Borealis AI, a Royal Bank of Canada institute for research, is continuing to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) research team across Canada with the addition of Pascal Poupart and Marcus Brubaker. The two professors both join as senior researchers.
“We are at a tipping point in Canada – the AI ecosystem is poised to become the true and material world leader in AI. “When top talent chooses to join a Canadian company, and stay in Canada, we all benefit,” says Foteini Agrafioti, chief science officer and head, Borealis AI.
Poupart, a professor at University of Waterloo, will base his team out of Waterloo, while working closely with the Toronto-based Borealis AI centre. He brings an extensive and highly regarded research background in the development of algorithms for reasoning under uncertainty and machine learning (ML) with application to assistive technologies, natural language processing and telecommunication networks.
During his tenure at Waterloo, a school with strong ties to industry, Poupart has collaborated with numerous international corporations like Huawei, Google, Intel, and Ford. Much of his research has focused on real-world applications and the expansion into financial services applications of ML is a natural next step in his career.
Brubaker, a professor at York University, will be overseeing Borealis AI’s fundamental and applied research team in Toronto. His expertise in Bayesian machine learning, a set of methods for inferring things about the world in the presence of uncertainty, has previously led him to accelerate the discovery of molecular structures from cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM). Cryo-EM recently won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Established in 2016, with labs in Toronto/Waterloo, Edmonton, and Montreal, Borealis AI supports open academic collaborations and teams up with world-class research centres in artificial intelligence.