7 ms·
Google Brain Toronto
- astrodust 10y agoOuch, sorry Waterloo.
- AdamSC1 10y agoRight? This is an odd choice. Google just built their massive new campus in Waterloo, and University of Waterloo is one of the best engineer schools and computer science schools in the world, but they build this an hour away in a market that is much more expensive? An odd choice for sure.
- unavoidable 10y agoGeoff Hinton has deep roots with the rival University of Toronto and the surrounding ecosystem. His role and influence undoubtedly played a large part in this decision.
- goodJobWalrus 10y ago> Right? This is an odd choice. Why? UofT / Hinton are doing the AI here...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kitcar 10y agoIt's part research center, part marketing expense...
- karpathy 10y agoI wasn't too surprised. If you look at the Vector Institute website (http://vectorinstitute.ai/#people http://vectorinstitute.ai/#people), you'll see many additional well-known researchers involved, in addition to Geoff Hinton: David Duvenaud, Sanja Fidler, Brendan Frey, Roger Grosse, Geoffrey Hinton, Jordan Jacobs, Tomi Poutanen, Daniel Roy, Raquel Urtasun, Richard Zemel. there is a lot more momentum at UofT in this specific area of research, more than there is at Waterloo.
- astrodust 10y agoThe University of Toronto is probably a lot better funded than Waterloo, too, has a massive student base, and has connections to other local universities that are also much larger than Waterloo like York and Ryerson. This selection will certainly put a dent in Waterloo's reputation, though with any luck they'll be able to capitalize on it in some capacity due to their proximity.
- canistr 10y agoSure, but Toronto and Waterloo have different reputations when it comes to Engineering and Computer Science. And if it really matters to you that Waterloo be involved, it's obviously worth pointing out that Pearl Sullivan (Dean of Waterloo Engineering) is on the Board of Directors for the Vector Institute anyway.
- 029r0823jr 10y ago> This selection will certainly put a dent in Waterloo's reputation, though with any luck they'll be able to capitalize on it in some capacity due to their proximity. Highly doubt it. Waterloo is known for being mediocre/trash for CS research. People go to Waterloo to get into industry and not academics.
- AvenueIngres 10y ago>Waterloo is known for being mediocre/trash for CS research Are you out of your mind? Do you know why Waterloo's School of Computer Science is named after David R. Cheriton? Yeah, the same DRC who made a major exit to Cisco, seed funded Google and hold an emeritus professorship at Stanford. A sizeable chunk of the people who published Spark have done their undergrad' or research masters at UW. Waterloo is definitely top-notch at the undergrad', perhaps less impressive than schools with bigger endowment at the research level, but far from being "trash". Tons of Waterloo profs are on the steering committees of major CS conferences (VLDB most notably). This comment is so puerile, it has to be written by some jealous and petty undergraduate student. Or so I hope.
- batty 10y ago
- anthonyc51 10y agoWaterloo is good at churning out entry-level software engineers. UofT is much stronger for ML and research in general.
- rand_r 10y agoFrom the perspective of someone who's lived in both cities, it makes perfect sense. Toronto is a much much nicer place to live and it'll be way easier to attract talent to it. I wouldn't move back to Waterloo for any amount of money.
- trapperkeeper79 10y agoWhy? I've never lived there but it seems one of the few places with tech jobs and houses that don't cost a million bucks.
- bigmanwalter 10y agoWaterloo is great for backyards and parking. Toronto is great for urban living. Take your pick :)
- obstacle1 10y agoThere's nothing there. It's a suburban wasteland. Yes, you can buy a house there more cheaply than in Toronto. But is owning a pile of bricks worth living in a wasteland? Personal preference, as they say.
- JabavuAdams 10y agoFew people want to live in Waterloo when they could live in Toronto instead.
- mhkhung 10y agoUofT is one of the best research university in the world, at the PhD level. Waterloo is best at producing the best engineers at the undergrad level.
- FT_intern 10y agoWaterloo is best at bleeding great Canadian engineers to the USA
- 029r0823jr 10y agoBecause U of T engineers decide to stay in Toronto out of the goodness of their hearts...? If an engineer stays in Canada it's certainly not because they're being adequately compensated.
- david-gpu 10y agoSome of us would rather live in a country with better welfare even if we won't directly benefit from it. Compensation is good enough up here IMO.
- perhonen 10y agoSo does UofT - I myself and at least a dozen other 1T7 grads I know personally are headed south as soon as we graduate. This is a Canada-wide problem which won't be fixed unless salaries equalize.
- trapperkeeper79 10y agoSpot on. This new institute (and other govt efforts like it) all fail to answer this fundamental question - why would someone work at half the pay (or less) if they were a Canadian citizen? It is a chicken-and-egg problem .. salaries and labour pool quality go hand in hand.
