December 16, 2021

From fundamental research breakthroughs to helping Ontario businesses deploy AI into their organizations, Vector had a very busy year. The 21 stories below offer a brief, but compelling overview of the flurry of activities in which Vector researchers and staff were involved over the past 12 months. 

• Vector researchers published papers, gave oral presentations, or led workshops at many of the top AI conferences this year, including Neurips, CVPR, ICLR, ICML, and ACM FAccT.
• In their ‘The Geography of AI” report, The Brookings Institution noted that “the Vector Institute represents one of the most ambitious efforts in North America to upgrade a strong ecosystem into a world-class position.” The report examines which cities are driving AI. Read more >
• Vector Faculty Member Bo Wang helped determine a set of mortality predictors for long-term care residents with COVID-19 by applying ML techniques to data from the Ontario Health Data Platform. Read more >
• Vector’s new  FastLane program promotes AI application in small and medium-sized businesses, strengthens, Ontario’s AI talent pipeline, and solidifies Toronto as the world’s fastest-growing AI tech hub. The program’s launch event featured Ontario Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade Victor Fedeli, Vector leaders, including Board Chair Ed Clark, and a panel of business leaders well-versed in the application and development of AI by growing companies. Read more > 
• Vector Institute’s latest report on the state of the Ontario AI ecosystem — Ontario AI Snapshot — found that despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the province is creating more AI jobs than ever while the pipeline of AI talent continues to expand. Read more >
• Vector’s VP AI Engineering and CIO Ron Bodkin shared practical insights on the regulation of algorithms and AI-powered decision systems in The Globe and Mail. Responsible AI was also the focus of the PwC and Vector-led webinar “Defining AI’s Guardrails: A Fireside Chat on Responsible AI” which featured Bodkin and PwC partner Annie Veillet. Read more >
• GLOM, the latest stream of research from Vector co-founder Geoffrey Hinton, attempts to overcome to two of the most difficult problems for visual perception systems: understanding an entire scene in relation to objects and their natural parts, and recognizing objects when viewed from a new perspective. Read more >
• A new machine learning model from Vector Institute and Apple researchers, including interim research director Graham Taylor, can create 3D environments without any reference images. Their breakthrough has potential applications with modeling software for the construction industry. Read more >
• Vector postgraduate affiliate Estelle Inack founded fintech company yiyaniQ, the first spin-out company from Vector. She and co-founder Behnam Javanparastuse use a neural network to get faster and more accurate derivative pricing calculations, one of the most difficult financial problems. Read more >
• Vector Faculty Affiliate and Princess Margaret Cancer Centre researcher Chris McIntosh co-created a machine learning model that automates the creation of radiation therapy treatment plans for patients with prostate cancer using computer vision. Read more >
• In a Globe and Mail op-ed, Vector’s CEO Garth Gibson and VP of AI Engineering and CIO Ron Bodkin assessed Canada’s readiness in addressing AI’s growing compute demands and described an approach that other countries can emulate. Read more >
• Vector Faculty Member Juan Carrasquilla and his team used machine learning to find a more efficient way to manipulate the qubits used by quantum computers. Read more >
• Vector’s annual Research Symposium showcased some of the new and cutting-edge developments in machine learning and deep learning coming out of the Vector community. Read more > 
• Vector researchers helped institutions ensure privacy and confidentiality when sharing machine learning models with new privacy-enhancing technique (PET) CaPC. PETs were also the subject of the Vector-led webinar “Privacy Enhanced Technologies for Health.” Read more > 
• In an MIT Technology Review profile, Vector Faculty Member Alán Aspuru Guzik discussed using AI, robots, and quantum computing to create the new materials needed to fight climate change. Read more >
• Canadian Healthcare Technology magazine highlighted Vector’s role in connecting federal funding for advanced AI research with practical implementation opportunities in Ontario organizations through Pathfinder Projects. Read more >
• Designed for small-to-medium-sized businesses, Vector’s Bias in AI program aims to deliver technical skills for reducing implicit and explicit bias in natural language processing & computer vision. Read more >
• Vector Faculty Members Frank Rudzicz and Bo Wang helped The Globe and Mail paint a picture of how the deployment of AI in healthcare will change doctor visits. Read more >
• For oversight to be effective, governments developing AI standards need to account for the technology’s unknowns, wrote Vector CEO Garth Gibson, Vector VP of AI Engineering and CIO Ron Bodkin and Schwartz Reisman Institute director Gillian Hadfield in a Toronto Star op-ed. Read more >
• The New York Times’ Cade Metz offered fresh insights on AI’s past, present and future in a wide-ranging discussion with Vector Faculty Member Graham Taylor about Metz’s new book, Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World. Watch > 
• Vector partnered with technical staff from many of our sponsor companies, including CIBC, ScotiaBank, Telus, and the multi-partner Dataset Shift Project, to better integrate AI into their businesses.