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| Participants waive their hands at the opening ceremony of Samsung Electronics' Montreal AI research center in Canada, Thursday. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics |
By Baek Byung-yeul
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| Gregory Dudek, head of Samsung Electronics' Montreal AI Center / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics |
The company said Friday it officially opened its Montreal AI lab, Thursday (local time). Starting with the launch of the Samsung Research AI Center in Seoul, last November, the firm has established AI labs in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Toronto, Moscow and New York.
In the race to gain dominance in the emerging technology, the Korea's tech giant has been going all out to cultivate talented AI scientists worldwide.
Samsung said that it chose Montreal, the second largest Canadian city, because it is home to one of the world's fastest growing AI communities with about 250 researchers and 9,000 university students in related programs.
"The opening of the AI center in Montreal will allow Samsung to expand its outposts for industry collaboration and talent recruitment in a major AI hub in Canada, dedicated to research and development of core AI technologies that entail machine learning, language, vision and other multi-modal interactions," the company said.
Samsung named Gregory Dudek, a computer science professor at MCGill University and an AI expert specialized in machine learning and human-robot interactions, as the head of the Montreal lab.
Led by Dudek, the Montreal facility will focus on studying machine learning and voice recognition, the firm said.
"We are excited to open a new Samsung AI Center in Montreal, which will conduct research in machine learning and robotics enabled multi-modal interactions," Duddek said.
"As the second AI research facility in Canada, we plan to work in tandem with the Toronto AI Center, established in May, and leverage the tremendous AI talent in Montreal. We are also looking forward to collaborating with top universities and academic institutions in the region."
Since Samsung unveiled its AI voice-recognition assistant Bixby in 2017, the company has been intensifying its research into AI, and applying the resulting technology to a wide range of its products.
The company earlier unveiled a plan to improve its AI research capabilities by nurturing 1,000 top scientists in the AI field by 2020, including 400 from overseas.
Samsung expects the newly-opened Montreal lab will play a head-hunting role to collaborate with AI researchers at McGill University and the University of Montreal, and local startups.
Considering the tech giant sells about a half billion devices every year, Larry Heck, who leads Samsung's Silicon Valley AI lab, said the firm was "uniquely positioned to be a leader" in AI.
"It's not just how each device uses AI, it's how they use it together," Heck said during an opening ceremony for the Montreal lab. "One key element that will move AI to being more widely adopted is multi-device systems; for example, a variety of AI-enabled devices that communicate seamlessly with each other."
