Welcome to Northern Frontier, our video interview series that showcases in-depth and engaging conversations with some of the brightest academic minds in AI research today.

In our third instalment, we met up with Prof. Marcus Brubaker, assistant professor of computer science at York University and RBC Borealis‘s new research director at our Toronto center. Prof. Brubaker has done some ground-breaking work in computer vision, including a contribution to the recent Nobel Prize-winning Cryo-EM field, where his research helped accelerate the discovery of molecular structures.

Prof. Brubaker talks about his interest in exploring modalities of vision, whether we’re asking the right research questions, and explains why he likes to build lots of prior knowledge and known structure into his models instead of the more popular mainstream technique of building as little prior knowledge as possible. He also describes the last “holy shit!” moment he had in the lab.

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