On this episode of The POD Cast, hosts Mike Allan and Kaitlin Mercier talk with guest, Dr. Matt Taylor, form the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute about how to get started on the path to employing AI.

Matt Taylor

Matthew E. Taylor (Matt) received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2008, supervised by Peter Stone. He then completed a two-year postdoctoral research position at the University of Southern California with Milind Tambe and spent 2.5 years as an assistant professor at Lafayette College. He was then an assistant professor at Washington State University where he held the Allred Distinguished Professorship in Artificial Intelligence. In 2017, he temporarily left academia to help start an artificial intelligence lab in Edmonton, Alberta, with Borealis AI, the artificial intelligence research lab for the Royal Bank of Canada. He is now a tenured associate professor in computer science at the University of Alberta, a Fellow-in-Residence at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and remains an adjunct professor at Washington State University. He has been a PI or co-PI on over $6M USD in competitively awarded research funding from federal, state, and industrial sources, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has (co-)supervised 7 graduated PhD students and 5 MS students, as well as published over 120 peer-reviewed papers in conferences and journals. His current fundamental and applied research interests are in reinforcement learning, human-in-the-loop AI, multi-agent systems, and robotics.

AMII

AMII’s mission is to make artificial intelligence and machine learning the primary drivers of sustainable growth for Alberta’s economy – through great research, advisement and education.

We began in 2002 as the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning (AICML), a joint effort between the Government of Alberta and the University of Alberta (UAlberta). Originally funded through the Alberta Ingenuity Fund, the research centre soon became known as the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning after being brought under the umbrella of Alberta Innovates. In 2017 the centre rebranded as Amii, becoming part of the CIFAR Pan-Canadian AI Strategy and launching as a not-for-profit in the heart of Edmonton’s downtown core. Over its twenty-year history, and thanks to forward-looking investments by Alberta Innovates and the Government of Alberta, Amii has built a world-class team of researchers at the University of Alberta and affiliated institutions. Since our inception, we have increased research capacity in AL/ML nearly nine-fold, starting with four co-founding members at the University of Alberta and now funding the research of 28 Fellows (including 23 Canada CIFAR AI Chairs) and eight Canada CIFAR AI Chairs at universities across Western Canada.

Key Takeaways

• What is AMII and what they do to optimize the supply chain
• Who is Matt Taylor and why he entered this industry
• What are the biggest challenges to the supply chain that AMII is working to solve
• What is the next big thing coming to the industry
• Advice for people in supply chain, where they should be looking and focusing their efforts

Important Links

Matt Taylor LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewedmundtaylor/?originalSubdomain=ca

AMII

https://www.amii.ca/

AMII LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amii/

AMII Twitter

https://twitter.com/AmiiThinks?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor