Mila (research institute)

Mila - Quebec AI Institute (originally Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) is a research institute in Montreal, Quebec, focusing mainly on machine learning research. Approximately 1000 students and researchers and 100 faculty members, were part of Mila in 2022. Mila is part of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy. Mila traces its foundations to the Laboratoire d'informatique des systèmes adaptatifs (LISA) at the Université de Montréal and to the Reasoning and Learning Lab (RL-Lab) at McGill University. LISA was founded in 1993 by Yoshua Bengio, a Turing award winner and one of the founders of the field of deep learning while the RL-Lab was founded in 2001 and is currently co-directed by Professors Prakash Panangaden, Doina Precup, Joëlle Pineau, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. In 2017, Mila was established as a partnership between the Université de Montréal and McGill University with École Polytechnique de Montréal and HEC Montréal. In December 2020, Mila teamed up with IBM to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning research using open-source technology in a bid to integrate the Quebec institute’s open-source software, Oríon, with IBM’s Watson Machine Learning Accelerator, an AI model training and inference tool that the tech giant offers to businesses. Besides Bengio, Mila's faculty members include Joëlle Pineau and Doina Precup. Some of its graduates include Marc Bellemare (MSc 2007 - RL-Lab), Hugo Larochelle (PhD 2009 - LISA) and Ian Goodfellow (PhD 2014 - LISA). Research at Mila is largely, but not exclusively focused on deep learning and reinforcement learning. Specific research topics include: generative models natural language processing meta learning computer vision reinforcement learning applications of AI, including: climate change research and COVID-19 research.