On May 25, 2018, Samsung announced that it has established a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) centre in downtown Toronto in the MaRS Discovery District, as part of a new venture to tap into and contribute to the flourishing AI industry growing in Canada's largest city. The Toronto centre will be led by Dr. Sven Dickinson, newly appointed as the head of the Toronto lab, professor on leave and past chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Dickinson is an expert in computer vision technologies, especially in the field of object recognition and is also a recipient of the lifetime research achievement award from the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS). He will play an integral part in Samsung's research of core AI technologies that entail language, vision and other multi-modal interactions.
The Toronto Centre will work in partnership with Samsung's Silicon Valley team to pioneer AI research and development for the region. Dickinson’s Toronto team will have 14 interns and research engineers to start, with plans to grow to 50.
Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP represented Sven Dickinson with a team consisting of Chad Bayne (Corporate) and Steven Dickie (Employment & Labour).