The Edmonton region is home to seven post-secondary institutions and has the highest post-secondary rate in Canada – making it the highest performing region in the most educated OECD country. The University of Alberta is one of the top five engineering schools in Canada and is ranked 3rd globally in AI research. The University of Alberta’s Computer Science division has more than 40 researchers, with approximately half of them working directly on artificial intelligence and machine learning.
In 2017, approximately 30% of computer science graduates in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region were qualified for ‘computer and information systems managers’ positions – the highest paid computer science-related occupation (the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area qualified only 23%.) This suggests the region has a well-established and highly-skilled talent pipeline being taught by some of the world’s pre-eminent researchers including:
Dr. Richard Sutton is considered by many to be the pre-eminent leader in AI and machine learning (ML) and has been named the pioneer of reinforcement learning (RL). In fact, Dr. Sutton is the most-cited researcher worldwide in reinforcement learning. He is a computer science professor at the University of Alberta.
Dr. Michael Bowling who also teaches at the University of Alberta, was instrumental in establishing the subfield of deep reinforcement learning through his Arcade Learning Environment, launched in 2013.