Toronto hosts Samsung’s second AI centre in North America

Samsung Research America (SRA) will establish an AI centre in Toronto’s downtown core at MaRS Discovery District. The AI centre seeks to hasten the adoption of AI using machine-learning technology on multiple devices — ranging from household gadgets and appliances to vehicles — with the goal of reducing friction between the user and the device. The Toronto AI centre joins a network of similar centres also announced recently in the UK and Russia. It is the second AI centre to be established in North America, the other one being in Mountain View, California. The Toronto team will work in partnership with the company’s Silicon Valley team. Dr Sven Dickinson, computer vision technologies expert and past chair of the Department of Computer Science at the Univ of Toronto, will head the Toronto centre. He is expected to play an important part in Samsung’s research on core AI technologies that entail language, vision and other multi-modal interactions. A key factor in choosing Southern Ontario to host the AI centre is the availability of talent, particularly AI researchers at the Univ of Toronto and Univ of Waterloo, which both have longstanding relationships with Samsung. Other considerations by Samsung for its location at MaRS Discovery District are stronger collaboration with regional start-ups and enlargement of the present ecosystem, and the encouraging environment by the MaRS community itself of cross-disciplinary collaboration ending in breakthrough discoveries and solutions.