Vector Institute

👋Meet the 2024-25 Vector Scholarship in AI Recipients Vector is excited to announce this year’s Scholarship in AI’s exceptional cohort of 115 recipients. These talented individuals, selected from Vector-recognized master's programs and AI study paths across Ontario, exemplify the brightness and diversity of Canada's rising AI stars. https://lnkd.in/gJjpEtJZ "Vector is exceptionally proud of the high caliber and rich diversity of this year's student cohort. Our Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence is a key part of Vector’s commitment to nurturing the next generation of AI innovators. By equipping them with the most sought-after AI skills and cultivating an ecosystem that encourages them to build their future in Ontario." - Melissa Judd, MBA With world-class educational institutions, industry leaders, and researchers, Ontario has emerged as an AI powerhouse on the global stage. Vector is proud to play a key role in attracting, developing, and retaining the brightest minds in AI through initiatives like the Vector Scholarship. Lakehead University, McMaster University, Queen's University, Smith School of Business at Queen's University, Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Guelph, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, University of Toronto - Rotman School of Management, University of Waterloo, University of Windsor, Western University, York University, Schulich School of Business - York University - 👋Rencontre avec les lauréats de la bourse Vecteur en IA 2024 Vecteur est heureux d'annoncer la cohorte exceptionnelle de 115 récipiendaires de la bourse d'études en IA de cette année. Ces personnes talentueuses, sélectionnées parmi les programmes de maîtrise reconnus par Vecteur et les parcours d'études en IA à travers l'Ontario, illustrent l'éclat et la diversité des étoiles montantes de l'IA au Canada. «Vecteur est exceptionnellement fier du haut calibre et de la riche diversité de la cohorte d'étudiants de cette année. Notre bourse d'études en intelligence artificielle est un élément clé de l'engagement de Vecteur à former la prochaine génération d'innovateurs en IA. En les dotant des compétences les plus recherchées en matière d'IA et en cultivant un écosystème qui les encourage à bâtir leur avenir en Ontario» - Melissa Judd, MBA Avec des établissements d'enseignement, des chefs de file de l'industrie et des chercheurs de classe mondiale, l'Ontario a émergé en tant que puissance de l'IA sur la scène mondiale. Vecteur est fier de jouer un rôle clé dans l'attraction, le développement et la rétention des esprits les plus brillants dans le domaine de l'IA grâce à des initiatives telles que la bourse d'études Vecteur.

Vector’s Talent Hub is designed to connect Vector community members with over 80 industry-leading employers on the forefront of AI adoption. With a Talent Hub profile you can get access to the latest data & #ML jobs like: ➕ BMO - Sr. Data Scientist (Controls Machine Learning/AI) ➕ Borealis AI - Senior Machine Learning Researcher ➕ Google - AI Lead, Customer Value and Transformation, Google Cloud ➕ OMERS - Senior Data Analyst, Investment Finance & Valuations ➕ TELUS - Senior Data Engineer Check out more open opportunities on the Talent Hub https://lnkd.in/gXAnhhzd #DataScienceJobs #Opportunities #Hiring - Le Talent Hub de Vecteur est conçu pour mettre en relation les membres de la communauté Vecteur avec plus de 80 employeurs à la pointe de l'adoption de l'IA. Avec un profil Talent Hub, vous pouvez accéder aux dernières offres d'emploi data & #ML comme : ➕ BMO - Sr. Data Scientist (Controls Machine Learning/AI) ➕ Borealis AI - Senior Machine Learning Researcher ➕ Google - AI Lead, Customer Value and Transformation, Google Cloud ➕ OMERS - Senior Data Analyst, Investment Finance & Valuations ➕ TELUS - Senior Data Engineer Consultez d'autres opportunités ouvertes sur le Hub des talents.

