Mila (research institute)

Last updated
Mila
Established1993  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg (31 years ago)
Founders Yoshua Bengio   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Location Little Italy, Montreal
Coordinates 45°31′51″N73°36′49″W / 45.530722°N 73.613736°W / 45.530722; -73.613736 OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Mila - Quebec AI Institute (originally Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) is a research institute in Montreal, Quebec, focusing mainly on machine learning research. Approximately 1000 students and researchers and 100 faculty members, were part of Mila in 2022. [1] Along with Alberta's Amii and Toronto's Vector Institute, Mila is part of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. [2]

Contents

History

Mila traces its foundations to the Laboratoire d'informatique des systèmes adaptatifs (LISA) [3] at the Université de Montréal and to the Reasoning and Learning Lab (RL-Lab) [4] at McGill University. LISA was founded in 1993 by Yoshua Bengio, a Turing award winner and one of the founders of the field of deep learning [5] [6] [7] while the RL-Lab was founded in 2001 and is currently co-directed by Professors Prakash Panangaden, Doina Precup, Joëlle Pineau, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung.

In 2017, Mila was established as a partnership between the Université de Montréal and McGill University with École Polytechnique de Montréal and HEC Montréal.

In December 2020, Mila teamed up with IBM to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning research using open-source technology in a bid to integrate the Quebec institute’s open-source software, Oríon, with IBM’s Watson Machine Learning Accelerator, an AI model training and inference tool that the tech giant offers to businesses. [8]

Notable researchers

Besides Bengio, Mila's faculty members include Joëlle Pineau and Doina Precup. Some of its graduates include Marc Bellemare (MSc 2007 - RL-Lab), Hugo Larochelle (PhD 2009 - LISA) and Ian Goodfellow (PhD 2014 - LISA).

Research activities

Research at Mila is largely, but not exclusively focused on deep learning and reinforcement learning. Specific research topics include:

Board of Directors

Board of Directors that watch over Mila's strategic directions are: [9]

Other activities

Mila is both a research and educational institution, providing postdoc and internship positions, and providing a research environment for students enrolled in their respective universities and working towards their graduate degrees such as PhD and Master's degrees in machine learning.

Mila members have also contributed to open-source software. Theano, one of the early programming frameworks for deep learning originated at MILA. In 2020, active projects included myia, a deep learning framework for Python, and baby-ai, a platform for simulating language learning with a human in the loop. [10]

In addition, Mila is also involved in numerous partnerships with private companies. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economy of Quebec</span>

The economy of Quebec is diversified and post-industrial with an average potential for growth. It is highly integrated with the economies of the rest of Canada and the United States. Manufacturing and service sectors dominate the economy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geoffrey Hinton</span> British computer scientist (born 1947)

Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist, known for his work on artificial neural networks which earned him the title as the "Godfather of AI".

The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a Canadian-based global research organization that brings together teams of top researchers from around the world to address important and complex questions. It was founded in 1982 and is supported by individuals, foundations and corporations, as well as funding from the Government of Canada and the provinces of Alberta and Quebec.

The Faculty of Science is one of eleven faculties at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. With roots tracing back to 1843, the Faculty currently offers several undergraduate and graduate programs ranging from Earth Sciences to Mathematics to Neuroscience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Université de Montréal</span> University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The University of Montreal (French: Université de Montréal is a French-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university's main campus is located in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce on Mount Royal near the Outremont Summit, in the borough of Outremont. The institution comprises thirteen faculties, more than sixty departments and two affiliated schools: the Polytechnique Montréal and HEC Montréal. It offers more than 650 undergraduate programmes and graduate programmes, including 71 doctoral programmes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McGill University School of Computer Science</span>

The School of Computer Science is an academic department in the Faculty of Science at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The School is the second most funded computer science department in Canada. As of 2024, it has 46 faculty members, 60 Ph.D. students and 100 Master's students.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yann LeCun</span> French computer scientist (born 1960)

Yann André LeCun is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta.

