Armilla AI and Mila partner to advance quality assurance for next generation machine learning systems

TORONTO, Sept. 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Armilla AI, a leading quality assurance platform for ML scientists, today announces its partnership with Mila, the world's largest academic research center in deep learning. Through this new partnership, Armilla AI will work alongside Mila to pioneer applied research methods for AI testing and validation to improve model performance while addressing key issues related to fairness, bias, explainability and robustness.

In 2021, the global AI market was valued at USD 93.5 billion and is projected to expand at an annual rate of 38.1% from 2022 to 2030. While investment into AI research and innovation has accelerated, "quality assurance" for AI systems—a common notion in traditional software development—has failed to keep pace. As a result, a gap persists around tools and testing frameworks capable of providing deeper insights into model quality, performance and risk. Today's piece-meal approach to AI testing means that a high percentage of AI projects risk failing in development or contributing to real-world harms after they are released.

Armilla AI and Mila will work together to equip researchers and practitioners with the knowledge and tools for building high-quality, trustworthy AI systems at scale. Mila's AI for Humanity team and Armilla will explore research collaborations on novel approaches to bias detection and mitigation. In addition, Armilla will work closely with Mila's applied research teams to develop comprehensive testing and validation solutions for the next generation of machine learning systems and to expand the platform's AI assessment and audit capabilities.

"Mila is one of the top AI institutes in the world, and a leading voice for responsible AI research and practice," said Dan Adamson, CEO of Armilla AI. "It's an honour to work alongside Mila's experts to develop the cutting-edge solutions needed to make progress in the field and help businesses capitalize on their investments towards responsible AI adoption." Armilla views the partnership as a way to deepen its network within a vibrant AI research and innovation ecosystem and to leverage the world-class talent that Mila and its community have become known for.

"It is critical that organizations equip themselves with the tools to ensure their machine learning systems are developed ethically and responsibly," says Yoshua Bengio, Mila's Founder and Scientific Director. "We are thrilled to partner with Armilla, whose commitment to responsible AI resonates with Mila's values."

Armilla AI is a Toronto-based start-up developing a quality assurance platform for large and small enterprises to govern, deploy, and scale their machine learning (ML) systems. Founded in 2020, Armilla has developed the first all-in-one QA for ML platform. Its technology enables users to oversee every phase of model development, detect hidden biases and vulnerabilities, and receive automated alerts about abnormal behaviours. Clients leverage Armilla's platform to help accelerate time to production for trustworthy AI systems, and to support independent assessment and audit in compliance with emerging regulations, industry standards and certification frameworks.

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.

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