Hugo Larochelle was appointed new director of science at Mila, the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Montreal, and played the role held by his former academic superintendent Yoshua Bengio.
Larochelle replaces Laurent Charlin, an associate professor at HEC Montreal, who took over as interim science director in May after Benguio moved to the role of advisor. The new director is an adjunct professor at Monttorill University and former head of the city's Google Brain Research Lab.
“I see AI as the key to bringing more intelligence into our economy.”
Hugo Larochell
In an interview with Betakit, Larochelle said his priorities are to maintain MILA's “high-capacity research” with AI, to help professors and students commercialize their jobs and create new startups.
“I think we can do more and we need to be ambitious,” Larochell said.
The new Science Director was selected by committees selected by MILA's board of directors and scientific councils. Larochelle currently chairs the council and leads the Institute's scientific research direction.
Mira was founded in 1993 by Benguio, a Turing Award winner and leading computer scientist. Since then, the nonprofit has grown into a joint initiative between Quebec's major academic institutions, including the University of Monttorill and McGill University. Mira and her sister organization, Vector Institute in Toronto, and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII) in Edmonton are federally funded through Pan Canada's AI strategy.
In addition to hosting academic research on AI and machine learning, MILA will serve as a research hub for industry partners, including Canadian startups Protexxa and Abcellera. There is also a research partnership with Enterprise AI Startup Cohere, with its new chief AI scientist, Joelle Pineau, the core scholar of MILA.
Larochelle collaborated with Bengio and the PhD project to explore new approaches to training deep learning algorithms in two published multiple papers. In a statement, Benguio called Larochelle “an exceptional researcher” and said he had the “rigour, creativity and vision” necessary to lead the organization's scientific research.
Benguio later founded Lawzero, a new AI safety laboratory focused on agent AI. Lawzero counts former startup executives Sam Ramadori and Philippe Beaudoin among their core teams, and says that it is Benguio's answer to the perceived dangers of autonomous AI agents, poses a “catastrophic” risk if developed irresponsibly.
Larochelle told Betakit that she is “watched” about several aspects of AI, but she believes the technology is ready for widespread adoption across the enterprise. He is also excited about the federal government's new focus on promoting AI adoption.
“We see AI as the key to bringing more intelligence into our economy,” says Larochelle. “I think we'll play a big role in cultivating that technology the right way.”
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The new Mira leader continued to study under another Canadian AI “The Godfather,” Nobel Prize winner Jeffrey Hinton, for his postdoctoral degree. Larochelle's research helped advance the concepts that are currently frequently used in generator AI. This includes zero-shot learning, which allows tasks to be correctly generalized to new categories where AI models are not included in the training data.
Beyond research, Larochelle also has experience in the startup field. He co-founded machine learning startup Whetlab with other U of T Alumni acquired by Twitter in 2015. After spending a short time in Twitter's machine learning division, he was hired to lead Google's AI Research Lab (Google Brain) at Montreal (Google Brain), which is now part of Google Deepmind.
Larochelle said her experience at Google managing a team of independent researchers pursuing multiple paths can help inform your leadership approach at MILA.
“I'm there to tweak [researchers] In an interesting direction, Larochel said. He also looks forward to pursuing his own research, including investigating the use of AI to monitor biodiversity on satellites.
Features Image Courtesy CNW Group/MILA – Quebec AI Research Institute
