¶ Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a Canadian not-for-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. It is located in the West Building of the MaRS Discovery District.[1]
¶ History
The Vector Institute was co-founded by a group including Geoffrey Hinton, Richard Zemel, Raquel Urtasun and Brendan Frey, launching on March 30, 2017.[1:1][2][3] It was founded "with the aim of producing, attracting and retaining the finest talent in the world as part of a Canadian-rooted economic supercluster that will generate future discovery, opportunity, jobs and growth."[4]
¶ COVID-19
On April 12, 2020, the Vector Institute announced it was repurposing "high-performance computing" NVIDIA graphics processing units to contribute to the Ontario Ministry of Health's Pandemic Threat Response (PANTHR) platform.[5]
On April 16, 2020, Roche announced the launch of its “Roche Data Science Coalition”, which included the Vector Institute as a collaborator, in order to work “with the global community to develop solutions to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.”[6][7]
On April 24, 2020, the Vector Institute held a webinar titled “Innovating Through COVID-19 webinar - Digital Contact Tracing while Preserving Privacy: MyTrace.ca” during which they launched a contact tracing application called MyTrace.[8] It was led by Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a University of Toronto professor and faculty member at the Vector Institute.[9] Additional participants included Ashleigh Tuite of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Garth Gibson, President and CEO of the Vector Institute.[10]
On September 16, 2021, the Vector Institute announced a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy for all staff, contractors and visitors. The policy went into effect October 1, 2021, with those in non-compliance denied access to the facility and threatened with termination.[11]
On February 9, 2022, the Vector Institute announced that one of its researchers, Bo Wang, had contributed to the development of Viral AI, a genetic sequencing platform led by DNAstack and the COVID Cloud Supercluster Project. They described it as a "tool that identifies COVID-19 variants" and an "AI-enabled genotyping tool that can analyze viral genome data from a nasal swab."[12]
On February 11, 2022, the Vector Institute published a study titled "Using AI to Help Solve the Long COVID Puzzle", describing how Vector "applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to over 460,000 Twitter posts by people who had self-reported long COVID to see if any patterns or signals would arise amidst the social media noise."[13]
On June 17, 2022, Chief Operations Officer Alan Veerman sent a memo to Vector Institute staff informing them that the institute's mandatory face mask policy was suspended.[14]
On Novembber 15, 2022, Research Director Graham Taylor and Veerman sent out a memo strongly recommending staff resume wearing face masks at the facility.[15]
On July 5, 2023, Kids Help Phone announced it had partnered with the Vector Institute to deploy an artificial intelligence program to analyze the contents of calls from young people seeking mental health assistance.[16]
¶ Organization
| Name | Position | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Garth Gibson | President & CEO[10:1] | - |
| Ed Clark | Board Chair[4:1] | - |
| Brendan Frey | Co-Founder[2:1][3:1] | Deep Genomics |
| Geoffrey Hinton | Chief Scientific Advisor[4:2] | University of Toronto |
| Alan Veerman | Chief Operations Officer[14:1] | - |
| Scott Bonham | Board member[4:3] | - |
| Vivek Goel | Board member[4:4] | - |
| Mary Jo Haddad | Board member[4:5] | - |
| Chaviva Hosek | Board member[4:6] | - |
| Jordan Jacobs | Board member[4:7] | - |
| Stephen Lake | Board member[4:8] | - |
| Nadir Mohamed | Board member[4:9] | - |
| Michael Serbinis | Board member[4:10] | - |
| Pearl Sullivan | Board member[4:11] | - |
| Terrence Sullivan | Board member[4:12] | - |
| Shivon Zilis | Board member[4:13] | - |
| Alán Aspuru-Guzik | Faculty[9:1] | Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), MyTrace, University of Toronto |
| Mark Daley | Faculty Affiliate[17] | Chair of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) |
| Laura Rosella | Faculty Affiliate[18] | Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), Banting & Best Diabetes Centre, Trillium Health Partners, Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, Population Health Analytics Laboratory, Royal Society of Canada (RSC), Institute for Better Health, Temerty Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM), Data Sciences Institute (DSI), Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society |
¶ Partners
The Vector Institute is partnered with:
- Acceleration Consortium[19]
- Cardiac Arrhythmia Network of Canada[20]
- GEMINI[21]
- Ontario's COVID-19 Genomics Rapid Response Coalition (ONCoV)[22]
Additionally, the Vector Institute is a donor to the University of Toronto's Boundless Campaign.[23]
¶ Affiliated institutions
Institutions formally affiliated with the Vector Institute include:[24][25][26]
