Canadian Club – Ed Clark

 

Ed Clark

Chair, The Vector Institute

“AI is Working”

December 13th, 2018

Ed Clark, Chair of the Vector Institute, will deliver a speech presenting the progress and potential of the Pan Canadian AI Strategy, which was made possible through a unique combination of support from the Government of Canada, and the Governments of Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec, and Canadian businesses, large and small. In just over a year and a half, the Vector Institute in Toronto, Amii in Edmonton, and Mila in Montreal have drawn world-renowned academics, attracted millions of dollars in new AI and tech investment, and contributed to the creation of thousands of jobs. AI is working. The technology is increasing productivity in Canadian industries, advancing Canada’s shift to a knowledge economy, and improving the lives of Canadian citizens. Canada led the world when the Federal Government launched the national AI Strategy, but now faces a world where many countries have launched aggressive AI strategies. Mr. Clark will address not only the economic challenges this represents, but also the worries many have with the widespread adoption of AI and the approach Canada must follow to make sure AI continues to work for all.

Mr. Clark’s speech will be followed by a discussion with Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Marzyeh Ghassemi and Raquel Urtasun, moderated by Dr. Garth Gibson, President and CEO of the Vector Institute.

Biography:

Ed Clark, Chair, Vector Institute

Ed Clark retired as Group President and CEO of TD Bank Group on November 1, 2014 after 12 years as CEO. In 2010, Ed was named Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year – widely viewed as the most prestigious award in Canadian business. In 2011, Ed was named Ivey Business Leader of the Year by the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. In 2012 and 2013, Ed was named to Barron’s prestigious annual list of the World’s 30 Best CEOs. Canadian Business awarded Ed CEO of the Year in 2013, and in 2014, American Banker named Ed a Lifetime Achievement Honoree. In October 2014, the Harvard Business Review named Ed to The 100 Top Performing CEOs in the World. In March 2017, Ed received the Canadian Dealmakers Award. Most recently, he was inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame for his “outstanding professional achievements and enduring contributions to Canadian society.”

Ed graduated from the University of Toronto in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He earned his Master’s degree and Doctorate in Economics from Harvard University in 1971 and 1974 respectively. Ed has also received honorary degrees from Mount Allison University, Queen’s University, Western University, University of Toronto, York University, and Ryerson University.

Ed has been honoured numerous times for his vision, integrity and strong leadership. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2010 – one of the country’s highest distinctions – for his “contributions to Canada’s banking and financial industry, and for his voluntary and philanthropic endeavours.” He provides support to WoodGreen Community Services, an organization that delivers programs to build sustainable communities in the Toronto area, to Egale, Canada’s only national charity promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) human rights and to Habitat for Humanity.

Ed is a member of the Board of Trustees of US public policy organization, the Brookings Institution. He is also a Director of Thomson Reuters, and Chair of the Vector Institute, an independent non-profit institution dedicated to Artificial Intelligence in fields as diverse as finance, education, environment and clean tech, retail, advanced manufacturing, transportation and health care.

Dr. Garth Gibson, President and CEO, Vector Institute

Dr. Gibson returned to Canada in January 2018 as the Vector Institute’s first President and CEO. The Vector Institute’s mandate is to drive excellence and leadership in Canada’s knowledge, creation, and use of AI to foster economic growth and improve the lives of Canadians. Prior to that he served in many leadership positions with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh where he was Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Co-Director of its Master of Computational Data Science program, and Associate Dean for Master’s Programs in the School of Computer Science. CMU’s Parallel Data Lab, co-created by Dr. Gibson over 25 years ago, continues to enable researchers and industry to collaborate on technology directions. He is recognized for his early contributions to Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) technology and now publishes and gives talks on bridging high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Dr. Gibson was raised in Aurora, Ontario and has a B. Math (University of Waterloo), MSc and PhD (University of California, Berkeley). Garth received his PhD under David Patterson on the RISC computing projects that won this year’s Turing Award. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Faculty Member, Vector Institute

Alán Aspuru-Guzik’s research lies at the interface of computer science with chemistry and physics. He works in the integration of robotics, machine learning and high-throughput quantum chemistry for the development of materials acceleration platforms. These “self-driving laboratories” promise to accelerate the rate of scientific discovery, with applications to clean energy and optoelectronic materials. Alán also develops quantum computer algorithms for quantum machine learning and has pioneered quantum algorithms for the simulation of matter. He is jointly appointed as a Professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was a full professor at Harvard University. Alán is also a co-founder of Zapata Computing and Kebotix, two early-stage ventures in quantum computing and self-driving laboratories respectively.

Marzyeh Ghassemi, Faculty Member, Vector Institute

Marzyeh completed her PhD at MIT where her research focused on machine learning in health care, exploring how to predict immediate and long-term patient needs to inform decisions in the intensive care unit and ambulatory care. Her current research interests include clinical risk prediction with semi-supervised learning, optimal treatment discovery using expert demonstrations, and non-invasive patient phenotyping for behavioral conditions. Prior to MIT, she received a B.S. degree in computer science and electrical engineering at New Mexico State University and Master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Oxford University. Marzyeh is on the Board of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), and co-organized the NIPS 2016/2017 Workshop on Machine Learning for Health, and MIT’s first Hacking Discrimination event.

Raquel Urtasun, Co-Founder, Vector Institute

Raquel Urtasun is Uber ATG Chief Scientist and the Head of Uber ATG Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), an academic computer science institute affiliated with the University of Chicago. She was also a visiting professor at ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2010. She received her Bachelors degree from Universidad Publica de Navarra in 2000, her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006 and did her postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley. She is a world leading expert in machine perception for self-driving cars. Her research interests include machine learning, computer vision, robotics and remote sensing. Her lab was selected as an NVIDIA NVAIL lab. She is a recipient of an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, an NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, a Ministry of Education and Innovation Early Researcher Award, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, a Connaught New Researcher Award and a Best Paper Runner up Prize awarded at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). She is also Program Chair of CVPR 2018, an Editor of the International Journal in Computer Vision (IJCV) and has served as Area Chair of multiple machine learning and vision conferences (i.e., NIPS, UAI, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV).

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