Mila announces a partnership with BrainBox AI to support the launch of the company’s first meta-learning project
Focused on accelerating the learning process of AI in the built environment.
MONTREAL – March 28, 2022 – Mila, the world’s largest academic research institute in deep learning, is pleased to announce its strategic partnership with BrainBox AI, a pioneer in predictive and self-adaptive commercial building technology.
Mila and BrainBox AI ’s first project collaboration will focus on bringing Meta-Learning to commercial real estate technology. “BrainBox AI strives to reduce the carbon footprint associated with our customer’s energy consumption. This collaboration with Mila will provide multiple benefits specifically related to the impact commercial buildings have on global warming,” said Jean-Simon Venne, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, BrainBox AI. “This project will result in a significant reduction of the computing power needed to meet our collective net-zero objectives.”
Using cutting edge Meta-Learning, BrainBox AI and Mila will work together on reducing the quantity of data necessary to train the AI algorithms globally deployed by BrainBox AI. This collaboration will produce a neural network that is “aware” of a new building’s components and capable of deploying its intelligence in similar buildings. Thus, resulting in an accelerated learning process for the AI-built environment overall.
“We are excited about this partnership. Much like Mila, BrainBox AI leverages artificial intelligence to fight climate change, making this collaboration a natural fit for us,” says Stéphane Létourneau, Mila’s Executive Vice President.
The resulting data of this project will allow BrainBox AI to improve model performance, increase prediction reliability, and on the environmental side, reduce training time, thereby lessening the computation process and required dataset volumes.
BrainBox AI offers artificial intelligence (AI) to combat climate change by making commercial buildings smarter and more efficient. Its flagship product is currently installed in over 100 000 000 sq. ft. of real estate across 18 countries. Through seamless communication with building management systems (BMS), the technology optimizes HVAC systems in real-time, permitting the existing infrastructure to become predictive and self-adaptive, while significantly reducing energy consumption and emissions.
In 2021 BrainBox AI was awarded top honors at the United Nations COP26 Tech for Our Planet Challenge. The company is also a member of the MaRS Discovery District, the largest urban innovation hub in North America.
About Mila
Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Mila is an artificial intelligence research institute that brings together nearly 900 researchers specializing in machine learning. Based in Montreal, Mila’s mission is to be a global hub for scientific advances that inspire innovation and development of AI for the benefit of all. Mila is a non-profit organization recognized worldwide for its significant contributions to the field of deep learning, particularly in language modeling, machine translation, object recognition, and generative models. For more information, visit mila.quebec.
About BrainBox AI
BrainBox AI was created in 2017 with the goal of redefining building automation through artificial intelligence to be at the forefront of a green building revolution. Headquartered in Montreal, a global AI hub, BrainBox AI has a workforce of over 100 employees and supports real estate clients in numerous sectors, including office buildings, airports, hotels, multi-residential, long-term care facilities, grocery stores and commercial retail.
BrainBox AI works in collaboration with research partners including the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO) as well as educational institutions including Montreal’s École de technologie supérieure (ETS) and McGill University.
