The Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) is an Edmonton-based AI research institute closely tied to the University of Alberta. It is internationally recognised as a centre of gravity for reinforcement learning, the branch of machine learning concerned with learning by trial and error from experience, and counts Richard Sutton - a 2024 Turing Award laureate and co-author of the standard reinforcement-learning textbook - among its fellows and chief scientific advisor.
Amii is one of the three national institutes designated under Canada’s Pan-Canadian AI Strategy in 2017, alongside Mila in Montreal and the Vector Institute in Toronto. Beyond academic research it works directly with companies, from startups to large enterprises, to turn AI research into practical strategies and products.
Why a business reader should care: Amii shows how a regional research community, sustained for years before deep learning became fashionable, became a pillar of a national strategy and a source of talent and reinforcement-learning expertise that companies worldwide now draw on.