Abstract
In February 2024, the Frontiers of Science: Artificial Intelligence Conference was organized in Ottawa, Canada. It was a multidisciplinary meeting focused on early to mid-career researchers, a total of 40 researchers, half from Canada and the other half from the United Kingdom. This report briefly summarizes the objectives and outcomes from that meeting.
Introduction
In February 2024, the Frontiers of Science: Artificial Intelligence Conference was organized in Ottawa, Canada. It was a multidisciplinary meeting focused on early to mid-career researchers, a total of 40 researchers, half from Canada and the other half from the United Kingdom (cf. Appendix A). This was the second such event between the Royal Society (UK) and the Royal Society of Canada; the first meeting happened in Whistler, Canada, in 2016.
The objectives of the meeting were:
1. To bring together future leaders in artificial intelligence from the UK and Canada for networking, relationship-building, and with a view to exploring potential collaborations between the researchers and furthering research collaboration between the countries.
2. To strengthen the relationship between the Royal Society (UK) (RS) and Royal Society of Canada (RSC).
3. To connect early career researchers from both countries with senior scientists, policymakers, and other key stakeholders in Canada, and to explore opportunities to contribute to public policy.
The event was co-chaired by Vaishak Belle from the University of Edinburgh and Nicolas Papernot from the University of Toronto. In the following, we discuss some of the key themes running through the event and some of the group discussions that followed as a result. The event also included keynote talks by Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director of MILA and professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal, and Doina Precup, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) AI Chair at McGill and Research Director at Google DeepMind.