🎤Kathleen S. has a story to share about where an internship with Vector led her: Her journey from intern to Vector professional staff showcases a story of remarkable growth. Kathleen’s internship honed her skills in stakeholder management, communication, and problem-solving, while AI projects expanded her understanding of real-world applications. Joining the Prompt Engineering Laboratory team, she witnessed the emergence of ChatGPT, shedding light on the potential of generative AI. As an associate project manager, Kathleen helps organizations embrace the future of technology with structuring and planning dynamic AI projects. 🔥Remarkable paths with AI await you as an Applied Intern at Vector! 🚀Start your story - Apply before June 4 1:00 PM ET! https://lnkd.in/gtu4ji7E ➕Preference will be given to Black & Indigenous post-secondary students studying in Canada. #InclusiveInternship #CanadaAI #Hiring #FallIntern #DiverseWorkplace -  Kathleen a une histoire à partager sur l'endroit où un stage chez Vector l'a menée : Son parcours de stagiaire à membre du personnel professionnel de Vector témoigne d'une croissance remarquable. Le stage de Kathleen lui a permis d'affiner ses compétences en matière de gestion des parties prenantes, de communication et de résolution de problèmes, tandis que les projets d'intelligence artificielle ont élargi sa compréhension des applications du monde réel. En rejoignant l'équipe du Prompt Engineering Laboratory, elle a assisté à l'émergence de ChatGPT, mettant en lumière le potentiel de l'IA générative. En tant que gestionnaire de projet associée, Kathleen aide les organisations à embrasser l'avenir de la technologie en structurant et en planifiant des projets d'IA dynamiques. Des chemins remarquables avec l'IA vous attendent en tant que stagiaire appliqué chez Vector ! Démarrez votre histoire - Postulez avant le 4 juin 13:00 ET ! https://lnkd.in/gtu4ji7E La préférence sera donnée aux étudiants post-secondaires noirs et autochtones qui étudient au Canada.

Exciting News! Vector’s AI Engineering team members Marshall Wang, John Willes, and Deval Pandya’s ICLR Climate Change AI workshop tutorial "One Prompt Fits All: Visual Prompt-Tuning for Remote Sensing Segmentation" received the audience's choice award. 🛰 During this workshop, the team delved into the transformative potential of image segmentation for climate change research, particularly through satellite imagery analysis. Utilizing the Segment Anything Model (SAM), they introduced PT-SAM – an innovative method that employs trainable, lightweight prompt embeddings to drastically reduce the manual input required for precise remote sensing segmentation. Key highlights from the tutorial included ➕ PT-SAM Architecture: How it integrates with SAM to enhance zero-shot learning capabilities. ➕Practical Demonstrations: Training PT-SAM for various environmental features like forests and buildings. ➕Efficiency and Accessibility: Achieving accuracies comparable to manually-crafted prompts with minimal dataset and hardware needs, making advanced segmentation accessible to more researchers and practitioners. https://lnkd.in/ejEpyeay - Des nouvelles passionnantes ! Marshall Wang, John Willes et Deval Pandya, membres de l'équipe d'ingénierie de l'IA de Vecteur, ont participé au tutoriel de l'atelier d'IA sur le changement climatique de l'ICLR intitulé « One Prompt Fits All : Visual Prompt-Tuning for Remote Sensing Segmentation » a reçu le prix du public. 🛰 Au cours de cet atelier, l'équipe s'est penchée sur le potentiel de transformation de la segmentation d'images pour la recherche sur le changement climatique, en particulier par le biais de l'analyse de l'imagerie satellite. En utilisant le Segment Anything Model (SAM), ils ont présenté PT-SAM - une méthode innovante qui utilise des incrustations légères et formables pour réduire considérablement la saisie manuelle nécessaire à une segmentation précise de la télédétection. Les points forts de la formation sont les suivants ➕Architecture de PT-SAM : Comment elle s'intègre à SAM pour améliorer les capacités d'apprentissage sans prise de vue. ➕Démonstrations pratiques : Formation à PT-SAM pour diverses caractéristiques environnementales telles que les forêts et les bâtiments. ➕Efficacité et accessibilité : Atteindre des précisions comparables à celles d'invites créées manuellement avec un ensemble de données et des besoins matériels minimaux, rendant ainsi la segmentation avancée accessible à un plus grand nombre de chercheurs et de praticiens.

