Earlier this year, QuantumBlack (QB), the advanced-analytics firm we acquired in 2015, opened its first location in Latin America, in Brazil.
This month, it is charting a new course—following their ‘north star’ to Montreal—and opening a Center of Excellence within Mila, the Montréal Institute of Learning Algorithms - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.
The announcement was made last week at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and included a packed agenda of events, panels, and recruiting gatherings to kick-off the initiative.
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McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.comLeft to right: Chantal Rouleau, minister for transport and minister responsible for the metropolis and the Montreal region; Maria Kolitsida, CEO and cofounder of Winning Minds; Emil Hewage, cofounder and CEO of BIOS; Jeremy Palmer, CEO of QuantumBlack; and Valérie Plante, mayor of Montreal.
Why Montreal? It has the largest concentration of academic researchers in deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence (AI).
Canada is investing $1 billion dollars over 5 years in AI as the core of its national strategy for innovation, and Mila is at the heart of this effort. It’s led by one of the three founding fathers of deep learning, Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, who heads a team of 17 professors alongside 200 experts. They are are pioneering the development of AI applications for vision, speech, and language.
The Mila ecosystem also includes 15 corporate labs and 30 venture-capital-backed start-ups. In addition to Mila, there are some 250 AI researchers at McGill University and the University of Montreal.
Montreal holds a special place in the hearts of QB cofounder and chief scientist Jacomo Corbo and QB head of the Montreal office, Yves Boussemart: both previously studied engineering at McGill University and will be leading the new office.
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McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.comJeremy Palmer, CEO of QuantumBlack, speaking at the Montreal International & Investissement Quebec press conference.
The goal is to build a team of up to 30 deep-learning specialists and data engineers within the first year, and up to 100 experts within 3 years. As part of the distinctive Mila ecosystem, they will undertake research for clients; co-build reusable assets, such as tools, code, and techniques; and collaborate on pro bono work. The center will serve as a training ground for McKinsey clients and our own analytics community, and it will function as an integral part of our Canadian office.
“QuantumBlack specializes in cracking new-to-the-world use cases—and using them in large-scale transformations to create major change for clients,” explains Yves. “The physical co-location gives us the chance to exchange ideas and to take part in the newest scientific advances in deep learning, so that we can applying leading-edge techniques to large real-world data sets. We can move from concepts and pilots to resilient systems and help our clients in critical ways.”
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McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.comLeft to right: Laura Proudlock, global communications manager at QuantumBlack; Vincent Bérubé, partner in McKinsey’s Montreal office; Yves Boussemart, leader of QuantumBlack’s Montreal office; and Kat Shenton, global head of marketing and communications at QuantumBlack.
QB has worked across life sciences, aerospace, finance, and natural resources—helping private- and public-sector organizations to detect fraud, understand the interactions of drugs and streamline research, and monitor city infrastructures to reduce pollution and improve safety.
So where to next…for the analytics firm that made its name by shaving off milliseconds in Formula One racing?
In 2019, there are plans to expand in North America and to look at opportunities across Asia–Pacific.