Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research of the University of Montreal (UdeM) is led by Irina Rish, a full professor at UdeM and Mila - Quebec AI Institute. The CERC-AAI program is supported by the CERC grant from the Canadian government, which is a part of the comprehensive strategy to encourage the development and deployment of artificial intelligence in Canada.

The high-level objective of this CERC in Autonomous AI program is to develop a set of sustained initiatives that will advance AI towards more general, human-like intelligence, by making AI more flexible, robust and broad.    More specifically, the lab's research is focused on:

• Building large-scale AI foundation models on supercomputers

• Neural scaling laws and emergent behaviors: understanding and predicting scaling properties, including emergence, in such models, with respect to both capabilities and alignment metrics.

•  Continual Learning, Robustness, and  OoD Generalization

• Nonlinear dynamical neural systems 

• RL and bio-inspired models of intelligent behavior