Druide informatique announced at the end of May the winner of the 6th Antidote Fellowship in Automatic Language Processing (ALP). Victor Schmidt, a doctoral student under the supervision of Professor Yoshua Bengio, founder of the Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence Mila, receives the 2022 grant in the amount of $20,000. The Antidote Fellowship in NLP is awarded through the Druid Fund for Research in Text Analysis, created by a donation from Druid Computer Science to the Université de Montréal.

The Antidote Fellowship in NLP is awarded annually to a student in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the Université de Montréal whose research work is related to Mila. It comes from the Druid Fund for Research in Text Analysis, which was created to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Antidote software and the 50th anniversary of DIRO.

Druide informatique

Founded in 1993, Druide informatique is a Quebec-based company specializing in the development and marketing of writing assistance software. Its subsidiary, Éditions Druide, publishes fiction novels, short stories and essays, children’s literature, as well as reference works. The entire group has more than eighty employees, along with a network of collaborators and partners.

Druide’s R&D team has extensive experience in advanced computer science, including object-oriented programming, AI and graphical user interfaces. Druide also has a high level of linguistic expertise, whether in formal grammar, lexicography or semantics. With these skills, Druide has developed Antidote, a writing software that has been very successful in North America and Europe. Antidote 11, released in October 2021, applies deep learning for the first time, in the dual form of a neural correction engine and the pronunciation of all words in two languages and different accents.

The DIRO

The Department of Computer Science and Operations Research is a department of computer science and operations research in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the Université de Montréal.

Founded by Jacques Saint-Pierre in 1966, following the creation of the first computer science research laboratory at the Université de Montréal, DIRO is today one of the leaders in computer science in Quebec, Canada and the world. It is composed of 17 laboratories, some forty professors, assisted by researchers and students, and welcomes international graduate students.

Its research areas are artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, vision, computer graphics, software engineering, bioinformatics, quantum computing, stochastic simulation and operations research.

Victor Schmidt, winner of the Antidote fellowship in language processing

Victor Schmidt’s work has focused on applications of artificial intelligence to the fight against global warming, such as modeling clouds from satellite data. He has designed an algorithm that simulates the impact of climate change, such as flooding, forest fires or intense pollution, for a given address; the results can be seen on the website ceclimatnexistepas.com. which the Mila presented last October, to raise public awareness of the impact of a natural disaster. His work is also focused on finding materials that can improve the efficiency of hydrogen energy storage via water electrolysis.

Translated from Victor Schmidt, doctorant sous la direction de Yoshua Bengio, est le lauréat de la 6ème bourse Antidote en TAL