Canadian AI sector developing growing reputation as world leader

Ever since the launch of the Pan-Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) Strategy in 2017 – the first ever national AI strategy – Canada has been the focus of sustained attention from the academic, IT and business communities. So, what are the key objectives of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy? What progress has been made to date? What is the long-term potential for Canada to develop as a globally significant centre of expertise in AI? And how best can IT professionals contribute to this ongoing development?

National AI strategy

Founded in 2017, the pioneering CIFAR Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy (CIFAR) works in partnership with the country’s three national AI Institutes – Amii in Alberta, Mila in Montréal, and the Vector Institute in Toronto – to achieve four key objectives. Firstly, to increase the number of ‘outstanding’ artificial intelligence researchers and skilled graduates in Canada. Secondly, to establish interconnected ‘nodes of scientific excellence’ in the country’s three major centres for artificial intelligence in Edmonton, Montréal and Toronto. Thirdly, to develop ‘global thought leadership’ on the economic, ethical, policy and legal implications of advances in AI; and, fourthly, to support a national research community on artificial intelligence. As Elissa Strome, AVP Research and Executive Director – Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, explains, since its establishment three years ago, CIFAR has ‘already made great progress towards its objectives.’

“The AI Institutes are all thriving hubs of their respective AI ecosystems, and there is a great deal of collaboration, exchange and training happening across all three Institutes,” she says.

Strome also points to a number of key highlights over the past three years, including the fact that, in March 2018, Canadian researchers Yoshua Bengio (Scientific Director and Canada CIFAR AI Chair, Mila; Université de Montréal) and Geoff Hinton (Scientific Director, Vector Institute; Google and University of Toronto), along with their colleague, Yann LeCun, won the ACM A.M. Turing Award ‘for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.’ In December 2019, CIFAR and the AI Institutes also announced another round of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs, bringing the total to 80.

Another ongoing strategic priority for CIFAR is its AI4Good National Training Program, which is focused on advancing AI training and skills for women and other underrepresented groups. The annual CIFAR Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer School (which ran virtually this year) also attracts who Strome describes as ‘the top grad students from AI from around the world, with a focus on diversity and inclusion, to learn the state-of-the art in research advances from top scientists.’

“In summer 2020, we also launched a report from the AI for Health Task Force, which outlines specific actions that Canadian governments must take to build the foundations for a national strategy on AI for health to capitalize on Canada’s advantages in this space. AI for Health is a tremendous opportunity for Canada,” she says.

Cutting-edge research

In addition to the CIFAR-wide work in pursuit of core objectives, the three key member organisations of CIFAR are also engaged in a wide-ranging variety of AI projects in their own right. For example, the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), an Edmonton, Alberta-based non-profit institute – originally founded in 2002 as a research centre at the University of Alberta – continues to support world-leading research in AI and machine learning and translate scientific advancement into industry adoption. As Spencer Murray, ‎Director of Communications & Public Relations at Amii, explains, a key objective of the Institute is to grow AI capacity through advancing leading-edge research, delivering what he describes as ‘exceptional educational offerings’ and providing business advice – all with the goal of building in-house AI capabilities.

“We advance leading-edge research in AI by funding academic research and empowering industry leaders to invest in Alberta’s world-leading talent and expertise,” he says.

Other key objectives are to grow business capabilities and capacity in AI for start-ups, SMEs and enterprise clients to support growth, improve operations, and solve complex problems – and to build Alberta’s AI workforce by funding research positions to teach the next generation of professionals, and by developing and delivering educational training for technical teams, managers, and executives.

Key ongoing projects at Amii include an initiative to develop an AI companion to counteract loneliness in the elderly and research efforts aimed at addressing a range of impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first cohort of Amii-funded Machine Learning Technicians have also recently presented their ‘capstone’ projects – with recruitment for the next cohort currently underway – and the Seventh Competition on Legal Information Extraction and Entailment, organised by Amii researchers, is scheduled to launch in October 2020.

“With diverse expertise in AI and machine learning, our researchers lead the world across many subfields and application spaces, including reinforcement learning, precision health, natural language processing, heuristic search and game theory,” says Murray.

“We strive to be the leading AI research institute in the world by 2025,” he adds.

Future prospects

Commenting on the broader prospects for the continued growth of the AI sector across the country, Murray observes that Canada already has ‘significant research expertise’ in AI and, as organisations like Amii continue to work to ‘connect industry into the leading-edge research and talent pools available in the country,’ he predicts ‘greater levels of industry adoption of AI.’

