Borealis AI expands to BC

Borealis AI will establish a computer vision research centre in Vancouver by fall. Borealis AI, an RBC Institute for Research, will develop a machine learning subfield that trains computers to see, process and understand the visual world even as computer vision is new to the financial services industry. Professor Greg Mori, computing science director of Simon Fraser Univ, will be the lab’s research director. An internationally recognized expert in computer vision, Mori will be joined by Univ of British Columbia professor Leonid Sigal who will work as academic advisor. While at Borealis AI, Mori and Sigal will continue teaching in their universities. Mori’s research includes semantic segmentation or a series of machine learning techniques that seek to label every object in a natural image down to the pixel level. Sigal’s research focuses on the challenges of visual understanding and reasoning. By providing a varied landscape and focusing on green living, Vancouver is also viewed as an ideal location for Borealis AI to expand its research to environmental science. Borealis AI was established by RBC in 2016 and has other labs in Toronto/Waterloo, Edmonton and Montreal.