- bigmanwalter 10y ago
- mooneater 10y agoWell Pearl Sullivan is a director (Dean of Engineering at UWaterloo)
- lazyant 10y agoThere are three sponsor companies from Waterloo (granted, not the big ones) so not ruling out something in Waterloo
- itchyjunk 10y agoI am seeing a lot of investments and MASSIVE promised commitments by a lot of people/company. Is all this money going towards paying experts/ buying equipments ? Don't get me wrong, I like seeing all this money being poured in. It's just that i'm curious as to how this money is being used. Tangentially, do you think any of this will trickle down to people who are trying to learn math/ML in the form of scholarships?
- FreedomToCreate 10y agoThe phrasing "Canada's AI Moment" to me implies that this is temporary.
- dgudkov 10y agoWhat [in technology] is not temporary?
- NateyJay 10y agoIt's a really strange phrase. Maybe meant to be "Movement"?
- backpropaganda 10y agoThe influx is temporary, is probably what was meant by the phrase. When AI becomes as ubiquitous as, say, the internet, noone would call it AI.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ape4 10y agoCanada will benefit from the brain wall Trump has erected.
- dukeluke 10y agoThose jobs would have been shipped to India eventually anyway. Global corporations don't care about silly things like stable economies. They care about the bottom line. Edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Am I wrong in some way?
- tachyonbeam 10y agoIndia doesn't have top universities and top research talent.
- dukeluke 10y agoMaybe not now, but I assure you there many smart people trying to build the infrastructure and plenty of smart talent that could be utilized.
- devdoomari 10y agoaren't IITs top univ.s?
- akinalci 10y agoCertainly some of them are for undergraduate education, but I'm not sure they're top research universities.
- whitenoice 10y agoDo you have any source on India not having top research talent? From my understanding India has good amount of research and tech talent but it suffers a lot from brain drain to US universities. Especially students graduating from Indian institute of technology, national institute of technology + many more. In fact if you look into student (masters, phd) profiles of top US engineering schools like MIT, CMU, Stanford etc. most of the Indian students there have graduate degress from those Indian schools and they are in huge numbers. (who eventually end up at these companies or starting their own) One of the main reasons for lack of research in India is lack of funding. Its nothing compared to US universities. But that does not imply it lacks talent. In fact primality test in polynomial time was founded by computer scientists at IIT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test.
- eigenvector 10y ago1. What is the Vector Institute? Is a foundation? Is it a not-for-profit corporation? Something else? 2. Who controls it? The government (which has put in most of the announced funding)? The University of Toronto? Google? A combination of all of those? 3. Who will own the work created by the Institute? How will it be licensed, and what rules will govern its publication? These are questions that would be answered at a very early stage of an ordinary research partnership between a public university and a corporation, but I can find none of these details about Vector.
- itchyjunk 10y agoAlso, this is meant to retain talents in Canada rather than coming to USA to work for companies like Google. By working for Google in Canada? Doesn't having "Google Brain" in Canada imply people are working for Google but it's one based in Canada now?
- canistr 10y ago#3 bothers me a lot. It reminds me of the way owners of sports franchises use public tax-payer money to pay for stadiums, meanwhile keeping all the profits from the money made by their teams. If the various governments in Canada are funding this research and Google is contributing such a minor amount of funding, who is the beneficiary of the research output? Does Google get first dibs on all the information? Does the research ultimately find its most valuable commercial use at Google? Who else stands to benefit from this research? Are any of these beneficiaries going to directly be Canadians? Or are Canadians merely going to be tertiary benefactors with the primary ones being the researchers working in Toronto taking salaries?
- tjpoutanen 10y agoGoogle is one of 11 companies (the platinum level sponsors) that committed $5M to Vector. It's not a Google thing. The researchers are Vector are free to pursue their own interests, and publish their work like any other academic. Their output is not owned by Google or any of the corporate sponsors.
- eigenvector 10y ago
- t3io 10y agoSoo much money being thrown behind a methodology/philosophy that is potentially on its last legs.... So many bets being placed on gift horses hoping for a high return. So little efforts looking and/or thinking beyond a narrow box. So much disruption potential outside of mainstream currents. And to think.. All one needs is a computer and an idea. What unfolds in the times ahead is going to be one for the history books.
- nebabyte 10y agoLiterally almost everything that happens, and everything in the past few decades of tech anyways, is "one for the history books" History books contain a lot of inane details no one besides readers of history books are ever charged with knowing. (Then there's the important big-picture stuff and sub-arcs that we're supposed to remember lest we repeat them, but most people have already stopped caring by that point because of the inane details)
- etiam 10y ago"Posted by Geoffrey Hinton" it may be, but "authored by Geoffrey Hinton" if there's any truth to it at all must surely be true only in the most superficial and technical sense. With all the marketing speak in that piece it's completely alien to Hinton and very much in line with coming out of some corporate spin department. Looking beyond the presentation though, I find this an interesting and important development for the field. I'm inclined to think there are plenty of valuable researchers who will work for the vector institute in Toronto who would not have gone to work for Google Brain in the SF Bay area.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]