CIFAR announces 34 new IA Chairs, including 19 to Mila members

CIFAR announced 34 newly-named chairs today at AICAN 2019, bringing the international AI talent pool in Canada to 80 researchers. This announcement is part of CIFAR’s Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, which has allocated a total of $86.5M to the recruitment and retention of world-class AI experts.

The 34 newly-named chairs are pioneering research in areas that will have a global societal impact, such as the development of machine learning for medical image analysis, using AI to map and enhance our understanding of the brain, developing responsible and ethical AI technologies, using AI to power robotics for tasks such as safety and surgery, 3D computer vision, natural language processing, and more.

“AI has the potential to deliver enormous positive social, economic and environmental benefits. The Canada CIFAR AI Chairs announced today bring diverse perspectives and expertise. Their research will advance AI technologies that are innovative, responsible, equitable and beneficial to society.” 
– Dr. Elissa Strome, AVP research and executive director of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, CIFAR

Mila is proud to have 19 Canada-CIFAR Chairholders among its professors. These talents will enable Mila to continue to achieve the highest levels of scientific leadership in the development of novel approaches in machine learning for AI, as well as economic and social acceleration in Quebec and Canada

Two Mila-affiliated researchers win a chair in IA Facebook-CIFAR

In September 2017, CIFAR and Facebook announced a new US$2.625 million partnership. As a major milestone in the partnership, CIFAR announces that two of the chairs named today will be Facebook CIFAR AI Chairs. The chairs, Siva Reddy (Mila, McGill University) and Pierre-Luc Bacon (Mila, Université de Montréal), are both based in university labs and will exercise total research independence as chairs.

Mila members holding a Canada-CIFAR AI Chair named at AICan 2019

Aishwarya Agrawal, Université de Montréal (starting 2020)

Tal Arbel, McGill University

Pierre-Luc Bacon (Facebook CIFAR AI Chair), Université de Montréal

Danilo Bzdok, McGill University

Sarath Chandar, École Polytechnique de Montréal

Fernando Diaz, McGill University & Microsoft Research

Marc-Antoine Dilhac, Université de Montréal

Christophe Dubach, McGill University

Audrey Durand, Université Laval

Christian Gagné, Université Laval

Pascal Germain, Université Laval

François Laviolette, Université Laval

Nicolas Le Roux, McGill University & Google Brain

Tim O’Donnell, McGill University

Courtney Paquette, McGill University

Siamak Ravanbakhsh, McGill University

Siva Reddy (Facebook CIFAR AI Chair), McGill University

Irina Rish, Université de Montréal

Martin Vallières, Université de Sherbrooke

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Source : CIFAR