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DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet, is opening an AI research lab in Montreal.

The lab will be headed by Doina Precup, a professor in the computer science department at McGill University.

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Precup will keep her job at the university and divide her time between it and DeepMind.

Founded in London in 2010, DeepMind was acquired by Google in early 2014. It’s known for developing a computer program that can beat human professionals at the game Go, and for its work with hospitals in the United Kingdom.

“The lab is going to focus on reinforcement learning, which is my specialty, and deep learning and the intersection of these kinds of algorithms,” Precup said.

Reinforcement learning is a method of teaching computer programs using a similar approach to the one many people use when training pets — encouraging desired behaviour through rewards.

“We try to set up reward systems so that automated algorithms can learn what’s the right thing to do, especially when there is a whole sequence of actions that need to be done,” Precup said.