It's time to make the Canadian AI ecosystem bloom

It's rare for Canadians to come out and assert global leadership in anything (barring hockey and winter coats), but here we are, on the brink of adding artificial intelligence (AI) to the list. This is no small measure. It requires us to move away from the understated modesty that often defines our national character and demands that we take action to be able to declare our place on the world stage. Thankfully, we have the goods to declare. Seminal breakthroughs such as deep learning and reinforcement learning, which have resulted in unprecedented technological transformation and are currently fuelling the AI engine, were brought to life by Canadian universities.