DeepMind expands to Canada with new research office in Edmonton | Hacker News Reader

DeepMind expands to Canada with new research office in Edmonton

deepmind.com

197 pointsjonbaer52 comments

Trace the graph of Reinforcement Learning movers and shakers, and see how many have their roots one or two levels up with Rich Sutton in Edmonton. David Silver, for example, quit a career in games AI and moved his family to Edmonton to study with Rich.

People are saying this is a coup for Edmonton, and it is. But it's also a coup for DeepMind. Having Rich Sutton, and giving him the resources to keep his best students together and working, is going to be amazing.

The amount of corporate worship that goes on around here is insane, holy hell just tone it down a notch or two they aren't your friends.

What a strange thing to say.

I pointed out that a university professor living in a small northern city actually turns out to have taught many of the other researchers currently pushing forward the field of Reinforcement Learning. I named one professor (at University College London) as an example.

I cannot imagine how that can be interpreted as corporate worship.

I am fairly surprised to see they opened up in Edmonton, rather than Toronto, Montreal or even Vancouver.

Despite that, it's a huge win for UofA - especially when you have names like Rich Sutton involved. I am quite excited to see the excellent growth of AI/ML expertise in Canada considering the Vector Institute [0] was announced recently as well!

[0] - http://vectorinstitute.ai/

In addition to the excellent people already at UofA, Edmonton has the advantage of being much cheaper than Toronto or Vancouver.

To be fair, if Google cared about cost of living, they wouldn't keep and keep on building in the Valley so much.

Living condition in Edmonton is pretty terrible in the Winter. They still have snow up to May sometimes. But on the other hand, this might be perfect for research. Keeps you focused when there's nothing else to do. If it's a great workplace, might as well hang out at work all the time.

Google's domed / canopied campus ideas actually make sense in Edmonton. In Mountain View they're only protecting people from lovely weather.

...or London.

Far less distractions too.

And pretty much in the middle of nowhere

(Also no worries about cooling hardware in winter, even compared to Toronto or Montreal)

Not sure how much HW in DeepMind is self-owned, or used "in the cloud" from GCP (or others), etc

It is actually almost on the flight path between San Francisco and London:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-LHR

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-LHR,+sfo-yeg,+yeg-lhr

quintessential "fly over" country. Being a medium-ish sized metro area, Edmonton doesn't have a lot of direct international flights.

I'm currently a student at the UofA, and I do Machine Learning / Deep Learning professionally; These are pretty good news, I know a lot of these professors personally and they do a lot of great (fundamental) work in the field of RL / ML, with a lot of collaboration happening between the university and the private sectors.

Hopefully, this will provide the needed boost to the University's CS department, and particularly Edmonton's tech sector.

University of Alberta has a very strong pure mathematics department (especially in Functional Analysis and Algebra). Pairing this with a strong Computer Science department could eventually bring it to a level to compete with Waterloo.

On the other hand, as someone who grew up in edmonton, I don't ever want to live there again. It's a tough city to live in, though it has its beauty when you look hard enough.

I completely agree with that assessment. The U of A is a great school, and summers in Edmonton are fantastic, but the winters are something else.

Out of pure interest, how would you describe winters in Edmonton?

It's a combination of:

- getting dark around 4/5pm - extremely dry and cold - winter starts in October, lasts until late April - massive urban sprawl so the city core is dead during the winter, and therefore the city feels lifeless.

That's particularly bleak and definitely biased, but it's not far from the truth.

I lived and worked downtown in the late 90s/early 00s, and going back recently, I have to say that it is a lot better than it used to be. There is an incredible amount of investment in the core, and the whole ice district area on 104th ave is pretty remarkable, including the new museum, hockey arena, and Stantec tower—which will be 68-stories high, quite surprisingly, the tallest tower in Canada outside of Toronto. The city has also invested in light rail expansion, and just installed a new bike grid in the downtown core. Things feel very different than they used to.

The short days are definitely tough. The shortest day of the year has less than 8 hours of sunshine. Sun comes up at 9am and sets by 4pm. However, Edmonton is usually quite sunny in the winter.

Conversely the summers are great. It's light from 5am to 10pm, so get almost 17 hours of sunlight. If you include twilight, it's more like 18 hours.

It's not that different from much of Europe. Edmonton is at the same latitude as Dublin.

I'm in Hull in the UK and we have basically identical latitude, Hull is just fractionally north.

