The 2018 Antidote Scholarship Awarded to Sarath Chandar

As part of the Druide Fund for Research in Text Analysis, created through a donation from Druide informatique, the Mila Laboratory has chosen the winner of its 2018 Antidote Scholarship. The lucky recipient of the $20,000 scholarship is Mr. Sarath Chandar, a Ph.D. student under the joint supervision of professors Yoshua Bengio et Hugo Larochelle.

A graduate of Anna University, Mr. Chandar also holds a master's degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Madras. Attracted by Mila's excellent reputation, he chose to do his Ph.D. in Montreal. Through his research on large-scale memory neural networks, he is tackling the problem of long-term dependency presented by language processing and reinforcement learning. His master's thesis, entitled Correlational Neural Networks for Common Representation Learning, won IIT Madras' Best Thesis award in 2016.

In 2017, to mark the 20-year anniversary of its Antidote software, as well as 50 years of Université de Montréal’s Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO), Druide informatique announced the creation of a million-dollar fund for research into deep learning-based text analysis. In addition to establishing the Fund, Druide also set up the Antidote Scholarship which awards $20,000 to one deserving student each year.

The Druide Fund for Research in Text Analysis is awarded to Mila, a laboratory led by Professor Yoshua Bengio, globally renowned for his spectacular breakthroughs in deep learning-based artificial intelligence. With 250 researchers coming from both sides of Montreal’s Mount Royal, Mila is a leader in its field. Drawing inspiration from Silicon Valley, Professor Bengio and his team hope to make Montreal into the “AI Mountain”, a goal that Druide informatique is proud to support through the Druide Fund and the Antidote Scholarship.

Antidote was already a remarkable mainstream application of artificial intelligence when it launched in 1996. Its corrector, guides and dictionaries have since benefited from 20 years of continuous evolution, culminating in 2015 with the extension of its full capabilities to the English language. Today, more than a million people use Antidote. Druide is methodically pursuing the development of Antidote and aims to be among the first to pass the benefits of deep learning research onto its users.