Simons Institute Launches Strategic Partnership with IVADO

The Simons Institute will be partnering with Canadian research consortium IVADO to enhance and expand the Spring 2025 research program, Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers, Part II (LLM2).

IVADO is an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral research and knowledge mobilization consortium whose mission is to develop and promote a robust, reasoning and responsible AI. Led by Université de Montréal with four university partners (Polytechnique Montréal, HEC Montréal, Université Laval and McGill University), IVADO brings together research centers, government bodies and industry members to co-build ambitious cross-sectoral initiatives with the goal of fostering a paradigm shift for AI and its adoption.

By joining forces, IVADO and the Simons Institute aim to foster global collaboration on artificial intelligence research. This collaboration will unite academic leaders and emerging scholars to address both the technical challenges and transformative potential of LLMs and transformer architectures. The partnership will support the addition of a third thematic workshop within the LLM2 program, organized by Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal), Siva Reddy (McGill University), and other collaborators. The partnership will also enable long-term program participation by 8–10 researchers and students from Canadian universities.

"Partnering with the Simons Institute provides a unique opportunity to blend our complementary strengths and create a platform for the brightest minds to come together, share knowledge, and spark new AI innovations,” observed Luc Vinet, IVADO’s CEO. “This collaboration will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on the global scientific community."

By pooling resources and expertise, the LLM2 program will foster a dynamic environment for advancing AI research, bringing together experts in machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, among others.

Sampath Kannan, associate director of the Simons Institute, remarks, "The partnership with IVADO allows us to delve deeper into the most pressing questions surrounding large language models and transformers, while exploring their ethical, societal, and technical dimensions. We are delighted to co-organize this thematic semester together to integrate the deep expertise from the Montréal ecosystem and look forward to the breakthroughs it will enable."

This partnership marks the beginning of what we hope will be a long-term collaboration between IVADO and the Simons Institute, one that will continue to shape the future of AI research.