Department of Computer Science

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Acceleration Consortium

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Department of Chemistry

Hospital for Sick Children

Entrepreneurship

Faculty of Art & Science

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Research & Innovation

Startups

University Health Network

The University of Toronto is collaborating with the University Health Network, the Hospital for Sick Children and Sunnybrook Research Institute on a new program that aims to leverage the expertise of entrepreneurs and business leaders to advance commercialization of emerging medical technologies and regenerative medicine research.

Funded by the Government of Ontario, the Entrepreneur-In-Residence program will support projects that display high potential for clinical impact and spin-off company formation, spanning areas ranging from regenerative therapies and medical devices to AI-powered clinical tools and apps for patient care.

The one-year pilot program is being launched with the help of a $300,000 grant from Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON), a provincial agency that was established in 2022 to provide IP resources and supports to researchers and businesses.

“The Entrepreneur-in-Residence program will help take medical innovations developed in academic and hospital environments and translate them into the commercial arena, generating economic opportunity for the region and expanding clinical impact globally,” said Leah Cowen, ��ֱ��’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

“The University of Toronto is grateful to IPON for its support of this initiative, which stands to strengthen existing networks of knowledge exchange and collaboration between the university and its partner hospitals.”

Jill Dunlop, left,Ontario’s minister of colleges and universities, said post-secondary institutions are critical incubators of innovation and commercialization (photo courtesy of IPON)

The program will see Entrepreneurs-in-Residence – individuals with a track record of launching science-based ventures and shepherding projects from proof-of-concept to incubation, acceleration and seed funding – liaise with ��ֱ��’s Innovations & Partnerships Office and IPON to generate and protect IP. It is designed to add capacity and scope to ��ֱ��’s thriving entrepreneurship and commercialization ecosystem, including existing Entrepreneur-in-Residence initiatives such as those offered by the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and Medicine By Design, an institutional strategic initiative (ISI).

“In today’s global knowledge-based economy, Ontario’s post-secondary institutions are critical – not just as centres of learning, but as incubators for innovation and commercialization,” said Jill Dunlop, minister of colleges and universities, in a recent announcement of new IPON-funded initiatives.

“Through the province’s support of IPON, our government is ensuring the social and economic benefits of publicly funded research stay in our province, so that Ontarians and the Ontario economy benefit from these new discoveries and innovations.”

Dunlop also spoke at an April 8 event with Christine Allen, a professor in ��ֱ��’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy who has an extensive track record of translating and commercializing lab discoveries.

Christine Allen, far right, is a professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the founder and CEO of Intrepid Labs (photo courtesy of IPON)

At the event, Allen highlighted the growth of her startup, Intrepid Labs Inc., which she co-founded with Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a professor in the departments of chemistry and computer science in ��ֱ��’s Faculty of Arts & Science and director of the Acceleration Consortium. The company marries Allen’s prowess in drug formulation and development with Aspuru-Guzik’s expertise in AI and advanced computing in order to accelerate the development of next-generation medicines. In the fall, the company closed a pre-seed round of US$4 million.

“The availability of top-notch talent in AI and life sciences made Toronto a great place to launch our company,” says Allen, who is Intrepid’s CEO, noting all four of the startup’s co-founders are from ��ֱ��.

She added that ��ֱ�� is a powerhouse for entrepreneurship and intellectual property, ranked second in North America for university-based startups, and that companies with founders or co-founders from ��ֱ�� make up a significant percentage of some of the fastest-growing companies in Ontario.

“This is the beauty of being at the University of Toronto and having the MaRS Discovery District across the street and all the hospitals around us. It’s such a rich environment,” she says.

“We can do this in Toronto.”

Allen stressed that a thriving lab-to-market ecosystem is critical to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs.

“Students are increasingly seeking out roles in the private sector,” she says. “For them to see other students and faculty members [found startups] helps them realize that it’s possible for them to start companies, too.”

