DeepMind Alberta, the first international research office of Alphabet’s UK-based AI division, celebrated its fifth anniversary at its newly completed office space in downtown Edmonton.
“It was a really big step for DeepMind, which is very London-centric, to come all the way to Edmonton to open an office,” DeepMind research board member Doina Prekup said at the July 28 meeting. “And our presence here today, and being on the fifth anniversary of this office, is a testament to the vibrancy of the Canadian AI ecosystem.”
Precup noted that a unique collaboration between government, academia and industry has fueled the site’s success since its founding in 2017, and it’s a model researchers have sought to replicate elsewhere.
DeepMind’s research has helped machines understand challenging games like chess and go, and more complex problems in mathematics and quantum chemistry. The company chose the anniversary date in Edmonton to announce the release of its AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, an open source project that has expanded to include over 200 million structures representing nearly all proteins known to science.
Canada was the first country to develop a national AI strategy in 2017, the same year DeepMind established its Edmonton office, and committed $443 million over the next 10 years to the second phase of its Pan-Canadian AI Strategy.
DeepMind’s arrival in Alberta “was significant because it cemented our status as a world leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Elan MacDonald, vice-president of external affairs at the University of Alberta.
McDonald noted that the DeepMind office “is almost like an alumni reunion, with almost 75% of the current team having a strong connection to the U of A.”
Photo: Michael Bowling, Richard Sutton and Patrick Pilarski, founders of DeepMind Alberta, were all smiles at the fifth anniversary of DeepMind’s Edmonton office on July 28. (Delivered)
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