ATB Financial is investing $940,000 over the next four years to partner with the University of Alberta in an effort to research artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The research will be mainly in fields that can help ATB grow its operations, such as fraud detection, small to medium-sized enterprises and business analytics.
The money will be spent on a chosen group of students and it will help pair them with professors and experts at ATB to help research new AI techniques.
ATB is hoping that this partnership will help them develop AI that uses the best practices in regards to legal, social and ethical implications that can come along with the use of AI.
The financial company has worked with AI before with the help of the Canadian startup Finn.ai.
The two companies created an AI-powered virtual banking assistant on Facebook Messenger. That tool would help people do online banking by simply talking with a chatbot. ATB is hoping that working with the University of Alberta will help them launch more AI initiatives like the Chatbot in the future.
This article was originally published on MobileSyrup