Amii’s Martha White joins Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists

Martha White — an Amii Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair — has been admitted to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) for her research accomplishments in artificial intelligence.

The college was established in 2014 to recognize “Canadian intellectual leadership” and those who have made significant achievements in their fields early in their careers.

White, an associate professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, is a part of the Reinforcement Learning and AI Lab at the U of A.

Much of her work focuses on developing artificial intelligence that can work in real-world industrial settings — specifically in developing industrial systems that can predict, learn, and adapt to changing conditions.

“My focus has always been how do you have an agent continually learning in the real world?” she says.

“I truly believe that this is something we might have if we’re going to use decision-making strategies in the real world, a mix of representation learning and reinforcement learning.”

In addition to her academic achievements, White is the co-founder of RL Core Technologies, a startup that aims to use reinforcement learning to improve the performance and efficiency of industrial systems. The company was created last year as the first part of the newly launched U of A Innovation Fund.

Along with co-founders, another Amii Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair Adam White, as well as Alden Christianson, RL Core has begun a pilot project that uses reinforcement learning to improve the performance at a water treatment plan in Drayton Valley, Alberta.

While that project is still in its early stages, the results have been promising, White says. It is an important step in her desire to create AI that can positively impact in the real world.

“I see this as a way to support our own decision-making [as people]. To do that … we need to have agents that are in the real world and who are sometimes interacting with people, who are messy.

So, shifting to that more realistic, messy setting is how we will have machine learning that will have an impact.”

The invitation to the RSC College is just the latest award recognizing White’s contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. Last year, she was named a Canada Research Chair in Reinforcement Learning by the Government of Canada.

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