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Canada may not be the first country that comes to mind when you think of artificial intelligence (AI) and its underlying machine learning (ML) technology. However, Canadians have played – and continue to play – a pivotal role in pioneering and advancing the field.

So, who exactly helped shape the future of AI? Well, there’s one big name that stands out: Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist.

While the title “father of AI” often goes to John McCarthy, a computer scientist at Princeton University who coined the term and laid the groundwork for the field in the 1950s, the real breakthrough for AI came decades later at the University of Toronto. Hinton’s work breathed new life into the AI industry, which earned him the title “godfather of AI.” Hinton’s research on neural networks, unsupervised deep learning, and backpropagation algorithms laid the foundation for the modern AI technologies we see today. For this, he was awarded the Turing Award in 2018 and, more recently, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024.

But Hinton isn’t the only prominent Canadian figure in AI.

Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian-French computer scientist, is the most-cited computer scientist in the world. His pioneering research at McGill University in Montreal greatly enhanced the functionality of neural networks and unsupervised deep learning, and allowed for the advancement of generative AI. Bengio was also awarded the Turing Award in 2018 alongside Hinton and Yann LeCun. In addition to this, Bengio is a leading advocate for ensuring that AI systems are transparent, bias-free, and ethically sound.

And we can’t forget Canadian Richard Sutton, widely known as the “father of reinforcement learning.” Based at the University of Alberta, he continues to lead the way in how AI learns to make decisions based on previous actions and information. His work is vital for areas such as robotics, gaming, self-driving cars, and many other autonomous systems we rely on today.

Why are these three AI pioneers so important? Well, brilliant minds attract global talent, and this talent, in turn, has contributed to the creation of some of Canada’s leading AI research institutes:

These institutes created a thriving AI ecosystem in Canada, with close ties to major tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft. These companies have established Canadian AI research labs near each of these institutes and universities in order to take advantage of the nearby AI talent pool.

But despite its important role in AI, Canada flies under the radar in AI news. You could say that Canada is a “quiet” AI powerhouse.

But why is that? Perhaps it’s because Canada prefers to focus on research and innovation, rather than seeking the spotlight. Canada has always been a hub for groundbreaking technological developments. From being the world leader in nuclear research to pioneering digital communications through companies like Nortel and Research in Motion (later BlackBerry), Canada has a long history of tech innovation. Even before the cloud became mainstream, Canada had its own ICON computer network in the 1980s that worked the same way, predating Sun Microsystems’ 1990s cloud prediction of “the network is the computer.”

So, while Canada may not always make the headlines in the AI space, it remains a global leader and will continue to shape the future of AI for years to come. Who knows, maybe one day “AI” will even be renamed “EhI” in recognition of Canada’s quiet yet crucial contribution to the field :-)

Canada: The Unsung Hero of AI Innovation