Geoffrey Hinton to give scholarly talk on whether AI will eclipse human intelligence

lanthierj — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 14:52:19 +0000

Geoffrey Hinton to give scholarly talk on whether AI will eclipse human intelligence

lanthierj Tue, 10/24/2023 - 10:52

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Geoffrey Hinton (photo by Polina Teif)

Adina Bresge

Topic

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

Geoffrey Hinton

Students

Vector Institute

After capturing the world’s attention with his warnings about the existential risks posed by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton will be engaging directly with researchers and scholars at a University of Toronto event.

A ��ֱ�� University Professor emeritus who is often referred to as “the godfather of AI,” Hinton will tackle the question “Will digital intelligence replace biological intelligence?” during an academic talk at Convocation Hall on Oct. 27. (Tickets to the in-person event are sold out, but a recording will be shared publicly at a later date).

His lecture will be followed by a Q-and-A session co-ordinated by Sheila McIlraith, a professor in the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science who is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and an associate director at ��ֱ��’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

The session will give Hinton an opportunity to directly engage with researchers and scholars from across the university regarding the revolutionary technology he helped create.

“AI is re-shaping the way we live, work and interact with each other,” says McIlraith. “Given the current public discourse about AI, it’s particularly important that scholars across disciplines learn from each other and engage in an informed exchange of views regarding the societal implications of this transformative technology.”

��ֱ�� provides an ideal forum for such scholarly discourse, she adds, because of ��ֱ��’s historical role in the development of AI, the “breadth and depth” of expertise at the university and the city of Toronto’s position as a global hub of AI research and development.

"The conversation around AI is no longer housed in the computer science lab or within the offices of Big Tech. It needs to be multidisciplinary to advance our collective understanding of the opportunities and the potential risks so we can work to avoid the risks while benefiting from all that AI has to offer.”

The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science are co-hosting Hinton’s talk in collaboration with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Cosmic Future Initiative at the Faculty of Arts & Science.

��ֱ��'s Alán Aspuru-Guzik on self-driving laboratories that use robotics, AI to automate routine parts of experiments

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 19:36:08 +0000

��ֱ��'s Alán Aspuru-Guzik on self-driving laboratories that use robotics, AI to automate routine parts of experiments

noreen.rasbach Wed, 10/09/2019 - 15:36

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“All of us scientists, we don’t take advantage of automation as much as we could,” says Alán Aspuru-Guzik (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Topic

Chemistry

Research & Innovation

Robotics

To accelerate progress in labs all over the world, quantum mechanic Alán Aspuru-Guzik wants researchers to embrace laboratories that can make smart decisions all on their own. He calls them self-driving laboratories, and they combine chemistry with robotics and artificial intelligence to automate experiments – all the way down to automating decisions on what conditions to try next.

Aspuru-Guzik is the principal investigator of the Matter Lab at the University of Toronto and is appointed to both the departments of chemistry and computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science. His multidisciplinary approach is one he hopes will spread.

“All of us scientists, we don’t take advantage of automation as much as we could,” says Aspuru-Guzik.

“So in my lab, we have been thinking a lot about how robotics and artificial intelligence can combine with chemistry to create something that we like to call self-driving laboratories: basically, a laboratory where, as much as possible, the mundane decisions of what the experiment to be done next, the next conditions to try, are actually optimized using artificial intelligence.”

Automating labs saves reagents, time and other resources. Manually running experiments and stopping to analyze the data slows down progress, so automation fundamentally change the way science is approached.

Aspuru-Guzik is starting with energy technology. From solar cells to batteries, every sustainable energy technology involves thin films of materials. So he built a machine to manufacture and test thin films made under different conditions to maximize their performance.

“Within five years, I would like my lab and my collaborators around the world to be able to demonstrate that these self-driving laboratories not only are successful, but they actually have positive change in the energy ecosystem,” says Aspuru-Guzik.

