Yoshua Bengio and his collaborators unveil the name of their COVID-19 tracing application and launch a White Paper

The team led by Professor Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director of Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, is pleased to announce that its tracing application for COVID-19 is called COVI and releases today a White Paper prepared by the researchers involved in the project.

“Developed in Canada and designed to protect privacy, COVI uses artificial intelligence to empower citizens to protect themselves, limit the spread of the virus and facilitate a safe and informed lifting of social distancing measures by public health authorities,” explains Valérie Pisano, CEO of Mila.

Respecting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, COVI also conforms to all the principles set out on May 7 in the Joint Statement by Federal,  Provincial and Territorial Privacy Commissioners on COVID-19 contact tracing applications.

Yoshua Bengio is the winner of the 2018 A.M. Turing Prize, considered the “Nobel Prize in Computer Science”. In 2020, he was elected by his peers to The Royal Society, joining such greats as Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin and Stephen Hawking.

Follow the latest news about COVI on Facebook, Twitter and covicanada.org.

About Mila
Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal, Mila is a research institute in artificial intelligence which rallies over 500 researchers specializing in the field of deep learning. Based in Montreal, Mila is a non-profit organization recognized globally for its significant contributions to the field of deep learning, particularly in the areas of language modelling, machine translation, object recognition and generative models.

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