TechAide AI conference raises $100,000 for United Way’s Centraide

TechAide

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Last Tuesday, the long-awaited TechAide AI Conference took place at the Rialto Theater in Montreal. It brought together an assembly of students, researchers, and tech-savvy folks to gather technical knowledge whilst supporting a good cause, Centraide, a non-profit that fights poverty and social exclusion. AI for good is at its core.

The event debuted with a 45-minute keynote presentation by Jeff Dean, Lead of Google Brain, entitled Deep Learning to Solve Challenging Problems. The purpose of the talk was to showcase what can be achieved with AI, deep learning, and machine learning to make our world a better place.

“We wanted to expose the tech world to the world of Centraide.”
– Alan MacIntosh, OSMO Foundation president

He explained how these advances can restore and improve infrastructure, advance health informatics, elaborate predictive task from medical records, establish the mortality risks to certain medical processes, automate machine learning, and even described how this field can improve cow health and deforestation. Dean also spoke highly about TensorFlow, an open source machine learning developed by researchers and engineers from Google Brain.

But the whole event boiled down to this: TechAide AI Conference is a unique opportunity to give back monetarily while sharing knowledge on technology. The audience discussed what we can accomplish, as a society, and how we could better serve humanity with all those technological advances.

This project was actually born with the OSMO Foundation, and its will to share its values of inclusion, peer to peer learning, networking, and entrepreneurship in all its forms. “We wanted to expose the tech world to the world of Centraide, so that every entrepreneur is doing something for the community”, said Alan MacIntosh, president of the Board of the OSMO Foundation.

“The idea was that a charity like Centraide, which doesn’t have a lot of money to buy and integrate technology into its practice, now has the connections and the access to knowledge,” continued MacIntosh.

The event also raises awareness in the tech community of the social issues Centraide is fighting to address. “We want to bring the two communities together, and make some creative sparks happen,” says MacIntosh. “We hope that with the tech world’s creativity, this event will continue to grow.”

TechAide raised over $100,000, and the entirety of it will go to help Centraide in its charitable activities.

Photo via Twitter.

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Gabrielle Drouin

Gabrielle Drouin has completed a master’s degree in Literature specializing in Quebec’s contemporary dramaturgy at the University of Montreal. She worked as a journalist in Toronto, covering the news of its Franco-Ontarian community, and has been reporting on the Montreal startup tech ecosystem since 2016. She is currently the Communications advisor and community relations at HEC Montreal's entrepreneurship hub.

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