On October 23, 2018, Canadian tech leaders will gather at the Rotman School of Management’s Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), located at the University of Toronto, for the fourth annual Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference.
Since its inception, the conference has brought together top experts in AI to share and discuss the future of AI and its impact on the economy. During the 2016 conference, Shivon Zilis, Project Director, Office of the CEO at Tesla and Neuralink, previous Partner and continued supporter of Bloomberg Beta, and Founding Fellow of the CDL AI Stream and the CDL Quantum Machine Learning Stream, gave the conference attendees a detailed overview of the AI landscape in Canada.
Canada has a unique data advantage and a healthy academic environment for bringing up the next generation of AI talent. It is clear that AI is critical to economic growth. In 2017 alone, the federal government invested $300 million in AI and the private sector made an investment of $230 million, including Google’s investment in and support of Vector Institute.
Canadian tech companies continue to be most represented in major machine intelligence categories, as shown in the image below.
Machine Intelligence 3.0 image courtesy Shivon Zilis.
It is predicted that by 2030, growth attributed to AI will be $15.7 trillion of the global economy, of which Canada will be striving to gain market leadership. To ensure that happens, collaboration is key, both globally and locally. A Pan-Canadian AI strategy has been proposed by the Government of Canada, which will see an investment of $125 million.
The Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference is a unique opportunity for attendees to connect and listen-in on leading minds that Canadian science and technology has to offer.
This year, the conference will explore the theme of complements of AI and the productivity gains associated with machine intelligence. Through this theme, the following topics will be discussed:
- Economic growth, algorithmic bias and complex cognitive tasks
- Implementing commercial grade AI and its economic impact
- Scaling with AI
- AI and the human machine interface
- AI on the frontier
We are privileged to welcome back Geoffrey Hinton, Engineering Fellow at Google and Emeritus distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto to chat with us about the future of AI and the nature of intelligence.
Professor Geoffrey Hinton has been hailed as University of Toronto’s godfather of deep learning and has made significant contributions to the improvement of deep-learning methods. The students in his lab have also made major breakthroughs by applying these methods to speech recognition in 2009 and object recognition in 2012. Since 2013, he has divided his time between Google and the University of Toronto. In 2010, he was awarded the Herzberg Gold Medal, Canada’s top award in science and engineering.
Suzanne Gildert, cofounder and CEO of Sanctuary AI, a company with a mission to build synthetic humans – “synths” – that are indistinguishable from us physically, cognitively, and emotionally, will also be joining us a speaker. Attend her talk to get up to speed on both cutting-edge technology and the ethical issues that arise from creating human-like machines.
Attendees will also have an opportunity to hear from speakers from OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.
CDL will also be using this opportunity to honour and celebrate the first-order impact of visionaries in the science and tech space such as Parvin Mousavi, Professor at Queen’s University and Jim Fleck, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. The awards will be presented at the Machine Learning and Market for Intelligence Conference at CDL.
The conference is dedicated to exploring the commercial opportunities and socio-economic implications arising due to advances in machine intelligence. For more details, visit marketforintelligence.com.
