The Silicon Review ^Asia

Microsoft acquires Maluuba to continue in investing for growing artificial intelligence in Canada. Maluuba’s vision is to solve ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans. Maluuba, a company founded by University of Waterloo grads Kaheer Suleman and Sam Pasupalak.

A  Montreal based company is making strong progress by focusing on challenging problems, understanding new techniques in reinforcement learning with a focus on machine comprehension and conversational interfaces.

Maluuba presents a collection of tasks in which success requires searching through a partially observed environment, for fragments of information which can be pieced together to accomplish various goals. And to understand natural dialog between individuals and to get better at tasks like memory, common-sense reasoning and finding information when they have a gap in their own knowledge.

Microsoft’s goals with AI align with the startup’s own, this emerging field of research has the potential to revolutionize computing by transforming vast amounts of information into useful insights. The future of every industry, from finance and health to manufacturing and transportation, will be shaped by advances in artificial intelligence. Leading global AI researcher Yoshua Bengio and Maluuba advisor, who heads the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, is also joining Microsoft as an advisor, Microsoft EVP of AI Harry Shum in the blog post announcing Maluuba’s acquisition. Microsoft in a blog post that its work will help with Microsoft’s broad goal of making AI more accessible and useful to the general public. This makes Maluuba to gain global attention.

Microsoft has newly formed connections in Montreal, and their recent investment in Element AI, early in Maluuba’s life cycle, the company impressed by demonstrating a virtual assistant product that could manage a wide range of domains, Cross-domain expertise which is typically difficult for intelligent software. Most successful efforts in AI to date have focused on building good results with a narrow domain focus. But Microsoft is well positioned to advance their strategy to democratize AI, bringing powerful new insights and capabilities to every person and organization on the planet.