Since 2016, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has focused on AI through its dedicated research division called Borealis AI. In October 2020, Borealis AI and RBC announced the launch of Aiden, an AI-driven electronic trading platform for institutional investors. Aiden uses "reinforcement learning," a form of AI based on behavioural psychology that either rewards or penalizes an algorithm when it makes a decision. This is the same type of machine learning used for AlphaGo, a Google-owned computer program that beat a human player at Go, a sophisticated board game, in 2016. But making trading decisions in a live market is more complicated than playing a board game, noted Foteini Agrafioti, chief science officer at RBC and head of Borealis AI. "It's a much more complex environment where we were able to deploy [Aiden] and we're extremely happy with the results," she said.

Royal Bank of Canada built a DGX-powered cloud and tied it to a strategic investment in AI. Despite headwinds from a global pandemic, it will further enable RBC to transform client experiences. The voyage started in the fall of 2017. That's when RBC, Canada's largest bank with 17 million clients in 36 countries, created its dedicated research institute, Borealis AI. The institute is headquartered next to Toronto's MaRS Discovery District, a global hub for machine-learning experts.

Valérie Pisano sips a cappuccino in Montreal's Caffè Italia, an unassuming gem in the heart of the city's Little Italy, and a place that she has known since she was a child. "Coming here is all about history and stability," said the newly appointed president and chief executive of Mila (formerly the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms), the Quebec epicentre of Canada's artificial-intelligence revolution. With a soccer match on the TV screen above and the steamy blasts of an espresso machine punctuating her words, Ms. Pisano spoke about the need to stay connected to the past while leading an organization that is literally inventing the future. "What we're trying to create is completely new, completely emergent… And as society quickly pivots to this new era, we need to ask, how do we anchor ourselves in the roots of who we are and what we stand for as humanity?" The future Ms. Pisano sees emerging is just around the corner – not just figuratively, but literally.

If Toronto is an artificial intelligence hub, MaRS is its beating heart. In the past few years, start-ups and tech giants have set up AI labs within its walls, and the world's smartest researchers have turned down jobs at Stanford and MIT to move in. On June 27, AI enthusiasts got a rare glimpse of what those brainiacs are up to. During the MaRS AI Open House, a cadre of companies took over the building's foyer to show how they're using the technology to predict legal decisions (Blue J Legal), design HD maps (Ecopia), treat wounds (Swift Medical) and help retailers stock their shelves (Rubikloud). But the main draw was the chance to peer into the offices of MaRS's buzziest tenants.

A. I studied electrical engineering. It was at the University of Toronto that I got introduced to machine learning – biometric authentication in particular. We developed a way to authenticate people's identities using the human heartbeat. Nymi was a company I built that commercialized that research. It was a wearable device.

Harish is a data officer and an expert in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered data analytics with 15 years of experience working in aerospace, telecommunication, automotive, security, geospatial and biomedical industries. He is the President and Chief Scientific Consultant of Zero One Infinity Consulting (ZOIC) Services Ltd., an Ontario-based Research and Development (R&D) company. Previously, he was a chief engineer at Samsung Electronics, India and an assistant professor/lead at the Visual Signal Analysis and Processing (VSAP) research center at Khalifa University, UAE. Harish has also worked as a researcher, managing the R&D of Ministry of Defense (MoD) UK and European Union (EU)-funded projects at Lancaster and Manchester universities, UK. Harish is a strong engineering professional with a Ph.D. in Computer Science and an M.Sc. in Autonomous Systems from Loughborough and Exeter universities, UK, respectively.

For a computer science professor, Greg Mori doesn't spend nearly as much time staring at a computer as one might think. "A lot of what I do is talk to people," said the director of Simon Fraser University's School of Computing Science. It's fitting, then, that he's using both his human and his computer skills for his next venture: making computers see and perceive the world as humans do. Mori is leading the latest artificial intelligence lab within a network of cross-Canada AI labs that the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) research institute Borealis AI is operating. The lab, announced by the big bank late last month, will be housed in a downtown Vancouver facility where researchers will be tackling fairness, privacy and bias in AI in addition to its mandate for computer vision. Mori said this holistic approach of Borealis AI helped entice him to join.

Borealis AI is a RBC Institute for Research. We're dedicated to achieving state-of-the-art in machine learning through curiosity-driven research.