He envisions that a laboratory in Taiwan might take his technology and find a better way to filter water, or that scientists in Mexico might find a better molecule for energy regeneration. Worldwide reach would have limitless possibilities for rapid discovery, he says.

This article first appeared on the Research2Reality website.

��ֱ�� researcher's website uses AI to help writers reach their audience

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 16:08:39 +0000

��ֱ�� researcher's website uses AI to help writers reach their audience

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 12/07/2018 - 11:08

Cutline

The website created by Kawin Ethayarajh, a master’s student in ��ֱ��'s department of computer science, is based on an algorithm that leverages a subfield of AI known as natural language processing (photo by Nina Haikara)

Nina Haikara

Topic

Graduate Students

Many technology companies say they want to hire more women. But University of Toronto researcher Kawin Ethayarajh found the language and tone of most job postings in the male-dominated industry tend to be more appealing to men.

“Even if the recruiter [or writer] didn’t realize it, they were implicitly writing things that would be more well-received by a male audience,” explains Ethayarajh, who is a master’s student in the ��ֱ��'s department of computer science.

His solution is Toasted, a website that uses artificial intelligence, or AI, to estimate how your writing will appeal to your audience and makes suggestions on how you can improve. It’s based on an algorithm that leverages a subfield of AI known as natural language processing – analyzing and retrieving information from language – to evaluate text for gender neutrality and audience.

Ethayarajh says, on average, the distribution of female and male tones in language is equal, but the degree to which something is feminine or masculine depends on the context in which it appears – which is why Toasted picks out words used within a context.

“For example, a word that is strongly male biased would be ‘squad’, because when used in an article or in copywriting, it tends to be surrounded by ‘these guys did this,’ or ‘the male sports squad did this,’” Ethayarajh says.

“When [Toasted] deems a correlation of this sort to be strong enough, it highlights the term.”

When Toasted is more confident in its predictions, it gives users alternatives for each highlighted word that would be more appealing to the audience they are trying to reach. Among the examples on Ethayarajh’s website is ad copy from Kylie Cosmetics by Kylie Jenner. The text is scored as “fairly effective” at speaking to a female audience – 57 per cent better than average.

Ethayarajh’s graduate studies research, under the supervision of Professor Graeme Hirst, includes understanding vector spaces and word embeddings, a technique used to help machines understand human language. He co-wrote a paper, “Towards Understanding Linear Word Analogies” with Hirst and Assistant Professor David Duvenaud that marks a major step towards better understanding these vector analogies.

As for Toasted, users can also check how well their writing appeals to college students, retirees and others. A Google job ad for a software engineer, for example, is average for both men and women but speaks more clearly to a software engineering audience than it does to accountants.

Ethayarajh says his goal is to add more audience groups. He would also like to define audiences by geography.

“Let’s say I’m selling a product that I think will do well in Southern California. Culturally, I want to use terminology and copywriting that will appeal to people there, more so than in other parts of the U.S.”

So why did he name the website “Toasted?”

“I took inspiration from a Lucky Strike ad campaign of the 1960s,” says Ethayarajh. “Toasted makes you think of a very warm, comfortable thing, so to me, toasted is the essence of what good copywriting can be.”

How one ��ֱ�� alumnus went from slinging drinks in undergrad to Geoffrey Hinton's AI lab

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 14:34:47 +0000

How one ��ֱ�� alumnus went from slinging drinks in undergrad to Geoffrey Hinton's AI lab

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 10/10/2018 - 10:34

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Nick Frosst, a ��ֱ�� computer science alumnus and Google Brain researcher, will be appearing on a panel during a Nov. 3 conference focused on AI research opportunities for graduates with bachelor's degrees (photo by Nina Haikara)

Nina Haikara

Topic

��ֱ��

Geoffrey Hinton

Woodsworth College

Nick Frosst, a researcher at Google Brain in downtown Toronto, didn’t require a master’s degree or PhD to launch a career in artificial intelligence research – all he needed was a chance meeting at a bar in Koreatown.

