An UdeM computer-science professor wins a big U.S. prize

. Irina Rish Credit: Amélie Philibert | Université de Montréal - As part of a U.S. Department of Energy program and as the sole Canadian-based researcher, Irina Rish gets to spend 990,000 node-hours on the IBM Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. CONTENU - The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science has released the list of the 56 winners of its 2023 INCITE program - and renowned Université de Montréal computer-science professor Irina Rish is among them. The sole Canadian-based scientist on the list, Rish was awarded 990,000 "node-hours" to work over the next 12 months on the powerful IBM Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A node-hour is the usage of one node (or computing unit) on a supercomputer for one hour. Having access to the Summit will allow Rish to develop her project 'Scalable Foundational Models for Transferable Generalist AI,' which aims to train large-scale multimodal deep neural network models. "With this support," she said, "we are not only getting a supercomputing resource, we are also taking a step towards our long-term goal of democratising artificial intelligence and demonstrating that universities and open source communities can compete in this field." Rish is a professor in UdeM's Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, is a member of Mila, and holds a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Autonomous Artificial Intelligence and a Canada-CIFAR Chair in AI.