Episode 7: Deep Learning, Startups, and Academia à la Montréal with Nicolas Chapados and JF Gagné

Montréal isn't just a beautiful city, it's also a hotbed of activity for deep learning. Fueled by ambitious entrepreneurs and some ground-breaking research coming out of the University of Montréal, the city is at the forefront of machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. In this episode, Jon Prial is joined by Georgian Partners' Ben Wilde for a fascinating discussion with two machine learning practitioners: Nicolas Chapados, Chief Science Officer at Imagia, and Jean-François Gagné, Entrepreneur in Residence at Real Ventures. Learn from these experts about what it takes to successfully leverage this technology in your own business.

You'll hear about:

• Why Montréal is one of the world’s most dynamic cities for machine learning (0:50)
• The types and stage of companies that Real Ventures typically invests in (7:51)
• What it takes to incorporate machine learning into an early stage company (8:53)
• Data acquisition and the transferability of deep learning models to other domains (12:04)
• The University of Montréal’s use of models for and research around image analysis (15:40)
• How the University’s research is coming to market and the opportunities that creates (19:17)
• The availability of data and its implications and opportunities are for early-stage companies (22:10)
• How deep learning can facilitate smarter decision-making (24:57)
• What the open sourcing of Google’s TensorFlow means for deep learning (27:40)
• Typical applications for Theano (29:45)