“Already Canada is a leader in the science of AI – and we’re continuing to develop our capabilities in the business of AI. One of the things we stress at Amii for industry adoption of AI is the importance of marrying domain knowledge with technical expertise. That’s why we offer courses such as our Machine Learning Technician Certification to individuals and as part of a greater corporate engagement,” he says.

“We’ve seen that the biggest challenges industry is currently facing in AI adoption around the world is access to talent and expertise – meaning the individuals needed to do the work of building useful models but also the know-how to apply AI within a business context. The ability to translate a business problem into an actionable plan for AI – and then translate back the work of AI technicians to leadership will be crucial going forward,” he adds.

Meanwhile Strome points out that Canada is already ‘doing really well’ at attracting and training technical talent in AI and, moving forward, believes the country has a ‘great opportunity’ to continue to grow its expertise in the societal implications of AI.

“We need more social scientists and humanists on the social, ethical, economic and legal aspects of AI and more collaborations between scientists, engineers and social scientists. Biologists and physicians who understand and can apply machine learning will also be critical to our growth,” she adds.

Published at Wed, 07 Oct 2020 06:45:00 +0000

AI Startup Vestun Launches Hedge Fund Navigating Market Turbulence

Vestun

Swiss-based AI company Vestun opens its market agnostic hedge fund strategy to new outside investors.

Vestun, a Swiss-based financial and technology company has now opened the launch of its hedge fund to new outside investors. The firm which until now has been only managing its own capital announced that its investment vehicle will open to institutional investments including banks, multi-family offices and asset managers within certain jurisdiction. 
” data-reactid=”27″>Zurich, Switzerland, Oct. 07, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Vestun, a Swiss-based financial and technology company has now opened the launch of its hedge fund to new outside investors. The firm which until now has been only managing its own capital announced that its investment vehicle will open to institutional investments including banks, multi-family offices and asset managers within certain jurisdiction.

Over the past decade, there has been an increasing number of funds involving data scientists or so-called “quants” using machines to build large statistical models. While they are usually more disciplined than their discretionary counterpart, the problem is that they tend to remain static. These models are usually not able to perform sustainably because the market is constantly changing and shifting. As the market evolves and uncertainty increases, they often not perform as well as they did in the past.

Vestun challenges this with a system free of rigid-rules and over-fitting. The company’s chief scientist, Stephen Varey is a pioneer in artificial intelligence with over twenty year spent on developing intelligent and risk engine systems for banks and hedge funds including HSBC, JP Morgan and UBS. Before joining vestun, he served at Cognizant as a lead AI architect, where under his supervision, it won the prestigious AI breakthrough in 2019.

He commented “Most commercially available AI applications only focuses on Machine Learning, a subfield of AI which is best suited to recognizing patterns but not understanding them. As there is no understanding, Machine Learning do not explain its thinking so cannot be given autonomy in non-stationary situations. The intelligence of these applications can be boosted by modeling human expertise”.

While the company wish to keep its performance confidential, the management mentioned that the recent turbulence was a good stress test to reinforce the validation of their investment process. Their strategy performed sustainably during the pandemic with limited volatility in comparison to benchmarks.

Vestun is a technology company that applies AI in asset management and organizational intelligence acquisition. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the company was established with the vision to enable new breakthrough in AI by combining the power of shared machine intelligence with human-networked cognition. Vestun’s AI platform "Hawkrel" amplifies enterprise intelligence with significantly more accurate and deeper insights to address complex situations which standard analytical systems cannot solve.” data-reactid=”40″>Vestun is a technology company that applies AI in asset management and organizational intelligence acquisition. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the company was established with the vision to enable new breakthrough in AI by combining the power of shared machine intelligence with human-networked cognition. Vestun’s AI platform “Hawkrel” amplifies enterprise intelligence with significantly more accurate and deeper insights to address complex situations which standard analytical systems cannot solve.

Hawkrel is currently used to produce predictive and market agnostic investment strategies by Vestun. It also runs pilots for financial institutions with use-cases such as transactions frauds, credit scoring and risk management. The team comprises a highly experienced board and leadership in asset management, AI and data-science. Vestun‘s financial solutions are only offered to qualified and institutional clients. Vestun is authorized and regulated in Switzerland as a financial intermediary and is a member or the industry organization for asset managers.

Contact: Robert Cristobal / +41 43 210 97 36

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