Redmond computing giant Microsoft has plans to double the team at its Montreal research lab. The company has also hired Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) artificial intelligence professor Geoffrey Gordon to serve as the new research director at the Microsoft Research Lab facility in Montreal.
According to a January 23rd, 2018 Microsoft blog post, the goal is to double the number of technical experts at the research facility to “as many as” 75 over the course of the new two years.
Gordon is a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s machine learning department, and is also affiliated with the university’s Robotic Institute. According to his CMU faculty page, his academic interests include multi-agent planning, reinforcement learning, decision-theoretic planning, statistical models of difficult data and, of course, game theory.
Microsoft established its research lab in Montreal in 2017. The facility is Microsoft’s largest natural language processing lab in the world.
The lab acquired Kitchener-Waterloo-based AI startup Maluuba in January 2017, in order to expand the facility’s deep learning and reinforcement learning research.
Montreal itself has become quite a hotbed for AI research.
Facebook, announced in September 2017 that it had plans to invest $7 million CAD by building its own Montreal AI lab facility.
Samsung also announced in September 2017 that it had plans to launch an AI lab in the city.
Source: Microsoft
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