CERC-AAI Lab

About the lab

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. Funded by Canada’s CERC program, we advance flexible, robust, general-purpose AI through:

• Foundation models at supercomputer scale

• Scaling laws, emergent capabilities, and alignment

• Continual learning, robustness, and OoD generalization

• RL, nonlinear neural dynamics, and bio-inspired intelligence.

Talks & perspectives

• Beyond Scaling: Toward Continual and Adaptive Intelligence @ Vision Weekend UK 2026 (2026)

• AI & Scale @ Vision Weekend 2025, Puerto Rico (2025)

• The AI Scaling Revolution and the Future of Intelligence (2024)

• Complex systems view of large-scale AI systems (2023)

• Continual Learning at Scale — CoLLAs 2023 (2023)

• AGI, Complex Systems, Transhumanism — NeurIPS 2022 (2022)

• Irina Rish — AGI, Scaling, Alignment (Oct 2022)

• Build artificial general intelligence (Dec 2020)

• Autonomous AI (2020)

• Learning About the Brain: Neuroimaging and Beyond (2016)