In Edmonton, companies find a humble hub for artificial intelligence

There's a hall of champions at the University of Alberta that only computer science students know where to find -- more of a hallway, really, one office after the next, the achievements archived on hard drives and written in code. It's there you'll find the professors who solved the game of checkers, beat a top human player in the game of Go and used cutting-edge artificial intelligence to outsmart a handful of professional poker players for the very first time. But lately it's Richard Sutton who is catching people's attention on the Edmonton campus. He's a pioneer in a branch of artificial intelligence research known as reinforcement learning -- the computer science equivalent of treat-training a dog, except in this case the dog is an algorithm that's been incentivized to behave in a certain way. U of A computing science professors and artificial intelligence researchers (left to right) Richard Sutton, Michael Bowling and Patrick Pilarski are working with Google's DeepMind to open the AI company's first research lab outside the U.K., in Edmonton.