Amii is proud to welcome two new Canada CIFAR AI Chairs to its researcher community: Martin Ester, Distinguished Professor at Simon Fraser University and Peter West, Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.
With these two new appointments, Amii increases its research capacity to 73 Canada CIFAR AI Chairs across the country.
The Canada CIFAR AI Chair program is a key part of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy that enables leading researchers to continue to pursue impactful research and advance fundamental AI science.
Martin Ester
Martin Ester is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Ester’s research focuses on four main areas: the advancement of transfer learning, which allows models to learn from one another, scientific discovery agents and generative molecule models, which operate similarly to language models but generate chemical structures instead of text.
His lab also uses machine learning in precision medicine to improve diagnosis and give treatment insights based on a patient's specific genomics and lifestyle.
Peter West
Peter West is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.
His research focuses on getting better understanding of the capabilities and limits of generative AI systems, with a focus on Large Language Models (LLMs). Much of his work on is generative AI's capability for social intelligence and creativity, and systemic limits on LLMs due to alignment techniques like reinforcement learning from human feedback.