Theano is a Python library and optimizing compiler for manipulating and evaluating mathematical expressions, especially matrix-valued ones. In Theano, computations are expressed using a NumPy-esque syntax and compiled to run efficiently on either CPU or GPU architectures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maluuba</span> Canadian technology company

Maluuba is a Canadian technology company conducting research in artificial intelligence and language understanding. Founded in 2011, the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yoshua Bengio</span> Canadian computer scientist

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Goodfellow</span> American computer scientist (born 1987)

Ian J. Goodfellow is an American computer scientist, engineer, and executive, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a research scientist at Google DeepMind, was previously employed as a research scientist at Google Brain and director of machine learning at Apple, and has made several important contributions to the field of deep learning, including the invention of the generative adversarial network (GAN). Goodfellow co-wrote, as the first author, the textbook Deep Learning (2016) and wrote the chapter on deep learning in the authoritative textbook of the field of artificial intelligence, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joëlle Pineau</span> Canadian computer scientist (born 1974)

Joëlle Pineau is a Canadian computer scientist and Associate Professor at McGill University. She is the global Vice President of Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), now known as Meta AI, and is based in Montreal, Quebec. She was elected to the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doina Precup</span> Romanian researcher of artificial intelligence

Doina Precup is a Romanian researcher currently living in Montreal, Canada. She specializes in artificial intelligence (AI). Precup is associate dean of research at the faculty of science at McGill University, Canada research chair in machine learning and a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She also heads the Montreal office of Deepmind.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ritika Dutt</span> Indian entrepreneur (born 1991)

Ritika Dutt is a Canadian entrepreneur. She is the CEO and co-founder of the legal artificial intelligence company Botler AI. In December 2019, Dutt was named as the only Canadian in the Forbes' 30 Under 30 2020 Law and Policy List.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tal Arbel</span> Professor of Electrical Engineering

Tal Arbel is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at McGill University who specialises in computer vision. She is interested in the application of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Element AI</span> Canadian software company

Element AI was an artificial intelligence company headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. It was funded by the Government of Canada for CAD$5 million, and raised US$102 million independently, before being acquired by ServiceNow. Prior to its acquisition, it had collaborated with Amnesty International, Twitter, Singapore Management University, the Port of Montreal, LG Electronics, Agile Data Solutions and others to release several studies.

Samy Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple, and a former long-time scientist at Google known for leading a large group of researchers working in machine learning including adversarial settings. Bengio left Google shortly after the company fired his report, Timnit Gebru, without first notifying him. At the time, Bengio said that he had been "stunned" by what happened to Gebru. He is also among the three authors who developed Torch in 2002, the ancestor of PyTorch, one of today's two largest machine learning frameworks.

Nvidia GTC is a global artificial intelligence (AI) conference for developers that brings together developers, engineers, researchers, inventors, and IT professionals. Topics focus on AI, computer graphics, data science, machine learning and autonomous machines. Each conference begins with a keynote from Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang, followed by a variety of sessions and talks with experts from around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vector Institute (Canada)</span> Research institute in Toronto, Canada

The Vector Institute is a private, non-profit artificial intelligence research institute in Toronto focusing primarily on machine learning and deep learning research. As of 2023, it consists of 143 faculty members and affiliates — 38 of which are CIFAR AI chairs — 57 postdoctoral fellows, and 502 students. Along with the University of Toronto, the Vector Institute is affiliated with faculty from universities across Ontario, as well as British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

References

  1. ↑ "Mila website". mila.quebec. Retrieved 2022-06-20.
  2. ↑ "CIFAR AI Strategy". cifar.ca/ai. Retrieved 2023-03-21.
  3. ↑ "Laboratoire d'Informatique des Systèmes Adaptatifs". www.iro.umontreal.ca. Retrieved 2020-08-11.
  4. ↑ url=http://rl.cs.mcgill.ca/index.html
  5. ↑ "Fathers of the Deep Learning revolution receive 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award". www.acm.org. Retrieved 2019-07-17.
  6. ↑ "Massive new centre for AI research opens in Montreal - Montreal | Globalnews.ca". globalnews.ca. 2019-01-28. Retrieved 2019-07-15.
  7. ↑ Desmond, John (2018-06-22). "Executive Interview: Yoshua Bengio of Mila, University of Montreal". AI Trends. Retrieved 2019-07-17.
  8. ↑ "Mila, IBM collaborating on open-source AI and machine learning project | BetaKit". 2020-12-11. Retrieved 2020-12-19.
  9. ↑ "Mila's Board of Directors". 2023-05-08.
  10. ↑ "Mila Github Page". github.com. Retrieved 2020-07-26.
  11. ↑ "Mila industrial partner list". mila.quebec. Retrieved 2024-08-21.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.