The Canadian Artificial Intelligence space has been growing rapidly and the country is slowly becoming a breeding ground for Ai innovations. The federal government has been supportive of the industry by enabling infrastructure development and providing an enabling environment to attract investments in the industry.
AI revolutionizing machine-generated translation
One of the areas that AI has been able to revolutionize is in translations which have made it possible to bridge the language barrier. Machine-generated translation has been possible because of AI and machine learning and in Canada, several industries have been able to benefit from Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Alexa assistant tool. The Alexa tool can address various translation needs in professional service industries such as finance and law sectors.
There has been an increase in demand for translations across various industries and Ai technology is proving to be vital in helping translators in maintaining efficiency and quality. The use of AI-enabled technology and integrating it with human abilities can help teams in enhancing their capabilities and it saves time and resources.
British Columbia to train women in AI
The industry continues to expand across Canada and in British Columbia, an initiative has been launched to help expand Ai expertise to women in the province. It appears like the British Columbia community is keen on correcting the gender imbalance that is common in the tech space. On March 5, the Athena Pathways Consortium was launched to train 500 women in the province in machine learning, AI and data science in the next 18 months.
AInBC executive director Steve Lowry indicated that organizations that are not gender-balanced usually tend to underperform and they are keen to correct that in AI. Already $682,000 has been committed to offering 300 scholarships to women but this could be extended as the group gets more donors. Athena Pathways is also receiving support from Teck Resources Inc. (NYSE: TECK), Metaoptima Technology Inc., D-Wave System Inc. and Canada’s Digital Technology Supercluster.
Women making a name for themselves in AI
The 2019 AI Global Talent Report indicated that only 14% of AI researchers are women in Canada showing significant imbalance. However despite the dominance of men in the AI space several women have been advancing in the space. One of the women leading in AI research includes the Vector Institute of AI founder and Uber (NYSE: UBER) Advanced Technologies Group’s chief scientist Raquel Urtsan. She is also the Canadian Research Chairholder in computer vision and Machine learning.
Equally, Accenture’s managing director of AI Jodie Wallis has contributed greatly to the IA industry in Canada. She is responsible for the expansion of Accenture’s footprint in the AI space as well as bring Ai expertise to various clients in the country. Also, Nvidia Corporation’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) director of AI and assistant professor at the University of Toronto Sanja Fidler has made her name in the space. She focuses on computer vision and deep learning with links to natural language processing and she was awarded the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research AI chair in 2018.
