MONTREAL, April 23, 2021 — Intel Corporation announced a new strategic partnership with Montreal-based Mila (Institut Québécois d’Intelligence Artificielle/Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute), one of the world’s largest academic machine learning research institutes, which will enable them to develop and apply advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

This announcement will lead to collaboration between their respective organizations. Their first project focuses on new AI methods for greatly speeding up the search in the space of drugs, taking advantage of large-scale high-performance computing to bring us faster and closer to urgently needed cures. Mila’s researchers are teaming up with parallel computing experts in Intel Labs to significantly speed up the search and discovery of synthesizable molecules with much better binding energies to target protein. This goal will be achievable through co-design and performance-scaling of relevant machine learning algorithms on the latest large-scale computing infrastructure.

The alliance with Mila demonstrates and reinforces Intel’s commitment to the present and future use of AI.

“Together, we have an enormous opportunity to leverage advances in our respective technologies to solve some of the world’s critical and challenging business and societal issues using AI,” said Denis Gaudreault, country manager of Intel Canada. “Our strategic alliance with Mila will not only apply the power of our technology, but will tap into the passion of our respective teams as we work towards improving and optimizing algorithms as well as advancing deep learning capabilities. Finally, Intel will be supporting Mila’s talent attraction and retention efforts through participation in the internship and job fairs.”

Stéphane Létourneau, Executive Vice-President at Mila added, “Working with a global leader like Intel is a great opportunity to democratize AI and to accelerate the development of an open-source solution recently initiated at Mila by combining engineering expertise, practical hands-on experience and cutting-edge research in AI.”

Mila’s partnership with Intel also validates Montreal’s leadership position as a global leader in AI research.

Finally, as both Intel and Mila have a deep commitment to the sustainable development of AI, their collaboration will focus on more joint research and development.

About Intel

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better. To learn more about Intel’s innovations, go to newsroom.intel.com and intel.com.

About Mila

Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal, Mila is a research institute in artificial intelligence which rallies over 700 researchers specializing in the field of deep learning. Based in Montreal, Mila’s mission is to be a global pole for scientific advances that inspires innovation and the development of AI for the benefit of all. Mila is a non-profit organization recognized globally for its significant contributions to the field of deep learning, particularly in the areas of language modelling, machine translation, object recognition and generative models. For more information, visit mila.quebec.

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Source: Mila