Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence

The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a Canadian not-for-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. It is located in the West Building of the MaRS Discovery District.¹⁾

The Vector Institute was co-founded by Brendan Frey in March 2017.^{2) 3)}

On April 16, 2020, Roche announced the launch of its “Roche Data Science Coalition”, which included the Vector Institute as a collaborator, in order to work “with the global community to develop solutions to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.”^{4) 5)}

On April 24, 2020, the Vector Institute held a webinar titled “Innovating Through COVID-19 webinar - Digital Contact Tracing while Preserving Privacy: MyTrace.ca” during which they launched a contact tracing application called MyTrace.⁶⁾ It was led by Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a University of Toronto professor and faculty member at the Vector Institute.⁷⁾ Additional participants included Ashleigh Tuite of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Garth Gibson, President and CEO of the Vector Institute.⁸⁾ Partners on the MyTrace project included the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Empower Health, EQ Works, Open Tracers and Flatten.ca. The project was shuttered in June 2020 when the Government of Canada announced a national contact tracing app.⁹⁾

On July 5, 2023, Kids Help Phone announced it had partnered with the Vector Institute to deploy an artificial intelligence program to analyze the contents of calls from young people seeking mental health assistance.¹⁰⁾

The Vector Institute is partnered with:

• Acceleration Consortium¹⁶⁾
• Cardiac Arrhythmia Network of Canada¹⁷⁾
• GEMINI¹⁸⁾
• Ontario's COVID-19 Genomics Rapid Response Coalition¹⁹⁾

Additionally, the Vector Institute is a donor to the University of Toronto's Boundless Campaign.²⁰⁾

The Vector Institute is funded by:^{21) 22)}

• Government of Canada
  • Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
• Government of Ontario
  • Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade

• COVID Truth Initiative
• Website