Schwartz Reisman Faculty Affiliates Duvenaud and Zemel named Canada CIFAR AI Chairs
With today’s announcement of David Duvenaud (L) and Richard Zemel (R) alongside 27 others inductees, the number of CIFAR AI Chairs under the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy surpasses 100.
Two Schwartz Reisman Institute Faculty Affiliates, David Duvenaud and Richard Zemel, have been named CIFAR AI Chairs in recognition of their innovative artificial intelligence research in areas that benefit society. Zemel and Duvenaud are both faculty members at the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science, as well as co-founders of the Vector Institute, where Duvenaud is a faculty member and Zemel is director of research.
In support of their research, CIFAR AI Chairs are granted five years of dedicated funding. The program is a cornerstone of the $125 million CIFAR Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, established in 2017 to recruit the world’s leading AI researchers to Canada and retain existing talent.
“We’re delighted to see two of our Faculty Affiliates appointed by CIFAR,” says Schwartz Reisman Director Gillian K. Hadfield.
“They are both brilliant researchers whose work embodies our mission at Schwartz Reisman to ensure technologies like AI make the world a better place—for everyone. David, for example, is co-founder of Invenia, which uses machine learning to tackle complex real-world problems like improving the efficiency of electrical grids while fighting climate change. And Rich’s work on improving unsupervised machine learning’s fairness and accuracy is absolutely foundational to the field, making him a sought-after partner to companies like Google and Microsoft. We’re very proud to have David and Rich with us on the SRI research team.”
Before joining U of T, Duvenaud conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University and received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on constructing deep probabilistic models to help predict, explain, and design things. Zemel’s research includes foundational work on systems that learn useful representations of data with no supervision; methods for learning to recommend and rank items; and machine learning systems for answering questions about images and producing automatic captioning.
“U of T is recognized as a home to pioneering AI research, both within Canada and globally,” says Marsha Chechik, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and an SRI faculty affiliate herself. “The announcement of four computer science faculty as new CIFAR AI Chairs reinforces this strength, and will propel societally important research to new heights.”
The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s minister of innovation, science, and industry, announced today’s appointments, remarking that “the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy continues to strengthen Canada’s leadership in responsible AI, reflecting our values of human rights, inclusion, and diversity.”
Duvenaud’s and Zemel’s research will continue to contribute to the Schwartz Reisman Institute’s mission to convene integrative research that rethinks technology’s role in society, the contemporary needs of human communities, and the systems that govern them.
With files from U of T’s Department of Computer Science and CIFAR News.
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