News

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.

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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.

A four-year, $400,000 partnership with Ontario’s University of Waterloo (UWaterloo) will support artificial intelligence (AI) research in disability claim prediction as well as fraud detection and natural language comprehension in customer service, Toronto-based Manulife Financial Corp. announced Tuesday.

Read the full story at Investment Executive

Progress on new artificial intelligence (AI) technology by Waterloo Engineering researchers could improve monitoring at treatment plants to help ensure clean water and safeguard public health.

The researchers have developed AI software capable of identifying and quantifying different kinds of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, a threat to completely shut down water systems when it suddenly proliferates.

Read the full story at engineerthefuture.ca 

Researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of Maryland have collaborated with the Comcast Applied AI Research Lab to improve the voice query understanding capabilities of the Comcast Xfinity X1 entertainment platform.

A medical startup has developed cutting-edge imaging technology that has the potential to detect skin cancer without leaving a mark.

Elucid Labs uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology in a small noninvasive imaging device to analyze moles and other skin lesions for signs of skin cancer, helping dermatologists make faster, more accurate decisions and reducing the number of unnecessary biopsies.

Part 2: Ontario’s complete artificial intelligence value chain

This is the second post of a series aimed to provide a cohesive perspective on all aspects of Canada’s AI ecosystems — from their roots, to the objectives, partnerships and impact of key ecosystem players. Our first article focused on how Montreal’s non-predatory model helped establish the city as a world-class AI research community.