edmonton. It's a time to build connections, discover what is possible, celebrate new companies, and inspire entrepreneurship in all of us. This event is produced by Startup Edmonton and Innovate Edmonton.

Amii is proud to be Edmonton’s Startup Week AI Track partner. Stay tuned for more details on AI-specific programming in the coming weeks.

Connect with Edmonton's innovation community

October 26-27: Canadian Symposium for Computational Neuroscience

Introducing Campus Alberta Neuroscience's first Canadian Symposium for Computational Neuroscience! This national symposium will connect trainees, researchers and industry representatives from across the country to share knowledge, research and innovation. Amii is sponsoring and leading the Interactive Workshop, providing attendees with an understanding of AI and ML in the real world.

Get your ticket

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

Job Opportunities

Work at Amii:

• Associate Machine Learning Scientist -- apply by October 14
• Machine Learning Engineer -- apply by October 16

Work with our industry partners:

• Associate Machine Learning Scientist -- apply by October 8

Get Amii in your Inbox!

Sign up for our monthly newsletter