Conference & Meetings World Supplements Canada AI Supplement | Page 5

Canada
Extremely innovative life on MaRS
The MaRS Discovery District, which
claims to be the world’s largest
urban innovation hub, is a connector
of AI start-ups in the energy, clean
technology, healthcare, fi nance, and
agriculture industries. It aims to give
entrepreneurs what they need most:
a home with access to networks and
capital. Opened in 2005, MaRS was
fi rst conceived by the late Dr John
Evans to commercialise breakthrough
medical discoveries. MaRS has turned
a nearly 100-year-old wing of Toronto
General Hospital into a nerve centre
for groundbreaking innovation. The
building was also where the Nobel-prize
winning discovery of insulin was made
and where medical devices like the
pacemaker were engineered.
Today the 140,000sqm space is home
to 150 companies and 6,000 people.
Clearly the commercial and
academic axis has to be harnessed to
political vision if the full rewards of AI are
to be reaped. This was a major theme
of the recent Elevate Toronto festival,
which showcased the region’s growing
expertise and clout in technology and
innovation.
Head of Uber’s Toronto lab (and one
of Vector’s co-founders), Raquel Urtasun,
is one academic who has resisted the
call of Silicon Valley to stay in Toronto.
She told the festival audience the
reason was that “the Machine Learning
group at the University of Toronto is one
of the best groups in the world”.
Urtasun, originally from Spain, also said
Toronto’s reputation as a diverse and
cosmopolitan city, was a major factor in
attracting her to stay in the city.
Another academic, Sanja Fidler, an
assistant professor in the Department
of Mathematical and Computational
Sciences at University of Toronto
Mississauga, told attendees about her
work developing computer vision so AI-
powered robots can better understand
and interact with the world around
them. “We need to train machines to
act friendly and natural,” she said.
Inmar Givoni, director of Machine
Learning at Toronto start-up Kindred.
ai, told festival delegates about the
company’s efforts to instil human-like
intelligence in machines and dismissed
warnings from the likes of Elon Musk
about the threat of AI running amok
and endangering humanity.
“As long as we task those robots with
doing things that are meaningful and
purposeful, I think it’s going to be a
better world,” Givoni said.
Professor Hinton told the Elevate
Toronto festival audience that times had
moved on since what he dubbed the
‘AI Winter’, a recent time when many
thought researchers like himself and
others were “a bunch of misfi ts wasting
their time on an irrelevant fi eld. Nobody
thinks that anymore,” he said.
Proof of the professor’s prophecy is
the tech giants, who are all fast hiring
leading AI academics.
The city’s connected ecosystem can
clearly provide a global benchmark
model for tech hubs around the
world, which can also replicate these
successes already charted in Ontario.
Meanwhile, AI Toronto is set to be
the largest AI conference and expo
in Canada, 12-13 June, 2018, when it
comes to the Metro Toronto Convention
Centre. The show is co-located with Big
Data Toronto.
CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD
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