Mila (research institute)

Last updated
Mila
Mila Research Institute Logo.png
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]

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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 2022-06-20.
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