DeepMind Opens New Research Office in Edmonton, Alberta

DeepMind, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company widely acclaimed for developing the superhuman computer Go player AlphaGo, opened its first AI research office outside the UK. The Edmonton, Canada office will be headed by Richard S. Sutton, according to a Bloomberg report. Sutton is a professor with the computer science department at the University of Alberta (UAlberta). He first met DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis in 2010 or 2011 (according to the Edmonton Journal) and started advising DeepMind shortly thereafter.

Also joining the new office is Michael Bowling, another professor with UAlberta's computer science department, and the leader of the Computer Poker Research Group, which developed DeepStack, an expert-level AI in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em poker. If a poker AI can beat pros at multi-player games in a couple of years, as predicted by Bowling in March 2017, then DeepMind will be able to add solving Texas Hold'em to its collection of AI milestones along with solving Go.

In a public tweet, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, congratulated UAlberta and thanked DeepMind for choosing Canada, echoing a contemporaneous call that it's time to make the Canadian AI ecosystem bloom. This commentary piece is published on The Globe and Mail and co-authored by world leading AI scientist Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.