Samsung Expands Its AI Lab In Montreal

Samsung Electronics will expand and move its current Montreal-based artificial intelligence (AI) lab to the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila), the company announced.

The Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) AI Lab in Montreal was set up in October last year, and was the seventh centre of its kind to be launched by the company.

Mila, founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal, has partnerships with the University of Montreal and McGill University.

The aim of the expansion and move to Mila, Samsung said, will be to strengthen its fundamentals in AI research, increase competitiveness in system semiconductors, and provide the South Korean tech giant with an opportunity to work closely with AI communities in Canada.

Samsung had announced last month that it would invest 133 trillion won in logic chips, which includes system semiconductors and processors, for the next ten years.

The Montreal-based SAIT AI Lab's research will focus on unsupervised learning and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANS) to develop new deep learning algorithms and on-device AI, the South Korean tech giant said.

Samsung will send its research personnel from its semiconductor business to the new lab for collaborative purposes.        

The lab has also recruited Simon Lacoste-Julien, Professor at the University of Montreal, to assist on the research.

SAIT in the past has collaborated with Yann LeCun and Richard Zemel, who are professors at New York University and the University of Toronto, respectively. LeCun and Bengio were both the winners of the 2018 Turing Awards.

Samsung previously said it wanted 1,000 researchers working on AI by 2020.

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