Facebook heads to Canada in search of the next big AI advance

Several leading figures in AI, including LeCun, have studied or taught at Canadian universities. Reinforcement learning builds on deep learning to let machines learn through experimentation. Michael Bowling, a U.S.-born computer scientist who leads a lab at the University of Alberta that has produced cutting-edge poker-playing machines, says the new Facebook lab simply shows that Canada already leads the rest of the world in AI. Indeed, after seeing AI researchers snapped up by big U.S. companies in recent years, Canada may well hope that the environment fostered by new labs, including the one in Montreal, will eventually produce companies that rival the likes of Facebook.