Can Northern Ontario become a thriving hub for AI jobs?
With Sudbury's Cambrian College now welcoming its first cohort of students in the AI and Machine Learning program, instructor Yousef Elarian believes it just might.
Elarian leads the post-graduate program at the Sudbury campus, with between 35 and 40 students expected to begin in January. The end goal, Elarian said, is to fortify learners with the skills to tackle technological challenges in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) — and the inevitable disruptions — ahead.
“I want students to be problem-solvers in smart ways,” Elarian told Northern Ontario Business. “And in some aspects, [Northern Ontario] should, in my opinion, be a hub in whatever industries that are hot here, like taxes and mining … even city planning.”
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AI, at least as it relates to mining, is not just a straightforward field with a specific application, either.
While the technology and its fast-paced advances grab headlines for its ability to automate manual tasks — think drones, assistants and robots — there’s a wide range of uses. Developers, entrepreneurs and programmers are just scratching the surface of its fullest potential.
His program, Elarian said, will enable students to “look under the hood” of AI to learn the nuts and bolts of how it operates and bring a fresh perspective to the industry.
“Imagine a car,” he said. “We are not teaching them just how to drive, but also to understand everything working underneath.”
So when it comes to AI, what exactly is under the hood?
The learning, Elarian said, is arranged on the three typical uses of machine learning.
“Computer vision is where we make the robot able to recognize and understand what to see,” he said, while audio-related applications revolve around its understanding of speech and ability to transcribe language.
Siri, Apple’s AI assistant, is an example of the latter, while generative AI apps like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion and their ability to create images from a text prompt exemplify the former.
“There’s also natural language processing,” Elarian said. “Something related to understanding an article and summarizing it into a few sentences, or being able to generate an article out of a few sentences.”
Cambrian’s courses will delve into all three of those applications, Elarin said. Following a capstone assignment at the end of the program, students design their own AI-powered project.
After that, Elarin said, students will be “ready for any market.”
“But afterwards, if they decide that they want to do their final project in Northern Ontario, or stay in Northern Ontario when it’s done, they're more than welcome to do that.”
Machine Learning in the Mines
Being in Canada’s mining capital, people naturally want to know more about how AI will apply to the resource sector. That’s where learning about computer vision will provide students with an immediate application they can bring to their workplace.
“Whenever we think of mines, we think of getting fewer people down there, and more autonomous robotics down there,” Elarian said.
“To make the robot autonomous, where you don't even need to control it with a remote control, you need computer vision. You need to put a camera, probably an infrared camera, probably a metal camera, and make that robot able to navigate correctly there.”
Another of Sudbury’s biggest employers — the Canada Revenue Agency Tax Collection Centre — could also benefit from AI.
Scanning tax returns, generating emails, and calculating refunds could all be automated, creating a faster turnaround time.
In short, Elarian said, every business will need to — or benefit from — adopting machine learning.
“Many people are afraid that if we do not leverage AI in our business,” Elarian said. “That business will sink slowly. “
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As with any new technology, concerns eventually arise about its downsides. One of the aspects of AI that is often mulled over is its usability for students — teachers regularly find it being used for cheating in school.
Although tools exist — QuillBot, for example — to detect the use of AI in students' assignments, there’s a larger body of knowledge that needs to be applied when considering what could potentially be created without guidance or oversight.
That’s where learning about the ethics of AI comes in.
“At the program level, we have two courses that deal with ethics,” Elarian said. “One only for ethics, and one that deals with something called data collection — what should I collect? … and privacy issues.”
“After that, it boils down to the instructor level, giving clear guidelines on what I accept and what I do not accept in my class in relation to AI.”
In some of his other classes at the college, Elarian said he’s been “bold” when it comes to telling his students to experiment with AI as a tool, as long as they are reporting its use.
“In other programs and other courses, depending on the need of the course, professors will say, ‘No, you will have to give this test here in the room without access to AI.’ So it differs. And at the instructor level that's good. The same instructor can change depending on needs, what and how they want to instruct.”
The program itself was a few years in the making, Pam Teed, chair of Cambrian’s schools of Information Technology and Creative Industries, said.
“We are always looking for opportunities for meeting demands in industry where there may be opportunities for filling some gaps in the workforce,” Teed said.
“AI machine learning happened to be one of those. So it's a process that takes a bit of time, but we developed this curriculum to try to meet some of those needs. And in consultation with industry partners and with faculty, we developed this graduate certificate program.”
Jill Ferguson, dean of the Douglas A. Smith Family School of Business, Schools of Creative Industries and Information Technology, said she expects the program to attract a wide variety of students.
“I do think that we're going to see people who have been in the industry for a while who are very excited about AI and know that if they have the skills, they can operationalize it within their workplace and really make some great changes,” Ferguson said.
“Think about it — AI will allow a doctor to take patient notes almost instantly, and that speeds up the delivery of health care in this province,” she said. “Just imagine the problems that it can help solve.
“When you come back with this knowledge of AI, you can transform your workplace.”