AI & Climate Change: A View From Quebec

JOIN US FOR A LIVELY PANEL DISCUSSION AND NETWORKING RECEPTION -- APPETIZERS & REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED

Since the surprise launch of Open AI’s consumer-facing ChatGPT product one year ago, AI innovation and investment have exploded. Meanwhile, governments and researchers are urgently seeking ways to combat the accelerating challenge of global climate change. 

With its focus on "harnessing AI for the benefit of all", leading thinkers from Mila will engage with Silicon Valley practitioners to delve into the current challenges and opportunities for deploying AI to solve climate change.

In addition to a robust and timely discussion, this event will be an opportunity for the local Silicon Valley AI and Canadian / Québécois expat community to gather and network with other experts and colleagues. Finally, the event will be a chance for the Quebec Trade Office - Silicon Valley and Mila to shine a spotlight on the province's world leading AI talent, research, and leadership.

Moderator

Samy Bengio, Sr Director, AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple

Bengio is an expert in deep architectures for sequences and other structured objects. He has is a leading researcher in identifying better modeling sequences (i.e. speech, text, etc.) using deep recurrent architectures in AI and machine learning. He was involved in the initial development of Torch , a machine learning library in lua/C++/GPL, including many building blocks for (deep) neural networks, mixture models, adaboost and bagging. This library is a successor of the well-known SVMTorch software for support vector machines. He is now involved in the team that developed TensorFlow, a modern and flexible library for deep architectures.

Panelists

David Rolnick, Assistant Professor & Canada CIFAR AI Chair in Computer Science at McGill University and the Mila–Quebec AI Institute 

Rolnick focuses on innovations in machine learning driven by problems in climate change such as biodiversity monitoring, land use classification, climate model emulation, and materials discovery. Rolnick is also the co-founder and Chair of the global non-profit Climate Change AI; Scientific Co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age; and the Canada lead for the US-Canada NSF Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change.

Sergei Issaev, AI Scientist at Vooban

Issaev develops custom AI projects for clients in a variety of industries across all stages of software development.  He has expertise working with data in a variety of forms, including image (CV), text (NLP), and time-series (financial). His articles on machine learning and AI have been published leading online publications, including Towards Data Science and Towards AI. Vooban is a leading AI software consultancy in Quebec City.

Lu Zhang, Founder & Managing Partner at Fusion Fund

Zhang is a renowned Silicon Valley-based investor and serial entrepreneur with extensive experience bringing a broad range of technologies to commercialization and has deep domain expertise in AI in healthcare, Enterprise AI/Networks, Edge Computing, and Data Privacy. Prior to starting Fusion Fund, Zhang was a serial entrepreneur and materials science researcher. As a first-generation immigrant originally from Inner Mongolia, at the age of 21, she built a medical device company for Type II Diabetes diagnosis based on her graduate research in Stanford University. Following the acquisition of her startup by a leading public medical device company, Lu began investing in and supporting early-stage entrepreneurs which led her to create Fusion Fund in 2015.

About Mila

Mila is a world-leading AI Institute recognized globally for its major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. The Mila community boasts the largest concentration of deep learning academic researchers globally. It is known for its expertise and significant contributions in modeling language, machine translation, object recognition, and generative models. 

Mila focuses on its core research areas of health, environment, climate change, and AI ethics. It is committed to deliver advances that will benefit all of society: its research is conducted using an Open Science approach to promote collaboration and foster knowledge transfer. 

Mila grew out of a collaboration between Université de Montréal and McGill University, in collaboration with Polytechnique Montréal and HEC Montréal. The institute brings together over 1,000 individuals advancing AI for the benefit of all.