- Brock University
- Carleton University
- Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)
- Compute Ontario
- Dalhousie University
- Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences
- Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital
- Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES)
- Lakehead University
- Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute
- McMaster University
- Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
- Ontario Tech University (OTU)
- Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI)
- Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
- Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
- Queen's University
- Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society
- SickKids
- Sinai Health System
- St. Michael’s Hospital
- Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
- Sunnybrook Research Institute
- Toronto Metropolitan University
- Toronto Rehabilitation Institute
- Trillium Health Partners
- Unity Health Toronto
- University Health Network (UHN)
- University of British Columbia (UBC)
- University of Guelph
- University of Ottawa
- University of Toronto
- University of Waterloo
- University of Western Ontario (UWO)
- University of Windsor
- York University
¶ Funding
The Vector Institute is funded by:[1:2][27][24:1][25:1][26:1][28][4:14]
- Accenture
- Ada
- Air Canada
- Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII)
- AltaML
- Avidbots
- Bank of Montreal (BMO)
- Bell Canada
- BenchSci
- Blue J
- Boehringer Ingelheim
- Borealis AI
- Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC)
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
- Canadian National Railway (CN)
- Canadian Tire
- Canvass Analytics
- Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)
- Clearpath Robotics
- Cohere
- DarwinAI
- Deloitte
- Deep Genomics
- Dessa
- EllisDon
- Ernst & Young (EY)
- FreshBooks
- Georgian
- GoldSpot Discoveries
- Government of Canada
- Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED)
- Intact Financial Corporation
- Integrate.ai
- KPMG
- KT
- League
- Linamar
- Loblaw Companies
- Layer 6
- Magna International
- Manulife
- MindBridge
- Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA)
- North
- NVIDIA
- Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS)
- Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities
- Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade
- Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy (PCAIS)
- PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
- Private AI
- Riskfuel
- Roche
- ROSS Intelligence
- Royal Bank of Canada (RBC)
- Scotiabank
- Shakudo
- Shopify
- Signal 1
- Stradigi AI
- Sun Life Financial
- Surgical Safety Technologies (SST)
- TD Bank Group
- TealBook
- TELUS
- Thales Group
- Thalmic Labs
- Thomson Reuters
- TrojAI
- University of Toronto
- Wattpad
- Wysdom
¶ COVID-19 policies
- September 16, 2021: COVID-19 Vaccination Policy
- June 17, 2022: COVID-19 Masking Requirements
- November 15, 2022: COVID-19 Masking Recommendation
¶ External links
About. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230705185902/https://vectorinstitute.ai/about/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Company. Deep Genomics. Retrieved May 2, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230502153754/https://www.deepgenomics.com/company/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Robinson, J. (2017, October 31). Six U of T researchers join Vector Institute. University of Toronto. https://web.archive.org/web/20230129214455/https://www.utoronto.ca/news/six-u-t-researchers-join-vector-institute ↩︎ ↩︎
Williams, K. (2017, March 30). News release: New Artificial Intelligence Research Institute Launched in Toronto. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. https://web.archive.org/web/20230705224908/https://vectorinstitute.ai/press-release-new-artificial-intelligence-research-institute-launched-in-toronto/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Williams, K. (2020, April 12). Vector Institute to Support Provincial Efforts Against COVID-19 with Computing Infrastructure and Data Science Expertise. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. http://archive.today/2023.07.06-203327/https://vectorinstitute.ai/vector-institute-to-support-provincial-efforts-against-covid-19-with-computing-infrastructure-and-data-science-expertise/ ↩︎
Wells, B., & Bozinov, D. (2020, April 16). Roche Canada Launches Data Science Coalition to Advance COVID-19 Solutions. Cision Newswire. https://web.archive.org/web/20230705194648/https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/roche-canada-launches-data-science-coalition-to-advance-covid-19-solutions-864244044.html ↩︎
Data Science Coalition Collaborators. Roche Canada. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230705194759/https://www.rochecanada.com/en/r-d/partnering/data-science-coalition/data-science-coalition-collaborators.html ↩︎