Winter nights are long but I love them, I sleep far better in the cold and dark than hot and light, insomnia and the sun appearing at 4:30am sucks.

Yeah, I agree. I lived in London, UK for a while and found the lack of sunlight much worse. Edmonton has a lot of sun, which makes it pretty tolerable.

The past couple years winters have been worse in New York than in Edmonton. Maybe that's the new normal now. The hard part isn't the cold so much as the lack of daylight during the winter solstice period.

Take a look : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGpsfvRb120

Oh God, I looked at a homemade video of Edmonton snow... even the crunching sounds set my teeth on edge. I don't see how anyone could endure that all the way from October to May.

Meh. It's such a personal thing: I never found it particularly bothersome.

People talk up how hard winters are (and let's be honest - we all prefer temperate temperatures) but good clothing goes a long, long way in your maintaining winter comfort. A good windproof jacket, warm socks, waterproof boots, long johns, and warm hat and gloves go a long way. Get good at layering and things get a lot easier.

I find winters in New York harder to deal with: I have to dress warmly for the outside, and everyone seems to set the heat to "roasting" inside. Weird.

I grew up in Montreal and actually miss the winter there.

Wow, strong and very distinctly Canadian accents. I didn't hear anyone speak like this on my visit to the Toronto suburbs.

I went to school in Edmonton and it wasn't unusual to hit -40C. I remember one week where it never got about -35C during the day.

Did you go to school in Edmonton in 1890 or something? I grew up near Edmonton too and while January/Feb can certainly cross the -30 mark from time to time (and barely), -40 is unheard of. Maybe with windchill, like once or twice a year.

Here you go! This is as close I could find. It was a while back.

https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/CYEG/1998/1/15/...

For the week of January 7th, the highest temperate was -28C. Lowest was -37C.

The prior week had a high of -25C.

Go back another year to 1997 and the temperature for the week of January 19th was a high of -30C and a low of -41C. I remember it fondly. The temperature never got above -30C for almost 10 days.

I just remember the day in 2009 [1] when Edmonton was literally the coldest place on Earth.

You're right that the winters have been getting better, but there's typically at least one week of below -40 weather, which is awful.

[1]: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eWnhUWh...

I've lived here for 17 years and there has never been a week of below -40.

Winter desert. It's bad.

Like a mini Alaska.

Despite some of the negative comments you see (Edmonton does have a real winter, on par with Toronto and Montreal for snow, but colder still) Edmonton is a pretty awesome place to live and spend time. It has always been the ugly step brother to Calgary and it took decades for oil wealth to really start to change the city. When it did, it wasn't in the cowtown-n-skyscrapers Texas style you saw in Calgary, but something a little less brash and more focused on arts and culture.

Don't forget as well, you are a short trip to Jasper, the BC interior and all sorts of absolutely amazing places that are busy and fun 4 seasons of the year.

That is all to say, from the perspective of someone who does not live there, Edmonton is an easy place to underestimate. There are many people who would prefer it to Toronto/Montreal just for the simple fact that they can buy a house, get around easily, and be much closer to the outdoors.

Edmonton is an awesome place to live, and even after a decade in Toronto I would move there in a heartbeat if there were opportunities for my spouse.

The history of Alberta actually shows Edmonton and Calgary trading places several times as the premier city in the province. It's only in the last 20 years that Calgary has really pulled ahead.

Edmonton has also traditionally been much more politically liberal than Calgary, which might appeal to some people - during 40 years of Conservative power (under various party names) Edmonton was often swept by NDP candidates, usually the only opposition members in the province.

Edmonton also has an excellent Drama scene - one of the first Fringe festivals outside of Edinburgh (and still one of the biggest), a great folk music festival, a vibrant multicultural scene without excessive ghettoization, and a 1-2 km wide river valley park that bisects the city with walking and biking trails.

I live in Calgary. This thread is spot on.

I used to visit Edmonton often, and for the warm half of the year, it's just a more livable city than Calgary. Edmonton has actually walkable communities, a sense of genuine hospitality and a constant barrage of festivals. The Folk Music festival is a world class music festival (for the best experience, get on a volunteer crew, they treat you super well). There's plenty of other good music festivals though, like interstellar rodeo (not at all a Country Music festival), and Up+Downdown. Fringe is fantastic. Fort Edmonton is a fun outing if you dig history.

If you do locate up here though, get a group together and learn a couple of winter sports. Once I started snowboarding and snowshoeing, I really started to look forward to winter.

