Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and its School of Management (ESG UQAM), Tourisme Montréal and the City of Montréal have launched MT Lab, an incubator dedicated for tourism, culture and entertainment startups.

A joining of academic, entrepreneurial and municipal sectors, MT Lab has a mission to host fledgling entrepreneurs from Quebec, Canada and abroad in the tourism, transport, festivals, culture, hotel, restaurant and entertainment sectors.

Anyone looking to move to Canada after January 20 may want to take a look at Montreal. Yes, it has beautiful scenery, a lot to do, and is populated by our friendly Canadian neighbors, but it’s also quickly becoming one of the biggest AI powerhouses in the world. This evolution is largely thanks to Microsoft and the many investments it’s made recently in Montreal’s AI future.

Early in January, Microsoft acquired Canadian startup Maluuba, which focuses on general artificial intelligence, and is moving it to Montreal. According to a recent article, “Maluuba focuses on natural language processing, in service of pursuing general artificial intelligence, or building computers that can think like people.” It does this through deep learning and reinforcement learning with the hopes of increasing the proficiency and effectiveness of computer-based systems. The goal is to eventually have AI answer questions, make decisions, understand natural language and so on, just like a human would.

GOOGLE IS BUILDING a new artificial intelligence lab in Montreal dedicated to deep learning, a technology that’s rapidly reinventing not only Google but the rest of the internet’s biggest players.

Hugo Larochelle will run the new lab after joining Google from the Twitter, where he was part of the company’s central AI team. It’s a homecoming for Larochelle, who earned a PhD in machine learning from the University of Montreal and remains a professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. Yoshua Bengio, one of the founding fathers of the movement, calls him “one of the rising stars of deep learning.”

As Montreal's original Metro cars are being gradually pulled out of service, at least a few of the 50-year-old cars will be getting second lives.

As part of an event celebrating the Metro's 50 years, the STM recently announced seven projects it has tentatively approved after putting out a call for proposals this spring.

Artificial intelligence in the form of computers with quasi-human capabilities, as well as the demise of disabling and lethal brain diseases are two areas of research at Montreal universities poised for major breakthroughs after receiving a historic investment of more than $200 million from the federal government.

There were no back-to-school blues Tuesday at Montreal’s leading research institutions — Université de Montréal, McGill University, Polytechnique Montréal and HEC Montréal — which started the academic year by announcing a windfall of $213 million from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund for three innovative and far-reaching projects.

As the first hurricane-force storm sits just off from the Atlantic Ocean’s shores, the American Northeast Summer draws to a close. During its rapid course, I took some hours to look back on the ICF Summit in June, celebrate its highlights and to consider what it means as our movement goes forward into the next Awards cycle, with its conclusion this time on the big stage of New York.

A company with an all-electric fleet of cabs and 40 percent of all medallions in the city is a beacon of light for Montreal’s taxi business.

Like many cities, Montreal has been trying to drag the city’s taxi industry, at times kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Many of the new municipal and provincial taxi rules made in the past two years—a business-casual dress code, accepting card payments, security cameras and background checks—have been met with drivers’ resistance, even as Uber creeps onto their turf.

To what degree does culture shape commerce? Does our national identity define us in the marketplace? Many people think so, to the degree that the typical Canadian entrepreneur is often typecast as being more timid and less prone to take risks than his or her counterpart in the United States. Although there are many elements of truth, this generalization begins to fall apart when we consider the depth, breadth and diversity of what it means to be Canadian. In other words, when it comes to business, a one-size-fits-all “Canadian approach” simply doesn’t exist.

Through concerted collaboration executed in a spirit of co-opetition, over the last three years 11 Canadian cities have executed seven joint Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) missions with the Federal government to 12 countries. These missions have resulted in 1,706 B2B meetings, 855 leads and 59 company visits. At an event last month hosted by the Toronto Region Board of Trade and attended by representatives of Chambers of Commerce and municipal economic development leaders from Canada's largest cities, attendees learned more about how to improve these numbers and accelerate leads to investment success.

4-day fest brings 3,000 investors and innovators together

Now in its sixth year, Startupfest is a smorgasbord of pitching competitions, keynote speakers, and networking.

Over four days starting Thursday, startup creators will have the opportunity to mingle with investors and entrepreneurs, pitching their ideas in hopes of catching the eye of a potential backer or winning one of the festival's many cash prizes.