News

During the past year, there have been major implosions of robot startups, such as with Jibo, Anki and Rethink Robotics.  They all raised substantial amounts of capital from top-tier investors and had strong teams.

So why the failure? One of the main reasons is the extreme complexities of melding software and movable hardware.  As a result, the technology often does not live up to expectations.

Our very own Waterloo.ai academic member, Professor Mark Crowley will be a panelist at this upcoming event hosted by Waterloo Symposium on Technology & Society on May 15th. 

The panel discussion will feature Avi Goldfarb, Andrew Bailey, Carla Fehr and Mark Crowley, with moderation from Centre for Security Governance  Executive Director Mark Sedra.

For more information and registration, please click here. 

For Canadian researchers whose fields have been selected as priorities for government largesse, such as artificial intelligence, Canada feels a comfortable place to be. Peter van Beek, co-director of the AI Institute at the University of Waterloo, says that the roughly Can$350 million provided in the 2017 federal budget for the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy and the Scale AI cluster (part of a business-led supercluster initiative) has been “a total game changer”.

Click here to read more from Peter van Beek and others. 

University of Waterloo researchers have developed a new framework that increases the probability of meeting your investment target by threefold.

The data-driven approach, which is enhanced by machine learning, significantly outperforms traditional methods used by investors and people saving for retirement.

Canadian company Voiceflow is one example of the kinds of possibilities the growing field of voice technology opens up

Voice-based assistants, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, are growing in popularity, to such an extent that market research company eMarketer predicts there will be 5.8 million such smart speakers in use in Canadian households this year.

Read the full story at The Globe and Mail

Fourteen members of the AI Institute will be at the University of Bordeaux on April 8-10 for a joint workshop on the topic of AI and Public Health. The goal of the workshop is to establish and deepen research partnerships by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, public health, biostatistics, epidemiology, mobile health technology, population health, surveillance, incentivizing healthy behaviour, and health informatics.

It is no secret that deep neural networks (DNNs) can achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of complicated tasks. DNN models such as BigGAN, BERT, and GPT 2.0 have proved the high potential of deep learning. Deploying DNNs on mobile devices, consumer devices, drones and vehicles however remains a bottleneck for researchers. For such practical, on-device scenarios, DNNs must have a smaller footprint.

Read the full story at Synced

One of the hottest topics at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos was the wave of automation expected from advances in artificial intelligence (AI), and the consequent displacement of workers. This anticipated realignment was depicted as good or bad news depending on who was speaking and who was listening.

Prof. Alexander Wong of the Systems Design Engineering department at the University of Waterloo is quoted in this article. 

AI (Artificial Intelligence) has experienced several periods of severe funding cuts and lack of interest, such as during the 1970s and 1980s. They were called “AI winters,” a reference to the concept of nuclear winter where the sun is blocked from a layer of smoke and dust!

But of course, things are much different nowadays. AI is one of the hottest categories of tech and is a strategic priority for companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many others.

Fakhri Karray, ECE Professor and co-Director of the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute, will be inducted in Gatineau/Ottawa on 30 March 2019 as an Engineering Institute of Canada Fellow for his exceptional contribution to engineering in Canada.

Congratulations Fakhri!