Repeated practice is necessary to achieve mastery, which is no exception for surgical residents who often train directly on patients for four to six years. However, in this hands-on learning environment, even a minor mistake can be serious. To protect against such fatalities, a McGill research team constructed a solution. "The implementation of competency-based surgical education, along with advances in virtual reality, has resulted in the development and utilization of virtual reality-based surgical simulators," Rolando Del Maestro, professor emeritus in neuro-oncology at McGill, said in an interview with The McGill Tribune. The Neurosurgical Stimulation and Artificial Intelligence Learning Centre recently published a study in JAMA Network Open.

Summer Lab Diversity Coordinator Jihane Lamouri believes that having a variety of perspectives, as the program encourages, is crucial to the development of AI: If a society is biased, so, too, are its machines. At the Lab's closing event, Lamouri referenced the alleged sexism that machine translation services like Google Translate or Microsoft's Bing Translator exhibit. When translating phrases from gender-neutral languages like Finnish or Turkish, machine translators may assign gender pronouns illustrative of a gender bias to the English translation. Users have complained that in the hands of a machine translator the phrase "they are engineer" becomes "he is an engineer," whereas the phrase "they are a nurse" becomes "she is a nurse." Lamouri hopes that having more women in the industry will lead to the identification of gender bias in AI.

TEDxMontreal, which had Perspectives as its theme in 2016, aims to stimulate curiosity by showcasing a diversity of viewpoints from the Montreal community. It is among the TEDx program of self-organized events, designed to bring a TED-like experience to local cities. This year, the conference was held on Nov. 12 at Espace DCMTL, located in Parc-Extension. This neighbourhood is away from the spotlight of downtown, and was chosen to represent the uncovering of underground ideas and culture in Montreal. Created in 2008, TEDx is a global event in which communities worldwide self-organize day-long TED conferences, all with a common mission to foster innovation and spread ideas.