IVADO announces a new expanded scientific management team

IVADO is delighted to announce the strengthening of its scientific leadership and the addition of high-caliber co-directors to shape the future of AI together.

We are pleased to announce the appointment of four scientific co-directors and a scientific advisor to fill key new positions. They join a management team that includes Luc Vinet, CEO of IVADO, Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director, and Pierre Dumouchel, Director of Technology Transfer. These new positions are instrumental in developing our research strategy, managing our scientific activities, establishing national and international university partnerships, and promoting social innovation, all with the help of the major R³AI grant recently awarded to IVADO by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF).

Danilo Bzdok: Scientific Co-Director – Research Programs and Academic Relations

Danilo Bzdok is a computer scientist and medical doctor by training with a unique dual background in systems neuroscience and machine learning algorithms. After training at RWTH Aachen University (Germany), Université de Lausanne (Switzerland), and Harvard Medical School (USA), he completed one doctoral degree in neuroscience (Research Center Juelich, Germany) and one doctoral degree in computer science in machine learning statistics at INRIA Saclay and Neurospin (Paris, France). Danilo Bzdok currently serves as Associate Professor at McGill’s Faculty of Medicine and as Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Montreal, Canada. His interdisciplinary research activity centers on narrowing knowledge gaps in the brain basis of human-defining types of thinking to uncover key computational design principles underlying human intelligence. Read more

As Co-Director, Research Programs and Academic Relations, Danilo Bzdok will provide essential leadership in directing and managing IVADO’s scientific activities, as well as developing the scientific research strategy for  R³AI.

Aurélie Labbe: Scientific Co-Director – Academic Partnerships

Aurélie Labbe is a full professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal, and a member of the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Data Science for Real-Time Decision Making. She received a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Waterloo. Her dissertation focused on Bayesian analysis of gene expression data. Aurélie Labbe was hired as an associate professor in Université Laval’s math and statistics department. She joined the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, where she was an associate professor. She was also a researcher at The Douglas Hospital Research Centre, a McGill affiliate. She has developed her research portfolio as a lead researcher on several projects funded in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) with the goal of developing statistical tools for analyzing gene data and methylation. She has also taken part in a number of collaborative projects in these fields. She has since branched out to other fields of data science, focusing on the analytical challenges generated by data from intelligent transportation systems. Read more

As Co-Scientific Director, Academic Partnerships, Aurélie Labbe will provide essential research leadership. She will be responsible for establishing links with the faculties and departments of the five partner universities and integrating them into IVADO’s research and knowledge transfer activities.

Foutse Khomh: Scientific Co-Director – Scientific and International Activities

Foutse Khomh is a Full Professor of Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair on Trustworthy Machine Learning Software Systems, and an FRQ-IVADO Research Chair on Software Quality Assurance for Machine Learning Applications. He received a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of Montreal with the Award of Excellence. He also received a CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize for 2019. His research interests include software maintenance and evolution, machine learning systems engineering, cloud engineering, and dependable and trustworthy ML/AI. His work has won several awards. He is co-founder of the CRSNG CREATE SE4AI project: A Training Program on the Development, Deployment, and Servicing of Artificial Intelligence-based Software Systems. He is also a co-founder of Quebec’s initiative on Trustworthy AI (Confiance IA Quebec). Read more

As Co-Scientific Director – Scientific and International Activities, Foutse Khomh will provide essential leadership in directing and managing the scientific activities associated with R³AI, as well as developing IVADO’s international strategy.

Véronique Guèvremont: Scientific Co-Director – Innovations and societal implications

Véronique Guèvremont is a full professor in the Faculty of Law at Université Laval and holds the UNESCO Chair in the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. She is co-director of the Arts, Media and Cultural Diversity axis of the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA). A graduate of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, she teaches international cultural law, international economic law and general public international law. Her work focuses on a number of themes, including the protection of the diversity of cultural expressions in the digital environment. Véronique Guèvremont has edited several books on cultural diversity issues, including “Intelligence artificielle, culture et médias” (PUL, 2023, forthcoming). Read more

As Scientific Co-Director of lnnovations and Societal Implications, Véronique Guèvremont will provide essential leadership in developing the human and social sciences aspect of the R³AIprogram, as well as fostering interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration across research fields. She will also be responsible for developing  IVADO’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy and the Indigenous People Community Engagement strategy.

Aaron Courville: Scientific advisor – Machine Learning

Aaron Courville is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the Université de Montréal. He received his Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He is a founding member of Mila and a fellow of the CIFAR program on Learning in Machines and Brains. Together with Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio, he co-wrote the seminal textbook on Deep Learning. His current research interests focus on the development of Deep Learning models and methods. He is particularly interested in the study of systematic generalization within neural networks, but he is also interested in deep generative models and multimodal ML with applications such as computer vision and natural language processing.

Aaron Courville will play a leadership role in ensuring that machine learning expertise is brought to bear on IVADO’s many scientific initiatives and activities. Read more