By: Justine Brooks
3 Jun, 2025
From research to real-world impact
June 3, 2025
Canada CIFAR AI Chairs are spearheading AI applications for real-world impact
Artificial intelligence is transforming industries and reshaping ideas. Across sectors such as life sciences, industrial automation, virtual environments and healthcare, Canada CIFAR AI Chairs are at the helm of startups and ventures that are translating cutting-edge research into tools, products and platforms with global reach.
CIFAR is exploring some of the many researchers that are growing Canada’s ecosystem through tangible, high-impact applications.
Adaptable AI for industry
Martha White and Adam White; Amii, University of Alberta
Canada CIFAR AI Chairs
Martha White and Adam White co-founded RL CORE which utilizes reinforcement learning across industrial control processes to enable automation and adaptation in their deployment. With real-time analysis, plant processes are continually adapted to optimize operations, freeing up operators to focus on maintenance and emergency responses. Their work has already been successfully deployed in three water and wastewater treatment plants across Alberta and British Columbia.
Accelerating research in life sciences
Marc Bellemare; Mila, McGill University
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Marc Bellemare co-founded Reliant AI to streamline and enhance the cumbersome process of literature reviews, competitive landscaping and other analyses. Using a large language model, their flagship product, Tabular, uses a specialized language model to cut down review times by 85 per cent – unlocking deeper insights from literature, competitive analysis and beyond. Their model is designed specifically for life sciences, which increases the accuracy and relevance of data extracted. Bellemare’s work with Reliant AI has the potential to transform scientific approaches to research processes, enabling users to make better data-informed decisions and streamline their work.
Creating virtual worlds
Sanja Fidler; Vector Institute, University of Toronto
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Sanja Fidler serves as Vice President of AI Research at NVIDIA, leading the NVIDIA Spatial Intelligence Lab based in Toronto. Her work combines machine learning, computer vision and
computer graphics for applications in robotics, self-driving cars, video games and entertainment. Her lab is primarily focused on the creation and realistic simulation of virtual worlds using AI and physics. This allows physical AI developers to train and test their models in simulation, significantly speeding up the development-to-deployment cycle.
Accelerating drug discovery
Bo Wang; Vector Institute, University of Toronto
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Bo Wang recently joined Xaira Therapeutics as Senior Vice President and Head of Biomedical AI. Wang brings his expertise in AI-driven biomedical research to the company to help advance understanding of the molecular basis of difficult diseases and match novel treatments to the patients most likely to respond. Solving these major challenges could help accelerate drug discovery and drive the development of new treatments for patients in need.
Smarter health care
Anna Goldenberg; Vector Institute, University of Toronto
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Anna Goldenberg is a Senior Scientist and Varma Family Chair in Biomedical Informatics and AI at the SickKids Research Institute. Goldenberg is developing machine learning methods that can identify mechanisms of complex human diseases as well as creating risk prediction and early warning clinical systems. Her work also focuses on addressing fundamental issues such as high error rates and lack of model explainability that prevent AI’s potential from being fully realized in medical care.
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