The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Group at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science conducts research in many areas of artificial intelligence. Faculty members of the group have active interests in: models of intelligent interaction, multi-agent systems, natural language understanding, constraint programming, computational vision, robotics, machine learning, and reasoning under uncertainty.
The AI Group also has a particular investment in Societal AI.
Pascal Poupart awarded $170k NSERC Alliance Grant to develop an agentic system to automate internal workflows
Professor Pascal Poupart has been awarded $170,000 through the NSERC Alliance Grant program.
This funding is complemented by $85,000 from industry partner Manulife Financial, bringing the total project support to $255,000. Manulife is also providing significant in-kind contributions, including synthetic data, technical infrastructure for simulated business environments, and access to its technical experts.
Q&A with Professor Dan Brown: Exploring societal, ethical and legal questions surrounding genAI
In spring 2026, Professor Dan Brown appeared before the Senate of Canada’s Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to discuss intellectual property and safety concerns raised by the rise of generative AI. He highlighted concerns about the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI systems and the potential impact of these technologies on creative professionals, particularly writers and creators from minoritized communities.
In this Q&A, Professor Brown discusses the opportunities and limitations of generative AI and explores the ethical, legal and societal questions these technologies raise about creativity, copyright, and the future of creative work.
Victor Zhong, Jimmy Lin awarded $1.64M NSERC Alliance grant to develop deep research agents for natural science research and development
Professors Victor Zhong and Jimmy Lin have been awarded $1,641,776 through the NSERC Alliance Grant program. This funding is complemented by more than $1.8 million in combined cash and in-kind contributions from industry partner BASF Canada, bringing the total project value to roughly $3.5 million.
Titled “Deep Research Agents for Natural Science R&D,” the three-year project will co-develop and deploy an end-to-end intelligent research assistant capable of retrieving, reasoning over, and acting on diverse experimental data sources. Developed in partnership with BASF Canada, the project aims to transform chemical informatics from static information retrieval into dynamic, action-oriented knowledge systems that accelerate scientific discovery.