The next global AI hub will be built in the Canadian Prairies BetaKit

The story of Alberta AI starts on April 1, 1964, with the opening of the University of Alberta's department of computing science. Researchers such as Randy Goebel would graduate from the department and set the foundation for early work on the science of natural language processing and AI in the 80s, the latter of which took the form of studying games like chess. By the '90s, however, several'AI winters' -- periods of funding constraints for research and lack of press interest to generate public excitement -- inhibited the discoveries coming out of the university. "The symptoms of the winter are more that industries [that] bought into the idea that expert systems could help them found that it was way too expensive to implement," said Goebel, now a U of A professor and principal investigator at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). "If you scale up, it costs a lot to have you and me write down processes for chemistry, for example."