Thinking our way to the top

Pop quiz: is the following statement true or false? Canada is the birthplace of a transformative technology set to disrupt countless industries and potentially lead the next wave of global economic growth. Most Canadians aren't aware of it, but artificial intelligence (more specifically its subset, deep learning) -- the inspiration for scores of dystopian science-fiction movies -- is a made-in-Canada technology that will become profoundly important over the next few years. Deep learning was the name given to a group of complex mathematical models that came out of the University of Toronto in 2006. In a nutshell, the technology mimics the neural networks of a human brain, giving machines the capacity to learn on their own and discover previously undetectable patterns within massive data sets.