Mila Names Four Academic Members Canada-CIFAR AI Chairs, Renews a Fifth
Mila has announced that four of its academic members have been appointed Canada-CIFAR AI Chairs, and that a fifth member's existing chair has been renewed. The appointments cover research on neural network optimization, physical AI, robotics ethics and language acquisition.
- Mila announced four academic members appointed as Canada-CIFAR AI Chairs: Felix Dangel, David Meger, AJung Moon and Eva Portelance.
- CIFAR also renewed the chair of Amir-massoud Farahmand of Polytechnique Montréal.
- Research areas include neural network optimization, physical AI and robotics, algorithmic governance, and computational models of language acquisition.
- The program gives professors long-term, dedicated funding and is part of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
Four new appointments
According to Mila, the four new Canada-CIFAR AI Chairs are Felix Dangel, David Meger, AJung Moon and Eva Portelance. Each works at a different Montréal-area or Québec university and holds an academic membership at the institute.
Felix Dangel, Assistant Professor at Concordia University and Associate Academic Member at Mila, focuses on second-order properties such as the curvature of the loss landscape. Mila says his work aims to optimize neural networks so that learning algorithms become faster, more interpretable and more computationally efficient.
David Meger, Associate Professor at McGill University and Associate Academic Member at Mila, concentrates on physical AI systems and autonomous robotics. By combining 3D spatial perception with data-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms, he seeks to improve their adaptability and deployment in complex, real-world environments, according to Mila.
AJung Moon, Assistant Professor at McGill University and Core Academic Member at Mila, continues her work at the intersection of robotics, ethics and human-machine interaction. Her research program aims to develop practical algorithmic governance frameworks and to inform public policies on the responsible development of autonomous systems.
Eva Portelance, Assistant Professor at HEC Montréal and Associate Academic Member at Mila, explores connections between AI, linguistics and cognitive science. Through computational modeling of human language acquisition, her work contributes to improving neural architectures while enriching cognitive learning theories, Mila says.
A renewed chair for Amir-massoud Farahmand
CIFAR also confirmed the renewal of the Canada CIFAR AI Chair held by Amir-massoud Farahmand, Associate Professor at Polytechnique Montréal and Core Academic Member at Mila. Mila says the recognition highlights the excellence of his research into the computational and statistical mechanisms needed to design efficient AI agents that interact with their environment and adaptively improve their long-term performance.
About the Canada CIFAR AI Chairs Program
The Canada CIFAR AI Chairs Program is described in the announcement as a cornerstone of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. Its aim is to recruit top AI researchers from around the world to Canada while supporting existing talent.
The program gives university-affiliated professors long-term, dedicated funding to drive cutting-edge research programs and to train the next generation of artificial intelligence leaders in Canada. Further details are available on the CIFAR website.
What it means
The announcement shows the range of work supported through the program at Mila, from the mathematics of training neural networks to robotics, governance and the study of how humans learn language. For the researchers, the chairs bring the long-term funding that the program is designed to provide. The source does not give funding amounts or terms, so the scale of support for each chair is not specified.
