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University of Waterloo has hit the headlines again! The university was recently was named as one of the Americas' 5 most innovative universities for AI and robotics!

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
2. Carnegie Mellon University, USA
3. University of Southern California (USC), USA
4. University of Waterloo, Canada
5. University of São Paulo, Brazil

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is making it possible to discover new drugs faster, cheaper and more efficiently.

Waterloo chemists have introduced AI to interpret the results acquired by the differential mobility spectrometry (DMS) technique to predict drug properties. This could reduce in principle the time between concept and coming to market of new drugs by years and decrease production costs by $100s of million.

Alexander Wong, a Canada Research Chair in the field of Artificial Intelligence and an associate professor in the Department of Systems Deign Engineering, is interviewed in The O'Reilly Data Show on his research on designing a human-in-the-loop platform for building deep neural networks with efficient network architectures.

Read about the interview at O'Reilly.com

Unlike with traditional software, we don't always have an exact idea of how AI works. And in numerous scenarios, the opacity of deep-learning algorithms has caused larger troubles.

Using AI to understand AI is a topic explored by Prof. Alexander Wong of the System Design Engineering department in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Prof. Wong is the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging. He is also a co-founder of DarwinAI along with Sheldon Fernandez. DarwinAI is a startup located in Waterloo Ontario. 

The First Bi-Annual Industrial Partners Meeting of the Waterloo AI Institute, has been an excellent success as per the testimony of a number of the attendees, whether industrial partners, faculty members or students.

As our climate changes and forest fires increase in number and intensity, what does our future with forest fires look like?

British Columbia experienced a state of emergency this summer when wildfires burned across the province, destroying more area than in any other season on record. The fire currently raging in California has become the deadliest wildfire in the state's modern history.

With climate scientists predicting warmer, drier weather in many regions across Canada, finding solutions to combat the devastation of forest fires has never been more pressing.

10 new organizations have been added to the growing Partnership on AI community. The latest cohort of new members represents a diverse range of sectors, including media and telecommunications businesses, as well as civil rights organizations, academia, and research institutes. The Vision and Image Processing Lab at University of Waterloo is one of the new members.

Read the full story

Systems Design Engineering Ph.D. student Jason Deglint participated at the first Future Engineers for Water and Environmental Safety (FEWES) International Student Competition which took place in Tianjin, China from October 29 - November 2, 2018. This competition focused on low-cost water technology with environmental and/or public health benefits and was hosted by the Sino-Canada Joint R&D Center on Water and Environmental Safety (SCWE).

Artificial intelligence has arrived at the point where most people know what it can do… but have no idea how it does it. The mere thought of building and training deep neural networks and algorithms is so daunting that many enterprises which could benefit from AI are reluctant to engage with the transformative tech.

Google’s AutoML is creating a buzz among AI watchers and the “AI-building-AI” concept is now a hot industry topic — what could be more appealing than having this mysterious new tech actually build your models for you?

Typically, deep learning approaches to voice recognition — systems that employ layers of neuron-mimicking mathematical functions to parse human speech — lean on powerful remote servers for bulk of processing.