Mila (research institute)


Mila is a research institute in Montreal, Quebec, focusing mainly on machine learning research. In 2020, approximately 500 researchers, including faculty and students, were part of Mila.

History

Mila was founded in 1993 by Yoshua Bengio a Turing award winner and one of the founders of the field of deep learning.
Since 2017, Mila is the result of a partnership between the Université de Montréal and McGill University with École Polytechnique de Montréal and HEC Montréal.

Notable researchers

Besides Bengio, Mila's faculty members include Joëlle Pineau and Doina Precup.
Some of its graduates include Hugo Larochelle and Ian Goodfellow.

Research activities

Research at Mila is largely, but not exclusively focused on deep learning and reinforcement learning. Specific research topics include:
Mila is both a research and educational institution, providing postdoc and internship positions, and granting PhD and Master's degrees in machine learning.
Mila members have also contributed to open-source software. Theano, one of the early programming frameworks for deep learning originated at Mila. In 2020, active projects included myia, a deep learning framework for Python, and baby-ai, a platform for simulating language learning with a human in the loop.
In addition, Mila is also involved in numerous partnerships with private companies.