RBC to boost focus on AI with new research lab

Royal Bank of Canada is hiring a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) as an adviser to a new research lab the bank is establishing as part of its investment in AI and machine learning, Canada's largest bank said on Wednesday. The bank declined to say how much is being invested, but estimated that its ongoing investments in AI will total in the tens of millions of dollars over the coming years. RBC Research said it is looking into how AI can be applied in banking and it will be working with Richard Sutton, a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta. Sutton has made substantial contributions in the field of "reinforcement learning," a type of machine learning that uses reward and punishment. It is a subset of the science of getting a computer to do something without programming it to do so, and is the technology behind self-driving cars and underpins Google's AlphaGo, the AI program that last year beat the world champion at the ancient board game Go.