RBC’s Borealis AI institute snags Washington State University professor

Borealis AI Matthew Taylor

Borealis AI, an RBC Institute for Research in artificial intelligence, has announced that it has hired on professor Matthew E. Taylor as a senior researcher.

Taylor will leave his position at Washington State University (WSU) to help lead and expand the Edmonton-based Borealis AI Institute, which specializes in machine learning research and development.

“Having freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research using rich, massive data sets in the industry is pretty rare.”

At WSU, Taylor held the Allred Distinguished Professorship in Artificial Intelligence and also served as director of the Intelligent Robot Learning (IRL) lab. Borealis AI says the professor’s areas of expertise lie in reinforcement learning, interactive machine learning and design of autonomous agents. In particular, Borealis notes that reinforcement learning is a subfield of machine learning that is one of the most quickly advancing areas of AI.

“I am thrilled to welcome professor Matt Taylor to Canada and to the Borealis AI family,” said Dr. Foteini Agrafioti, head, Borealis AI and chief science officer at RBC. “His joining our Institute in Edmonton is a testament of our commitment to the advancement of the machine learning field with theoretical and applied research in areas such as reinforcement learning.”

“Having freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research using rich, massive data sets in the industry is pretty rare,” said Taylor. “I am excited to see how our research can positively impact people’s lives, and how we can make things better by bringing AI techniques out of science and into the real world.”

Back in August, RBC said it wants to use artificial intelligence to help its customers with their various banking needs. Specifically, the company said its free iOS and Android app will use AI to soon offer “actual insights about our client’s financials and a fully automated savings solution that uses predictive technology to identify money in a client’s cash flow that can be automatically saved.”

Specific release timing for this feature has not been revealed.

This article was originally published on MobileSyrup.

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Bradly Shankar

Fourth-year journalism student at Ryerson University.

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