Everything in this small, nondescript datacentre comes in singles. There's one server, one cooling unit, and one cardinal rule: stay within thermal guidelines. It's into this setting that TELUS released an AI agent tasked with cooling the room as efficiently as possible, and gave it virtual carte blanche to figure out how. This was the first real-world test in TELUS' Energy Optimization System Project (EOS), a pilot in which a reinforcement learning agent took control of a real physical system in order to teach itself how to best operate it. Two months prior, that same agent had showed it could increase energy efficiency by 2%-15% in a simulator, thanks in large part to a series of its own ingenious innovations.

Naveen Tadepalli, Business Strategy Director, Data & AI at Microsoft – Naveen is a Business Strategy Leader for Data and AI for Retail and Consumer Goods at Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft, Naveen led the digital transformation journey at Starbucks across Store Operations (Front Line Workers) and Supply Chain for 5 years. Andres Jejen – VP of Solutions Engineering at Exceedra by Telus – An expert in market needs, Andres is a Software Consultancy Executive with ample experience in sales force automation, sales and audit management systems, medical promotion systems and software related with Sales Force Mobility, for the CPG and Pharmaceutical Industries.

Elevate Tech Fest day two was a whirlwind event, with more than a dozen different'tracks' spread out across Toronto that focused on everything from fintech to health, smart cities and more. IT World Canada spent the day attending the artificial intelligence (AI) track and learned about some interesting ways that Canadian companies are using AI. As a leader in the world of AI development and research Canada is home to a number of AI research labs for many of the big names in tech including Facebook, Microsoft, Alphabet Inc., LG Electronics, Adobe Systems Inc., which have opened labs in Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton or Vancouver. And not to forget MaRS Discovery Centre which hosted today's AI event, and has housed and helped AI companies like Element AI and Rubikloud. Layer 6 AI co-founder and chief AI office for TD Bank Jordan Jacobs helped start-off the discussion around just how big a role Canada plays in the AI industry, calling it the country that essentially created AI technology.

If you work in tech or are even thinking about it, you've probably come across the term "machine learning". Google Trends shows that the popularity of the search term "Machine Learning" has grown by about 400% in the last three years. Clearly, there is a high demand for people with knowledge of machine learning–but what exactly is it? In this post, I'll describe what exactly is meant by the term "machine learning", and explain why it seems to have such importance to modern businesses. There is a famous definition by the computer scientist Tom M Mitchell which has often been used and which I will adapt here.