May 23, 2023

IVADO: Powering R3AI at the 90th Acfas Congress

A look back at the 90th Acfas Congress, marking the organization’s centenary, held at Université de Montréal, HEC Montréal and Polytechnique Montréal from May 8th to 12th.

With 300 symposiums, 600 free communications, and 40 public activities, this congress represents the most important event in its history, and we are proud to have contributed to it by addressing the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence through the following activities:

🔷The Symposium “L’IA au service de la société” featured two roundtable discussions hosted by our scientific advisor, Guillaume Chicoisne. The first, focused on research, was held with our AI experts Pascal St-Onge (CHUM), Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal), and Thibaut Vidal (Polytechnique Montréal), who discussed applications in health, natural language processing (NLP), and optimization. The second, more oriented towards deployment, included Martin Gibert and Zouheir Malki from IVADO and Joé T. Martineau (HEC Montréal), and addressed ethical and adoption issues.

We had the unexpected visit of the Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, who engaged with our panelists and the audience during this second roundtable, discussing regulation, accountability, training, research excellence, and children’s data protection.

🔷 The Symposium  “L’IA pour la prédiction de la ressource et du productible dans les énergies renouvelables” featured a roundtable discussion led by our knowledge mobilization advisor, Zouheir Malki. Our invited speakers included our scientific director, Yoshua Bengio, Loubna Benabbou (UQAR), Hicham Bouzekri (IFMEREE SA), Adel Guitouni (Université Laval), Khalid Radouane (EDF Renewables), Arnaud Zinflou (Hydro-Québec), and Salah El Adlouni (Université de Moncton).

🔷 The Symposium “RD et RC : les formes de collaborations intersectorielles dans les industries créatives” organized by SYNTHÈSE – Pôle Image Québec and the Centre de développement et de recherche en intelligence numérique – CDRIN. As part of this symposium, the panel on experience design in healthcare, moderated by our Health Research Advisor, Barbara Decelle, covered research creation, a field that combines artistic and scientific practices. Panel participants included Jean-Francois Malouin (Super Sublime), Stéphane Potvin (Université de Montréal), David Labbe (ETS), and Laurent Gosselin (Gravity Rehabilitation).

🔷 Conference entitled “Notre relation amour/haine avec l’intelligence artificielle”, organized in collaboration with our academic member, Tech3Lab, featuring Sylvain Senecal and Joé T. Martineau (HEC Montréal), Nicolas Saunier and Foutse Khomh (Polytechnique Montréal), all members of the Human-Centered AI (HCAI) research group IVADO-Tech3Lab | HEC Montréal. This conference provided a valuable opportunity to discuss our complex relationship with AI, addressing both its undeniable utility in tools and the challenges related to more controversial applications, such as autonomous vehicles or ChatGPT.

The congress was an opportunity to highlight the essential contributions of French-language research in areas where Canada stands out, particularly in AI.

Thank you to all our panelists for these rich and exciting exchanges on the major challenges and issues related to robust, reasoning, and responsible AI, R3AI, as well as to the participants who actively contributed to the discussions.