NVIDIA is the latest foreign technology giant to open an AI lab in Toronto

Silicon Valley computer chip giant NVIDIA Corp. on Wednesday became the latest foreign tech giant to establish an artificial intelligence lab in Canada, hiring University of Toronto computer science assistant professor Sanja Fidler to lead the effort. The company, which has about one-quarter of its 50 downtown Toronto employees focused on AI, plans to at least double the size of its operation, with most of the new hires tasked "to work specifically on pie-in-the-sky kinds of AI research," said Rev Lebaredian, an NVIDIA vice president. Ms. Fidler, a Slovenian-born academic, will devote about half her time to NVIDIA and the balance to supervising graduate students at U of T, where she has gained a reputation as one of the bright lights of the computer science department, winning several research and faculty awards, including a nod as professor of the year in 2014-15 from the faculty's student union. She also gained notoriety along with fellow U of T researchers for using AI to help people determine if their outfits were stylish and also to generate Christmas songs based on computer analysis of holiday images. Ms. Fidler was not available for an interview. NVIDIA, best known as a graphics processing powerhouse in the computer gaming industry, was one of the earliest Silicon Valley companies to shift its business to serve the burgeoning AI industry, providing a platform and tools to serve the market for self-driving cars, autonomous robots and super-computing applications.