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Science and technology

Montreal to become world centre of AI

Montreal is positioning itself to become a world centre of artificial intelligence with impressive amounts of cash flowing into academia, public-private partnerships, research labs and startups. Bertrand Marotte reports on some of the big brains behind the suddenly hot trend.
  • Montreal Gazette,
  • For more information about the conference, visit c2montreal.com.

PHOTOS: JOHN MAHONEY Jean-François Gagné is co-founder and chief executive officer of Element AI, an artificial intelligence startup factory launched in Montreal last year. “We want to be part of that conversation — shaping what AI is going to look like,” he says.

It might seem like an ambitious goal, but key players in Montreal’s rapidly growing artificial intelligence sector are intent on transforming the city into a Silicon Valley of AI.

Certainly, the flurry of activity these days indicates that AI in the city is on a roll. Impressive amounts of cash have been flowing into academia, public-private partnerships, research labs and startups active in AI in the Montreal area.

And hopes are high that a threeday conference starting May 24 — AI Forum — will help burnish Montreal’s reputation as one of the world’s emerging AI advanced research centres and top talent pools in the suddenly very hot tech trend.

Topics and issues on the agenda include the evolution of AI in Montreal and the transformative impact AI can have on business, industry and the economy.

For example, researchers at Microsoft Corp. have successfully developed a computing system able to decipher conversational speech as accurately as humans do. The technology makes the same, or fewer, errors than professional transcribers and could be a huge boon to major users of transcription services like law firms and the courts.

Setting the goal of attaining the critical mass of a Silicon Valley is “a nice point of reference,” said tech entrepreneur Jean-François Gagné, co-founder and chief executive officer of Element AI, an artificial intelligence startup factory launched last year.

“It’s ambitious,” allowed Gagné, one of the keynote speakers at the AI Forum, held in partnership with the annual C2 Montréal international gabfest.

The idea is to create a “fluid, dynamic ecosystem” in Montreal where AI research, startup, investment and commercialization activities all mesh productively together, said Gagné, who founded Element with researcher Nicolas Chapados and Université de Montréal deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio.

Continue reading Montreal to become world centre of AI →

Astronomy News

Long range sensors detect…

  1.  Curiosity gets a new AI system
  2.  Supernova that exploded TWICE!
  3.  Amateurs Aid in Discovery of Pulsing White Dwarf
1. NASA upgraded Curiosity with computer vision, letting it choose interesting rocks on its own.

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NASA-JPL; Mars rover Curiosity now has its own built-in curiosity.

NASA recently installed a new AI system called AEGIS to autonomously choose targets for its laser detection system.

The AEGIS algorithm analyzes images taken by the rover’s navigation camera (Navcam). AEGIS can select a target rock and pinpoint it with the rover’s laser system, ChemCam, before scientists on Earth have time to look at the images. ChemCam then determines what kinds of atoms the rock contains. The new autonomy is especially useful when Curiosity is in the middle of a long drive, or when there are delays in sharing information with scientists on Earth. READ MORE

2. Astronomers find a superluminous supernova that seems to have exploded twice.

Most supernovae explode only once, but a newly found superluminous star did something truly bizarre: it exploded twice.  A recently discovered class of supernovae called superluminous supernovae (SLSN) are brighter and longer-lasting. Only a dozen or so have been found, and using the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC), astronomers have found evidence of another, but reveals surprising behavior. It seems to have exploded not only once, but twice.

3. Io has a unique collapsing atmosphere

Jupiter’s closest moon, Io, has an atmosphere that collapses when it is eclipsed by the gas giant.

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An artist’s interpretation of Io’s collapsing atmosphere when in Jupiter’s shadow

As one of the four Galilean moons, Io has played an important role in Astronomy since its discovery in 1610. It is the fourth largest moon in the solar system while also being the most geologically active, but a new study may add a new and interesting aspect to this moon.

Using the the Gemini North telescope and its instrument the Texas Echelon Cross Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES), a group of scientists documented unique atmospheric changes on Io. They found that Io’s thin atmosphere, which is mostly sulfur dioxide gas vented from volcanoes, collapses and freezes onto the surface when shaded by Jupiter.  READ MORE

3. Amateurs Aid in Discovery of Pulsing White Dwarf

AR Scorpii: white dwarf and red dwarf binary
An artist’s impression shows the exotic binary system, AR Scorpii. M. Garlick / University of Warwick / ESO

In the July 28th Nature, researchers announced the discovery of a pulsing white dwarf, part of the system 380 light-years from Earth known as AR Scorpii. Amateur astronomers have long kept an eye on AR Sco, thinking they were watching the flickering of a single variable star. But when they took more detailed observations last year, they saw entirely unexpected behavior and began a fruitful collaboration with professional astronomers to find out the answer.

A multitude of ground- and spacebased observations later, and astronomers now have a working hypothesis that explains the system. AR Sco is not one star but two: a cool red star and its companion, a white dwarf generating a lighthouse beam of energetic particles. The two revolve around each other every 3.6 hours in a precise cosmic dance. The white dwarf is spinning too, lashing its companion with the beam again and again, causing the whole system to brighten dramatically and fade away again every 1.97 minutes. READ MORE

Local Sensors Detect...

Local Earth Sensors Detect…

  • The Moon
  • Space Debris
  • Robots & AIs

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  • Robot & moonThe moon: This week, 14 to 17th, and March 15-18 before 10 PM is the best time to view the moon this year until the autumn.  The sun will be striking it at just the right angle for optimum viewing of mountains and craters.  Even binoculars on a tripod will show a lot of detail. Copernicus is a favourite target for many amateur astronomers, and this is the best time to see it.   http://observethemoonnight.org/

 

  • Space Debris: Wherever we go, we leave our garbage behind.
  • Almost 20,000 pieces of space debris are currently orbiting the Earth. This visualisation, created by Dr Stuart Grey, lecturer at University College London and part of the Space Geodesy and Navigation Laboratory, shows how the amount of space debris increased from 1957 to 2015, using data on the precise location of each piece of junk ( from https://www.space-track.org ).