Borealis AI, part of RBC Institute for Research, has announced a new collaboration with Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, to support Mila’s research project focused on using AI to address climate change.

“Climate change is humanity’s biggest crisis.”

– Yoshua Bengio

In partnership with RBC Quebec, Borealis donated $50,000 to Mila’s efforts on climate change. Through the collaboration, Borealis researchers will also support and work with Mila groups on computer science and natural language processing algorithms for the project.

Mila researchers, led by founder and professor Yoshua Bengio, have developed computer vision algorithms to “personalize the effect of extreme weather events.” The machine learning model is able to generate realistic photo images of what the potential impacts of extreme weather events would look like on specific locations. The imagery is predicted by a climate model associated with geography.

“Generative models are used to synthesize images showing flooding and other weather effects that are hyper-personalized and depicting of your own home or street,” Borealis explained in a blog post.

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“Climate change is humanity’s biggest crisis and our hope is that we can apply machine learning to raise awareness regarding the future impacts of climate change, making it more concrete and more personalized, and ultimately trigger collective action,” said Bengio.

Borealis’s donation is meant to help Mila develop the tool, which is part of its ‘AI for Humanity’ research portfolio. The portfolio focuses on projects that are meant to be socially responsible and beneficial to society, and has seen Mila participate in programs like the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, the conference AI on a Social Mission, and AI For Good Summer Lab.

“We see immense potential for technology to help address the challenges of climate change and are pleased to invest in these solutions with our partners in the AI ecosystem of Montreal, a world-class hub for machine learning research,” stated Foteini Agrafioti, chief science officer at RBC and head of Borealis.

Image source Borealis AI via Flickr