Professor Pascal Poupart is a senior researcher at Borealis AI, an RBC research institute, and a professor of computing science at the University of Waterloo. My parents thought I was crazy when I announced my intention to study artificial intelligence. Back then, in 1998, AI was considered a fringe group within the academic community, even though we knew the field had the potential to transform lives. Today, AI is among the hottest fields in academia, attracting the focus of every major university and the courtship of the world's biggest companies as they try to apply cognitive machine learning to just about every challenge in the marketplace. Thanks to this commercial interest and the academic pursuit of AI, we now have personal assistants in our smartphones, intelligent cybersecurity to protect our credit cards, and even recommendation engines in our favourite movie and music streaming services.