UBISOFT, MILA AND MCGILL JOIN FORCES TO CREATE NEW RESEARCH CHAIR ON RESPONSIBLE AI IN VIDEO GAMES

MONTREAL, Sept. 27, 2023 /CNW/ – Alongside ALL IN 2023 happening in Montreal, global video game leader Ubisoft, Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, the world’s largest academic deep learning (DL) research institute, and McGill University are proud to announce the creation of Ubisoft-Mila’s new research Chair, Scaling Game Worlds with Responsible AI. This five-year Chair will be led by McGill’s Associate Professor, Dr. Derek Nowrouzezahrai, and will explore the ethical use of AI in the large-scale game development content creation pipeline.

As modern machine learning-based approaches have started permeating a variety of digital content regimes – such as text, image, audio and even video generation – key questions regarding the responsible consumption of human-created content that underlies these powerful techniques remain mostly unanswered. In the context of game world creation, what constitutes a healthy dynamic between purely learning-based and purely human-based content creation methods also introduces important questions that need to be resolved.

The research team, composed of both academic trainees and industrial production and research experts from Ubisoft, will work together in a distinctive collaborative environment to build and deploy applied research prototypes. Therefore, the Chair will aim to grow both the quantity and breadth of Highly Qualified Personnel trained under this unique academic-industrial co-learning environment. The Funds will be spent to target research and training for tomorrow’s creative and technical professions in Quebec.

“Since the creation of Ubisoft La Forge, we’ve done our best to innovate in a responsible and sustainable manner, by focusing on our creators. With the recent acceleration of AI, we think this Chair is an opportunity to ensure that incoming AI innovations are designed with the goal of assisting the creators at scale and not the creation. We trust the digital artists’ unique expertise and believe it is by empowering them that the next generation of large-scale, immersive game worlds will be created”, mentioned Yves Jacquier, Executive Director at Ubisoft La Forge.

“Computer graphics has long explored marrying traditional artistic creation processes with technological tools; here, the importance of working hand-in-hand with artists has remained integral to the goal of creating tools that build atop their intuitive creative capacities, thus accelerating tangible real-world impact. The modern age of data-driven content creation has further highlighted the importance of exploring the growingly-complex dynamics of joint human-computer content creation. This exciting endeavour will center the content creators in this process, instead of focussing solely on the human-seeded AI content creation technologies.” said Dr. Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Associate Professor at McGill University and the Ubisoft-Mila Research Chairholder.

“Mila is proud to bring its researchers’ expertise in AI to an increasingly larger pool of industrial and creative applications. AI is changing all aspects of society, and as a leading research institute, we have a duty to ensure a responsible development and use of this powerful technology. This research chair is a great opportunity to show leadership in responsible use of AI tools in video games content creation and will contribute to bringing Dr. Derek Nowrouzezahrai’s groundbreaking research into more real-world applications,” said Laurence Beaulieu, Vice President, Academic Affairs, at Mila.

Source: Ubisoft, Mila, McGill

About Ubisoft

Ubisoft is a world creator committed to enriching players’ lives through unique and memorable gaming experiences. Its international teams create and develop a diverse portfolio of games, including brands such as Assassin’s Creed^®, Brawlhalla^®, For Honor^®, Far Cry^®, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon^®, Just Dance^®, The Lapins Crétins^TM, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six^®, The Crew^® and Tom Clancy’s The Division^®. Through Ubisoft Connect, players enjoy a service ecosystem to enhance their gaming experience, earn rewards, and stay connected with their friends across any platform. The Ubisoft+ subscription offer also allows them to enjoy a catalogue of over a hundred titles and downloadable content (DLC) from Ubisoft. For the fiscal year 2022-23, Ubisoft’s net bookings amounted to 1.74 billion euros. For more information, go to: www.ubisoftgroup.com.

About Mila–Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute

Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Mila is an artificial intelligence research institute that brings together over 1,200 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 McGill University

Founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1821, McGill University is Canada’s top ranked medical doctoral university. McGill is consistently ranked as one of the top universities, both nationally and internationally. It is a world-renowned institution of higher learning with research activities spanning three campuses, 11 faculties, 13 professional schools, 300 programs of study and over 39,000 students, including more than 10,400 graduate students. McGill attracts students from over 150 countries around the world, its 12,000 international students making up 30% of the student body. Over half of McGill students claim a first language other than English, including approximately 20% of our students who say French is their mother tongue.