Agree so much. I'm originally from just outside of Edmonton, but have been living in southern Ontario for work since the late 90s. At this point in my life with two kids and with the rest of my family back there, I'd seriously consider moving back there despite the terrible winter and right wing politics [which seems to be changing].

The river valley is fantastic wonderful greenspace. Great festivals and arts culture. Big enough to have most things you need but not too congested. Very friendly people. And the UofA is a wonderful university.

As a Google employee I hope that this DeepMind presence grows over time to be a real Google office. Although I doubt this will happen, I'd certainly welcome the ability to transfer there.

The other big Google engineering office in Canada is in Waterloo. So we at least have a history of co-locating beside excellent engineering universities. The UofA is up there with Waterloo in terms of a excellent CS/engineering.

I've been told my numerous people who grew up there that the winters in Edmonton were brutal. Despite Toronto's reputation being a Canadian city the winters are very mild by comparison and Vancouver, of course, is even easier.

Having lived in Montreal on the other hand I was surprised at the impact a lengthier far snowier winter can have on a city if you didn't grow up with it, after being familiar with Toronto/southern Ontario I found the winters in MTL hard to deal with. A winter-heavy city really does create two very different cities, the summers in Montreal are really amazing though, half the year it's the best city in Canada.

Keeping people inside for winter may be a non-negative in academic research but it's probably the most serious implication to consider lifestyle-wise when moving to Edmonton. Not to mention the lack of access to events (both culturally and industry-wise).

I'm not sure I could be optimistic for a Canadian city for technology outside of Toronto, MTL, and Vancouver, besides the current available talent pool which can create at least a decade-long attraction with someone exceptional like Rich Sutton. Similar to sports teams talent attracting free agents. Which is what we're talking about in this case, with advanced research in AI.

The Manhattan project's success was largely a result of the talent they attracted early on, which blossomed into even more talent as a result, and it was located in the middle of nowhere in an isolated New Mexico town.

City-wise it might not be attractive but talent is what matters at the end of the day. The only risk then is that it can maintain an active research community, aka consistently attracting talent. I'd be measuring the output of the universities with highest priority in this case more than anything.

>Not to mention the lack of access to events

This is simply not true. There's some festival or other happening every weekend all summer long in Edmonton.

I'm in Toronto and I'm consistently jealous of the far better quality of cultural events in Montreal. Which is why I still travel there often. So I guess this is more about your tastes and expectations. The majority of top-tier American performers typically visit Montreal on tours (likely due to proximity of NYC) but only occasionally Toronto or Vancouver. By this I mean for music, stand-up comedians, etc.

I'd imagine far far less so in Edmonton. And I don't mean quantity as much as quality.

And I could give a number of examples in terms of just technology, infosec, and design events in terms of quality of the various events available in different Canadian cities.

Granted, but Edmonton is also much smaller than Montreal and Toronto. I think Edmonton would compare favorably to similar-sized North American cities in terms of cultural events.

Edmontons winters are brutal, but they are dry and sunny and the buildings are properly built for them.

They are just a month or two too long.

I remember this soldier telling me a common military mantra was that "there's no bad weather, just bad equipment".

People who move to places with winters who never grew up with it are largely just inexperienced and ill-prepared to deal with it. It really isn't that bad if you have a good jacket, long-johns, and good boots. Plus a bike with winter treads can be just as stable on snow as a road bike on cement.

But regardless it's a time investment and not for everyone. Not to mention limitations it ultimately puts on transportation. Even the well prepared cities get caught off-guard once or twice a year.

University of Alberta is a growing hub of AI studies. Dr. Jonathan Schaffer has done some interesting work on AI applied to games, his program Chinook has simply solved the game of checkers.

Bioware has offices in town and is a sponsor of the UofA CS department, so it makes sense the university research is directed towards games.

It's not just Schaeffer. The research department has a huge and deep history of AI in games (GAMES group).

https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/University+of+Albert...

The principal author of AlphaGo did postdoc work at UofA in computer go. This link isn't new - it's old friends and collegues.

The next AI winter is going to be really cold...

This time it will be Python and C++ instead of Lisp, though.

Apparently around a half of Deepmind's AI specialists are Canadian educated, so no surprises here.

This is great news for Canada, but I'm curious what the pay would be like relative to the usual lowballing for Canadian tech workers across all levels.

What a glorious day for Canada, and therefore the world.

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