“I was working at Snakes and Lattes and started talking to a customer about the computability of a game he was playing,” says Frosst, a University of Toronto Woodsworth College alumnus who, at the time, was in the second-year of his undergraduate studies in the department of computer science.

That fateful conversation led to an introduction to York University’s John Tsotsos, a former ��ֱ�� associate chair of computer science, and a position as an undergraduate research assistant. Not long after, Frosst was striking up similar conversations with his ��ֱ�� professors and undertaking several independent research studies – a path that led him to his current gig at Google Brain.

On Nov. 3, Frosst will be a panelist at the Start AI conference at the MaRS Discovery District. Organized by ��ֱ��’s Undergraduate Artificial Intelligence Group, it’s the organization’s first-ever conference to focus on opportunities in the AI field for bachelor’s graduates.

Over 300 people from across the province are expected to attend.

While Frosst says those early independent research studies at ��ֱ�� “didn’t get huge results,” he nevertheless described the overall experience as invaluable.

“I learned a lot about what it means to set up an experiment and how to talk to people about what you’re working on,” he says.

“There are many professors doing interesting research – stuff that's really groundbreaking and pushing the boundaries – so they want and need help. ��ֱ��, especially, has the potential for undergraduate research to be really commonplace.”

As for Google Brain Toronto, Frosst is now part of a 10-person research team led by ��ֱ�� University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton, a vice-president and fellow at Google, is widely known as the “godfather of deep learning,” a branch of artificial intelligence that trains computers to reason like humans. He will be Start AI’s keynote speaker.

“I got connected to the Google Brain team because I was working [for Google] in Waterloo and spending a day or two here in Toronto,” says Frosst. “I certainly wanted to work with [Hinton], so I introduced myself and made that known. He’s a really funny guy, so it’s pretty easy to strike up a conversation with him.”

At Google Brain, Frosst and his colleagues do fundamental research that seeks to improve AI’s neural networks. This doesn’t mean simply making AI better at solving problems, or improve its usability in the next app, he says, but improving the neural networks themselves – which, in turn, creates a host of new problems that need solving.

In a paper published last year, Hinton, Frosst, as well as lead author and fellow Google researcher, Sara Sabour, who has a master’s in computer science at ��ֱ��, showed off what they believe is the next evolution: capsule networks. It immediately caused a stir. Frosst says Sabour’s project intends to define an entirely new structure for neural nets.

Building digital humans: Would-be ��ֱ�� entrepreneurs to put a non-'creepy' human face on digital assistants

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 16:03:04 +0000

Building digital humans: Would-be ��ֱ�� entrepreneurs to put a non-'creepy' human face on digital assistants

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 09/13/2017 - 12:03

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Matt McPherson, the head of corporate development at Quantum Capture, shows off "Alyssa," one of the Toronto startup's digital humans (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Chris Sorensen

Author legacy

Chris Sorensen

Topic

Department of Computer Science Innovation Lab

Entrepreneurship

Would-be entrepreneurs enrolled in a business of software course at the University of Toronto are being asked to play God in the digital realm.

The theme for the course, offered by the department of computer science, is “creating virtual humans” using virtual reality, or VR, technology provided by Quantum Capture, a local Toronto startup that provides tools for content creators working in VR, augmented reality (AR) and other 3D platforms.

The students will use Quantum Capture’s platform to create ultra-realistic 3D characters for a variety of potential industry applications – everything from building police training simulators to creating virtual tech support workers.

In effect, they will be putting a human face on virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.

“We like to think of it as the embodiment of a chat bot,” says Matt McPherson, a ��ֱ�� alumnus and former sessional lecturer who’s now Quantum Capture’s head of corporate development.

