Samsung Electronics will open an artificial-intelligence lab in Toronto on Thursday, the latest in a slew of foreign multinationals to set up research operations in Canada. The move is part of a broader push by the South Korean consumer-electronics giant to close the gap with Silicon Valley heavyweights that have snapped up machine-learning talent of late – including many Canadian-trained and Canadian-based researchers. Breakthroughs in image-recognition software by students of pioneering University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton (now a Google employee) early this decade touched off a global race to develop self-teaching technology. "We are coming to [AI] later, so we're playing catch-up," said Larry Heck, co-head of global AI research with Samsung and formerly a research director at Google. "AI in terms of a priority for [Samsung] has risen to the top."

Several Canadian startups have made announcements and launched new features to make strides in AI. DeepLearni.ng announced that it is now a partner of Toronto's Vector Institute, which is working to be a hub for artificial intelligence research. At the launch of tin March 2017, the government announced that 30 companies were dedicating $80 million to the Institute. DeepLearni.ng is now a Bronze sponsor of the Vector Institute, joining companies like Helpful.com, the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, and integrate.ai "In our work with enterprises around the world, our team of machine learning practitioners strives to transform the latest AI research into real-world business applications," said Stephen Piron, the company's co-founder and co-CEO.

If culture is a set of beliefs and behaviors that people pass from one generation to another, then is artificial intelligence becoming one? AI is certainly changing how people think about and interact with technology. Talking to your phone and expecting an intelligent response has quickly shifted from novelty to routine expectation. Self-driving vehicles orienting themselves in the physical world will soon shuttle us all over, changing how millions of commute hours are spent and our relationship with cars themselves. Inherent in AI is a capacity to learn, and to use this knowledge to advance the tasks it's been assigned to tackle.

Are you looking for a pragmatic understanding of machine learning? This is not about research or academics, it's solely about getting your models into production - much like DeepLearni.ng's business model. Deeper than a blog post or typical meetup, we'll explore and discuss the best practices and idioms of the code base across many areas including Spark's JVM Bytecode Generation, CPU-cache-aware Data Structures and Algorithms, Approximations, Probabilistic Data Structures, Shuffle and I/O Optimizations, Streaming Micro-batch Scheduling, Performance Tuning, Configuration, Monitoring, Auto-Scaling, etc. P.S. WE ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR GREAT TALENT! va@deeplearni.ng