Mila > News > Mila announces partnership with AI Sweden, welcoming the entity to Montreal’s AI ecosystem

9 Feb 2022

Mila announces partnership with AI Sweden, welcoming the entity to Montreal’s AI ecosystem

MONTREAL – February 9, 2022 – Mila, the largest academic research institute in deep learning, is proud to announce a partnership with AI Sweden, the Swedish national center for applied artificial intelligence (AI). Settled in Mila’s office spaces since Fall 2021, AI Sweden and Mila join forces to find collaborative synergies to strengthen the bond between both countries and bolster Sweden’s competitiveness and advantage in AI.

Montreal has established itself as a global hub for AI research and development with Mila at the forefront. This is largely what motivated AI Sweden to partner with Mila and open a center for collaboration in Montreal.

“Sweden and Québec have a lot in common, and this partnership with AI Sweden means that we can share knowledge and strengthen each other’s work to accelerate AI research and development in our communities. We are very pleased to welcome AI Sweden into Mila’s ecosystem and to our premises in Montreal,” says Yoshua Bengio, Mila’s Founder and Scientific Director.

“Through the partnership with Mila, we can connect organizations and companies in Sweden closer to the AI ​​hub that Montreal constitutes and create great opportunities for collaboration, talent exchanges and knowledge transfer with one of the world’s foremost AI ecosystems. We are very happy to initiate this relationship to strengthen Swedish competitiveness and welfare,” says Martin Svensson, Co-Director at AI Sweden.

The investment, which is partly financed by Sweden’s Innovation Agency Vinnova, means that AI Sweden places staff at Mila and thereby establishes a physical presence in Montreal. This partnership will focus on linking the two countries to foster collaborations in AI-related research. Among other things, Canada is one of the main players behind the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI). AstraZeneca, a global leader in biopharmaceuticals, also partnered with Mila in 2021 to maximize AI innovation in healthcare for drug discovery.

Ranking among the most innovative countries in the world, Sweden also has a well-organized public sector with a long tradition of documentation and data collection.

About Mila 

Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Mila is an artificial intelligence research institute that brings together nearly 900 researchers specializing in machine learning. Based in Montreal, Mila’s mission is to be a global hub for scientific advances that inspire innovation and development of AI for the benefit of all. Mila is a non-profit organization recognized worldwide for its significant contributions to the field of deep learning, particularly in language modeling, machine translation, object recognition, and generative models. For more information, visit mila.quebec.

About AI Sweden

AI Sweden is the national center for applied artificial intelligence, supported by the Swedish government and the public and private sectors across the country. Our mission is to increase the use of AI for the benefit of our society, our competitiveness, and for everyone living in Sweden. For more information, visit: ai.se/en.

Word from Martin Svensson, Co-Director at AI Sweden: