Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a powerful new tool in training and education, including in the field of neurosurgery. Yet a new study suggests that AI tutoring provides better results when paired with human instruction.
A coalition of 40 AI researchers – including signatories from Meta, OpenAI and Montreal-based Mila – has issued a joint position paper warning that as advanced AI systems evolve, we may be losing the ability to understand or monitor how they “think.”
A new study from McGill University researchers suggests the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to rapidly analyze vast amounts of biodiversity data could revolutionize conservation efforts by enabling scientists and policymakers to make better-informed decisions.
February 12, 2025 | Professor Taylor Owen writes about the "vibe-shift" of AI as he comes back from the Paris AI Action Summit. Owen explains how the governments are pivoting from regulating AI risks to aggressively pursuing foreign direct investment, and Europe faces a new era of AI adoption.
Update March 14, 2025
Gen AI Modules now available in French. / Modules d'IA Générative maintenant offerts en français.
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A McGill-led research team has developed the first real-time, on-site technology capable of detecting and deciphering nanoplastics from all other particles in water, a capacity akin to being able to find a needle in a haystack within milliseconds.
Microplastic pieces are between 1 micrometre and 5 millimetres, roughly equivalent to a grain of rice. Nanoplastics are far tinier - a single nanometre is just 0.000001 millimetres. For comparison, a human hair is approximately 80,000–100,000 nanometers wide.
Professor David Ifeoluwa Adelani (School of Computer Science) is McGill’s newest Chair, as Professors Joelle Pineau and Reihaneh Rabbany have their appointments renewed
Protecting people from their personal information being used against them is more important every day as our lives become increasingly interconnected through data-driven products and services. In his new book, Ignacio Cofone challenges us to reevaluate conventional wisdom about data, showing how many of the rules that govern the information economy are outdated in today’s social and economic reality.
Here is an expert from McGill University who can provide comment on this topic:
Virtual reality simulators can help learners improve their technical skills faster and with no risk to patients. In the field of neurosurgery, they allow medical students to practice complex operations before using a scalpel on a real patient. When combined with artificial intelligence, these tutoring systems can offer tailored feedback like a human instructor, identifying areas where the students need to improve and making suggestions on how to achieve expert performance.
McGill University and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) announced today the creation of the Research and Innovation Chair in Animal Welfare and Artificial Intelligence (WELL-E). The five-year, $5 million Chair will carry out a major research project funded by a grant from NSERC Alliance and PROMPT, fiduciary of the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy. Important contributions have also been made by industrial partners Novalait, Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC), Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO), Les Producteurs de Lait du Québec (PLQ), and Lactanet.
Two seminal studies from McGill University, investigating immune landscapes of lung and brain tumours, were published today in Nature. This work was led by Logan Walsh, Daniela Quail and Peter Siegel, researchers at the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute and Philippe Joubert from Université Laval. The studies used innovative highly multiplexed imaging to create sophisticated immune atlases of lung and brain tumours and demonstrate how big data and artificial intelligence are the future of cancer research and clinical care.
AI can help identify biases in news reporting that we wouldn't otherwise see. Researchers from McGill University got a computer program to generate news coverage of COVID-19 using headlines from CBC articles as prompts. They then compared the simulated news coverage to the actual reporting at the time and found that CBC coverage was less focused on the medical emergency and more positively focused on personalities and geo-politics.
Human languages are notoriously complex, and linguists have long thought it would be impossible to teach a machine how to analyze speech sounds and word structures in the way humans do. But researchers from McGill University, MIT, and Cornell University have taken a step in this direction. They have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can learn the rules and patterns of human languages on its own.
