This program supports AI startups at any time of the year. Benefit from cutting-edge resources and tailored support to accelerate your technology's development.
Offered by Mila and the Public Policy Forum, this program is designed to equip policy and decision makers with the tools to navigate the opportunities and risks of AI. The next cohort will be held in French on September 1-2, 2026, at Mila.
Connect with a Mila academic advisor and current student-researchers to learn more about Mila's community and how to join us on August 19, 31 and September 11, 2026.
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Publications
Co-developing longitudinal patient registries for phenylketonuria and mucopolysaccharidoses in Canada
This chapter explores the foundational concept of robustness in Machine Learning (ML) and its integral role in establishing trustworthiness … (see more)in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. The discussion begins with a detailed definition of robustness, portraying it as the ability of ML models to maintain stable performance across varied and unexpected environmental conditions. ML robustness is dissected through several lenses: its complementarity with generalizability; its status as a requirement for trustworthy AI; its adversarial vs non-adversarial aspects; its quantitative metrics; and its indicators such as reproducibility and explainability. The chapter delves into the factors that impede robustness, such as data bias, model complexity, and the pitfalls of underspecified ML pipelines. It surveys key techniques for robustness assessment from a broad perspective, including adversarial attacks, encompassing both digital and physical realms. It covers non-adversarial data shifts and nuances of Deep Learning (DL) software testing methodologies. The discussion progresses to explore amelioration strategies for bolstering robustness, starting with data-centric approaches like debiasing and augmentation. Further examination includes a variety of model-centric methods such as transfer learning, adversarial training, and randomized smoothing. Lastly, post-training methods are discussed, including ensemble techniques, pruning, and model repairs, emerging as cost-effective strategies to make models more resilient against the unpredictable. This chapter underscores the ongoing challenges and limitations in estimating and achieving ML robustness by existing approaches. It offers insights and directions for future research on this crucial concept, as a prerequisite for trustworthy AI systems.
Electricity price forecasting is a challenging task for decision-makers in deregulated power markets due to the inherent characteristics of … (see more)electricity prices, e.g., high frequency and volatility. Therefore, accurate forecasting of electricity prices can assist market participants in maximizing their profit. Accordingly, we proposed a novel hybrid Deep Learning model to forecast one-step, two-step, and three-step ahead Ontario electricity prices based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Our model consists of three consecutive CNN-GRU models combined in parallel with different input data. We downsampled input data via pooling layers at the beginning of two streams of the model to capture different frequencies of price patterns concurrently. Also, a set of external variables, including previous prices, electricity load, generation, import and export, and weather data, were considered in our forecasting models to test whether these features improve the efficiency of the models. Finally, three experiments in various weeks of 2022 were carried out in the Ontario electricity market to assess the model. The results indicate that the proposed model reduced the forecasting error significantly by 63.3% in the first experiment, 41.8% in the second, and 28.2% in the third, on average, with respect to a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). Also, the proposed model was compared with outperformed several baseline models, including statistical time-series, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning models. Furthermore, the comparison of results in univariate and multivariate settings indicated that adding variables to forecasting models did not help reduce forecasting errors.
Theories of attention and learning have hypothesized a central role for high-frequency bursting in cognitive functions, but experimental rep… (see more)orts of burst-mediated representations \emph{in vivo} have been limited. Here we used a novel demultiplexing approach by considering a conjunctive burst code. We studied this code \emph{in vivo} while animals learned to report direct electrical stimulation of the somatosensory cortex and found two acquired yet independent representations. One code, the event rate, showed a sparse and succint stiumulus representation and a small modulation upon detection errors. The other code, the burst fraction, correlated more globally with stimulation and more promptly responded to detection errors. Potent and fast modulations of the burst fraction were seen even in cells that were considered unresponsive based on the firing rate. During the later stages of training, this modulation in bursting happened earlier, gradually aligning temporally with the representation in event rate. The alignment of bursting and event rate modulation sharpened the firing rate response, and was strongly associated with behavioral accuracy. Thus a fine-grained separation of spike timing patterns reveals two signals that accompany stimulus representations: an error signal that can be essential to guide learning and a sharpening signal that could implement attention mechanisms.
To address the interlinked biodiversity and climate crises, we need an understanding of where species occur and how these patterns are chang… (see more)ing. However, observational data on most species remains very limited, and the amount of data available varies greatly between taxonomic groups. We introduce the problem of predicting species occurrence patterns given (a) satellite imagery, and (b) known information on the occurrence of other species. To evaluate algorithms on this task, we introduce SatButterfly, a dataset of satellite images, environmental data and observational data for butterflies, which is designed to pair with the existing SatBird dataset of bird observational data. To address this task, we propose a general model, R-Tran, for predicting species occurrence patterns that enables the use of partial observational data wherever found. We find that R-Tran outperforms other methods in predicting species encounter rates with partial information both within a taxon (birds) and across taxa (birds and butterflies). Our approach opens new perspectives to leveraging insights from species with abundant data to other species with scarce data, by modelling the ecosystems in which they co-occur.
Asymmetry between the left and right brain is a key feature of brain organization. Hemispheric functional specialization underlies some of t… (see more)he most advanced human-defining cognitive operations, such as articulated language, perspective taking, or rapid detection of facial cues. Yet, genetic investigations into brain asymmetry have mostly relied on common variant studies, which typically exert small effects on brain phenotypes. Here, we leverage rare genomic deletions and duplications to study how genetic alterations reverberate in human brain and behavior. We quantitatively dissected the impact of eight high-effect-size copy number variations (CNVs) on brain asymmetry in a multi-site cohort of 552 CNV carriers and 290 non-carriers. Isolated multivariate brain asymmetry patterns spotlighted regions typically thought to subserve lateralized functions, including language, hearing, as well as visual, face and word recognition. Planum temporale asymmetry emerged as especially susceptible to deletions and duplications of specific gene sets. Targeted analysis of common variants through genome-wide association study (GWAS) consolidated partly diverging genetic influences on the right versus left planum temporale structure. In conclusion, our gene-brain-behavior mapping highlights the consequences of genetically controlled brain lateralization on human-defining cognitive traits.
The widespread online communication in a modern multilingual world has provided opportunities to blend more than one language (aka code-mixe… (see more)d language) in a single utterance. This has resulted a formidable challenge for the computational models due to the scarcity of annotated data and presence of noise. A potential solution to mitigate the data scarcity problem in low-resource setup is to leverage existing data in resource-rich language through translation. In this paper, we tackle the problem of code-mixed (Hinglish and Bengalish) to English machine translation. First, we synthetically develop HINMIX, a parallel corpus of Hinglish to English, with ~4.2M sentence pairs. Subsequently, we propose RCMT, a robust perturbation based joint-training model that learns to handle noise in the real-world code-mixed text by parameter sharing across clean and noisy words. Further, we show the adaptability of RCMT in a zero-shot setup for Bengalish to English translation. Our evaluation and comprehensive analyses qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the superiority of RCMT over state-of-the-art code-mixed and robust translation methods.