Vector Institute. (2020, April 29). Innovating Through COVID-19 webinar - Digital Contact Tracing while Preserving Privacy: MyTrace.ca. YouTube. https://web.archive.org/web/20200528150519/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yANODJc3Hhw ↩︎
Fraumeni, P. (2020, April 24). U of T researcher aims to improve accuracy of COVID-19 contact tracing with MyTrace app. University of Toronto. https://web.archive.org/web/20230705193758/https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-researcher-aims-improve-accuracy-covid-19-contact-tracing-mytrace-app ↩︎ ↩︎
Digital Contact tracing while Preserving Privacy: The MyTrace.ca Project. University of Toronto Department of Physics. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from http://archive.today/2023.07.05-193440/https://www.physics.utoronto.ca/research/quantum-optics/qoamo-seminars/digital-contact-tracing-while-preserving-privacy-the-mytraceca-project/ ↩︎ ↩︎
COVID-19 Vaccination Policy. (2021, September 16). Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. https://web.archive.org/web/20230705234539/https://vectorinstitute.ai/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/covid-19-vaccination-policy-september-16-online.pdf ↩︎
Gormely, I. (2022a, February 9). AI-enabled tool that identifies COVID-19 variants co-developed by Vector researcher Bo Wang. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. http://archive.today/2023.07.06-204515/https://vectorinstitute.ai/ai-enabled-tool-that-identifies-covid-19-variants-co-developed-by-vector-researcher-bo-wang/ ↩︎
Gormely, I. (2022, February 11). AI analysis of Social Media data to help with treatment of long COVID. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. http://archive.today/2023.07.05-235300/https://vectorinstitute.ai/ai-analysis-of-social-media-data-to-help-with-treatment-of-long-covid/ ↩︎
Veerman, A. (2022, June 17). COVID-19 Masking Requirements – June 2022. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. https://web.archive.org/web/20230706202610/https://vectorinstitute.ai/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/covid-19-memo-20220617.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
Taylor, G., & Veerman, A. (2022, November 15). COVID-19 Masking Recommendation – November 2022. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. https://web.archive.org/web/20230706212335/https://vectorinstitute.ai/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/covid-19-memo-20221115.pdf ↩︎
Ireland, N. (2023, July 5). Kids Help Phone seeking help from AI tech to meet demand for mental health support. CTV News Toronto; The Canadian Press. http://archive.today/2023.07.05-182243/https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/kids-help-phone-seeking-help-from-ai-tech-to-meet-demand-for-mental-health-support-1.6467525 ↩︎
Mark Daley. ICES. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230705195012/https://www.ices.on.ca/people/mark-daley/ ↩︎
Laura Rosella. Population Health Analytics Laboratory. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230705200035/https://pophealthanalytics.com/laura-rosella/ ↩︎
Partners. Acceleration Consortium. Retrieved April 9, 2023, from http://archive.today/2023.04.09-222433/https://acceleration.utoronto.ca/partners ↩︎
About Us. Cardiac Arrhythmia Network of Canada (CANet). Retrieved July 1, 2023 fom https://web.archive.org/web/20230701175514/https://canet-nce.ca/about/ ↩︎
QI & Research Partners. GEMINI. Retrieved May 14, 2022, from http://archive.today/2022.05.15-004803/https://www.geminimedicine.ca/health-care-partners ↩︎
Home. ONCoV. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20220910203044/https://www.oncov.ca/ ↩︎
Donor Listing. University of Toronto Boundless Campaign. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from http://archive.today/2021.04.23-095356/https://boundless.utoronto.ca/our-supporters/donor-listing/ ↩︎
Clark, E., & Gibson, G. (2023). 2021-2022 Annual Report. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. https://web.archive.org/web/20230705215929/https://vectorinstitute.ai/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/vector-institute-2021-22-annual-report_accessible.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
Gibson, G., & Clark, E. April 2020 - March 2021 Annual Report. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230705215846/https://vectorinstitute.ai/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/vector-institute-annual-report-2020-21-sept-8.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
Clark, E., & Gibson, G. April 2019 - March 2020 Annual Report. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230705215859/https://vectorinstitute.ai/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/vector_annual-reportv8.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
Current Partners. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230705190023/https://vectorinstitute.ai/partnerships/current-partners/ ↩︎
Clark, E., & Gibson, G. Annual Report 2019. Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved July 5, 2023, from https://vectorinstitute.ai/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/269063-01-vector-institute-ar-2019_v7.pdf ↩︎