I am thrilled to introduce OMNI-EPIC: Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness with Environments Programmed in Code. Led by @maxencefaldor and @jennyzhangzt, with @CULLYAntoine and myself. Website: http://dub.sh/omniepic Paper: https://lnkd.in/gxeW7xFT Open-ended and AI-generating algorithms aim to continuously generate and solve increasingly complex tasks forever, offering a promising path toward more general intelligence. To accomplish this grand vision, learning must occur within a VAST space of potential tasks. Existing approaches to automatically generating environments are constrained within manually predefined, often narrow distributions of environment, limiting their ability to achieve “Darwin Completeness” (the potential to create *any* learning environment). OMNI-EPIC uses foundation models to autonomously generate code specifying the next learnable and interesting tasks. The generation of both environments and reward functions enables, in principle, the creation of any learning task (i.e. achieving "Darwin Completeness"). Every run of OMNI-EPIC triggers an explosion of creativity in designing fascinating, diverse, interesting new challenges tailored to the current capabilities of the agent, akin to the processes observed in biological evolution and human culture (e.g. art, science and technology). Here is an example run. All tasks (save 3 seeds) are generated by OMNI-EPIC. Imagine running this for billions of years! It is also a great form of human entertainment! OMNI-EPIC ushers in a new era of gaming, where endless novel and interesting content *of any type* is automatically generated & tailored to players' skills. Soon we will share a website where players can engage with generated tasks. In conclusion, OMNI-EPIC represents a leap towards truly open-ended learning by generating an endless stream of learnable, interesting, and wildly diverse tasks.

Last week at #OSCDialogue, our first afternoon panel discussed how we can capitalize on artificial intelligence. Senior Vice President Kevin Fine was joined by Dr. Foteini Agrafioti, Senior Vice President, Data and AI and Chief Science Officer of RBC; Barbara Boucher, Senior Director, Global Enterprise Risk, Market Structure and Partnerships, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ); Mario Schlener, Managing Partner, Risk Consulting in Canada and Global FS Risk Technology Lead and Co-lead of EY’s Global Responsible AI; and Cameron Schuler, Chief Commercialization Officer and Vice President, Industry Innovation, Vector Institute, to explore ways to harness the power of AI systems responsibly and maintain Ontario’s position as a leader in AI innovation. They spoke about opportunities posed by AI and strategies to mitigate risks and combat fraudulent activities. They also discussed effective regulation of AI development and deployment, including procuring effective oversight of capital market participants who are adopting AI systems, in shaping dynamic, resilient and inclusive capital markets.

Day 2 of the AI-CRV Conference continues at the University of Guelph after a successful day of keynotes and presentations to launch the conferences yesterday - 37th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Canadian AI 2024) and the 21st Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV 2024). Today adds the Responsible AI track. Tonight on May 29th, we have added free registration to the Industry Track (Talks and panels organized by the Vector Institute) and the Poster Session as part of the AI-CRV Conference. Thanks to the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences - University of Guelph, University of Guelph - School of Engineering and School of Computer Science for making this possible. To register: https://lnkd.in/gHpyA4f5 The industry track includes keynote presentations from Ozge Yeloglu, Vice President, Advanced Analytics & AI, CIBC and Vik Pant, PhD, Partner & Chief Data Scientist, PwC Canada. A panel moderated by Warren Ali with Dana Sharp from Linamar Corporation and Brandon Sheldrake from the Linamar Innovation Hub (iHub) on Enterprise Opportunities and Risks. A panel on the Canadian AI Ecosystem: Opportunities and Challenges for Startups and Scaleups moderated by Sedef Akinli Kocak, PhD, MBA featuring: Dan Adamson, Head of Innovation, Armilla AI Ryan Gariepy, CTO, Clearpath Robotics by Rockwell Automation and OTTO by Rockwell Automation Ben Unsworth, CTO & Head of Labs Lumeto A Vector Presentation on a Bias Detection Tool by Ananya Raval, Software Developer - Machine Learning, Vector Institute