The course’s instructors, Helen Kontozopoulos and Mario Grech, got the idea for the theme after Quantum Capture joined the Department of Computer Science Innovation Lab, or DCSIL, where both Kontozopoulos and Grech are co-founders and directors. The lab is one of several entrepreneurial hubs at ��ֱ��, which has emerged as a leader in developing research-based startups. The accelerator focuses on growing startups that specialize in turning ��ֱ�� research in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality and blockchain into game-changing companies.

“This is the first time we’re actually leveraging teams out of our accelerator to produce the problem sets we use in the class for our students,” Grech says, adding that it’s possible some of the student-led teams may decide to pursue their startup ideas further by applying to DCSIL’s accelerator program upon completion of the course.

Among the problems Quantum Capture has asked the students to tackle: building realistic virtual humans for doctors, police and soldiers to interact with in training simulators; creating virtual teachers for language instruction courses; and, in what may be perhaps the toughest feat of all, developing virtual tech support workers who can deftly deal with irate customers.

While two of Quantum Capture’s founders, Morgan Young and Craig Alguire, came from the video game industry, McPherson says the technology is quickly moving beyond the entertainment space as companies seek to make their computer-generated assistants and agents more interactive and engaging – basically more like the humans they seek to replace.

“There are certain social cues that are better for conveying information during a real-life interaction,” says McPherson, who has a master's in information studies from ��ֱ��, before he opens his laptop and shows off one of the company’s emotive creations. Her name is “Alyssa.”

Quantum Capture’s approach involves taking high quality, 360 degree images of, say, an actor with the company’s 112-camera rig, housed in an Etobicoke warehouse. The resulting 3D image is then animated using motion capture technology and made to look lifelike with behavioural software.

But making a virtual human seem like a real thing is a fraught exercise thanks to a phenomenon known as the “uncanny valley.” The term, coined by a Japanese roboticist in the 1970s, refers to the creepy feeling one gets upon interacting with a robot or computer-generated character that appears almost human, but not quite. (The “valley” in question refers to the drop-off in “familiarity” experienced by observers, as represented on a graph.)

One of the better known pop culture examples is the 2004 animated film Polar Express, starring Tom Hanks. Writing on CNN.com, one reviewer called the CGI Christmas movie about a group of kids on a magical train trip to the North Pole “at best disconcerting, and at worst, a wee bit horrifying.”

Needless to say, few businesses are willing to risk inflicting a similar nightmare on their customers. As a result, there has been a tendency to avoid creating ultra-realistic virtual agents in favour of ones that are more cartoon-like.

McPherson, however, believes it’s possible to bridge the chasm with Quantum Capture’s technology.

“Our research has shown that what makes the character look creepy is when the lip synch is off and when the eye behaviour or other subtle cues aren’t quite right,” he says.

“But you can actually push through the uncanny valley in immersive environments like VR and AR. You can make the eye behaviour start to look pretty accurate based on cognitive science literature.”

To that end, Quantum Capture is incorporating into its platform and tools a lip synch algorithm that was developed by ��ֱ��'s dynamic graphics project lab.

McPherson says that he’s looking forward to seeing the potential applications devised by the ��ֱ�� students, adding that part of the reason Quantum Capture decided to partner with ��ֱ�� on the course is to test potential markets for the technology.

He believes it’s only a matter of time before virtual humans – non-creepy ones – become a familiar part of our day-to-day existence.

“We interact with humans all the time,” McPherson reasons. “It’s the ultimate user interface.”

Learn more about Entrepreneurship at ��ֱ��

#UofTBackToSchool: computer science launches second-year learning communities

rasbachn — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 15:03:21 +0000

#UofTBackToSchool: computer science launches second-year learning communities

rasbachn Wed, 09/06/2017 - 11:03

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Teaching stream faculty Jennifer Campbell (second from left) and Jacqueline Smith (second from right) with peer mentors (left to right) Sonata Abdullh, Farhan Samir and Charlie Zhang (photo by Nina Haikara).

Nina Haikara

Author legacy

Nina Haikara

Topic

#UofTBacktoSchool