🎉 Excited to share my first, first-author paper, "EHRMamba: Towards Generalizable and Scalable Foundation Models for Electronic Health Records," co-authored with my amazing colleagues Mahshid Alinoori, Arash Afkanpour, and Amrit Krishnan at the Vector Institute! 🚀 🏥 Electronic Health Records (EHR) capture detailed patient medical histories and hold immense potential for revolutionizing personalized medicine and clinical decision-making. However, deploying EHR models in real-world settings is challenging due to high computational demands and limited hospital resources. Traditional transformer models, with their quadratic computational costs, are impractical for processing extensive EHR sequences. Additionally, maintaining separate downstream models for each clinical task complicates deployability. 🐍 To overcome these limitations, we introduce EHRMamba, a robust foundation model built on the Mamba architecture. EHRMamba can process sequences up to four times longer than previous models due to its linear computational cost. We also introduce a novel approach to Multitask Prompted Finetuning (MPF) for EHR data, which enables EHRMamba to simultaneously learn multiple clinical tasks in a single finetuning phase, significantly enhancing deployment and cross-task generalization. Our evaluations on the MIMIC-IV dataset demonstrate that EHRMamba advances state-of-the-art performance across 6 major clinical tasks and excels in EHR forecasting, marking a significant leap forward in the field. 👨🍳 Alongside EHRMamba, we open-source Odyssey, a toolkit designed to support the development and deployment of EHR foundation models, with an emphasis on data standardization and interpretability. 🔥 Discover more about our work and explore EHRMamba and Odyssey: https://lnkd.in/eDYspsuA #EHRMamba #Odyssey #ElectronicHealthRecords #Healthcare #MachineLearning #AIInHealthcare #VectorInstitute

Last week, I had the great privilege of representing the Vector Institute, participating as a speaker and also chairing a roundtable discussion at the AI Global Summit and Forum co-chaired by the President of the Republic of Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak. The meeting brought together private and public sector leaders, experts, and decision-makers from across the globe to find common approaches to safe and responsible AI development and deployment and consistent global standards for AI governance. In my many conversations over the two-day Summit, I kept returning to two key points: Change how we think about AI - unlike other technologies, it can’t be treated as its own thing. Like electricity, it is increasingly embedded in everything we do and our governance structures must reflect that. Invest in AI trust and safety today, not tomorrow - as Vector researchers along with their co-authors said in their paper, published in Science last week, organizations must match their investments in AI R&D for safety and ethics, with their investments in AI capabilities, and prioritize safety throughout AI's lifecycle. One of the biggest global priorities right now is AI, specifically, the decisions on how AI will be governed will determine how it is developed. Having the right people at the table — including Canadians with their global leadership and expertise in trust and safety — is critical. Vector, complemented by our researchers’ work advancing these topics, brings non-partisan expertise to this area as we help shape global AI governance. The decisions that will shape how AI is developed and deployed are being made now. I hope these messages resonate with Summit participants as they return home to their institutions, companies, and constituents. Getting AI right on a global scale is paramount to reap its immense societal benefits. 

🚨Attention AI intern seekers!🚨 Immerse yourself this fall alongside seasoned professionals and gain invaluable hands-on experience. Connect and network with researchers. Propel towards a rewarding career in a dynamic and innovative environment. 🔎Ready to take the next step? 🚀Apply before June 4 1:00 PM ET and unlock a world of possibilities with Vector Institute. https://lnkd.in/gtu4ji7E In order to relieve disadvantage and alleviate the under-representation of Black and Indigenous people in AI, and to attempt to achieve equal opportunity in the field of AI, preference in hiring will be given to qualified Black and Indigenous persons, studying at or having recently graduated from a Canadian post-secondary institute, who self-identify as such in the application process. #RemarkableAI #InclusiveWorkplaces #AppliedInternship #AIMentors - Attention aux stagiaires en IA ! Plongez cet automne aux côtés de professionnels chevronnés et acquérez une expérience pratique inestimable. Entrez en contact avec des chercheurs et créez des réseaux. Poussez-vous vers une carrière enrichissante dans un environnement dynamique et innovant. Prêt à passer à l'étape suivante ? Postulez avant le 4 juin à 13h ET et ouvrez un monde de possibilités avec l'Institut Vector. https://lnkd.in/gtu4ji7E Afin de remédier aux désavantages et à la sous-représentation des Noirs et des autochtones dans le domaine de l'intelligence artificielle, et pour tenter de parvenir à l'égalité des chances dans le domaine de l'intelligence artificielle, la préférence en matière de recrutement sera accordée aux Noirs et aux autochtones qualifiés, étudiant ou ayant récemment obtenu un diplôme dans un établissement postsecondaire canadien, qui s'identifient comme tels dans le cadre du processus de candidature.