The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a Canadian-based global research organization that brings together teams of top researchers from around the world to address important and complex questions. It was founded in 1982 and is supported by individuals, foundations and corporations, as well as funding from the

Government of Canada The Government of Canada (), formally His Majesty's Government (), is the body responsible for the federation, federal administration of Canada. The term ''Government of Canada'' refers specifically to the executive, which includes Minister of t ...

and the provinces of

Alberta Alberta is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Canada. It is a part of Western Canada and is one of the three Canadian Prairies, prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to its west, Saskatchewan to its east, t ...

and

Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...

Operations

CIFAR staff supports more than 400 researchers from 21 countries and more than 140 institutions. Approximately half of the researchers are based in Canada and half are located abroad. The President and CEO is directly responsible to the

Chair A chair is a type of seat, typically designed for one person and consisting of one or more legs, a flat or slightly angled seat and a back-rest. It may be made of wood, metal, or synthetic materials, and may be padded or upholstered in vario ...

and the

Board of Directors A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

, who are responsible for funding allocation and approval of research programs. In November 2022,

Stephen Toope Stephen John Toope (born February 14, 1958) is a Canadian legal scholar, academic administrator and a scholar specializing in human rights, public international law and international relations. In November 2022, he was appointed as the fifth pre ...

became president and CEO. Irfhan Rawji is the chair of CIFAR's Board of Directors. Jacqueline Koerner and

Anne McLellan A. Anne McLellan (born August 31, 1950) is a Canadian politician and academic who served as the ninth deputy prime minister of Canada from 2003 to 2006. She was a cabinet minister in the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin ...

serve as co-vice chairs. CIFAR receives funding from a blend of governments, partnerships (research organizations and universities), private sector (corporations, foundations and individuals) and investment income. CIFAR's annual budget in 2018 was $30M. In 2017, CIFAR was asked by the Government of Canada to develop and lead the

Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy Regulation of artificial intelligence is the development of public sector policies and laws for promoting and regulating artificial intelligence (AI). It is part of the broader regulation of algorithms. The regulatory and policy landscape for AI ...

Research programs

As of 2023, CIFAR supports research in 15 major multidisciplinary areas: * Bio-inspired Solar Energy (established 2014) * Boundaries, Membership & Belonging (established 2019) * Brain, Mind & Consciousness (established 2014) * Child & Brain Development (formerly known as Experience-based Brain and Biological Development, established 2003) * Earth 4D: Subsurface Science & Exploration (established 2019) * Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities (established 2019) * Future Flourishing (established 2023) * Gravity & the Extreme Universe (established 1986) * Humanity's Urban Future (established 2023) * Humans & the

Microbiome A microbiome () is the community of microorganisms that can usually be found living together in any given habitat. It was defined more precisely in 1988 by Whipps ''et al.'' as "a characteristic microbial community occupying a reasonably wel ...

(established 2014) * Innovation, Equity & the Future of

Prosperity Prosperity is the flourishing, thriving, good fortune and successful social status. Prosperity often produces profuse wealth including other factors which can be profusely wealthy in all degrees, such as happiness and health. Competing notions ...

(established 2019) * Learning in Machines & Brains (formerly known as

Neural Computation Neural computation is the information processing performed by networks of neurons. Neural computation is affiliated with the philosophical tradition known as Computational theory of mind, also referred to as computationalism, which advances the th ...

& Adaptive Perception, established 2004) * The Multiscale Human (established 2023) *

Quantum Information Science Quantum information science is a field that combines the principles of quantum mechanics with information theory to study the processing, analysis, and transmission of information. It covers both theoretical and experimental aspects of quantum phys ...

(established 2002) * Quantum Materials (established 1987) Past programs: *

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

and

Robotics Robotics is the interdisciplinary study and practice of the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. Within mechanical engineering, robotics is the design and construction of the physical structures of robots, while in computer s ...

(formerly known as Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and

Society A society () is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. ...

, established 1983, closed 1995) *

Population Health Population health has been defined as "the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group". It is an approach to health that aims to improve the health of an entire human population. It ha ...

(established 1983, closed 2003) *

Evolutionary Biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biolo ...

(established 1986, closed 2007) * Laws and the Determinants of

Social Order The term social order can be used in two senses: In the first sense, it refers to a particular system of social structures and institutions. Examples are the ancient, the feudal, and the capitalist social order. In the second sense, social orde ...

(established 1986, closed 1996) *

Economic Growth In economics, economic growth is an increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and Service (economics), services that a society Production (economics), produces. It can be measured as the increase in the inflation-adjusted Outp ...

and

Policy Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an or ...

(established 1991, closed 2002) * Earth System Evolution (established 1992, closed 2014) *

Human Development Human development may refer to: * Development of the human body ** This includes physical developments such as growth, and also development of the brain * Developmental psychology * Development theory * Human development (economics) * Human Develo ...

(established 1993, closed 2003) * Science of Soft Surfaces and Interfaces (established 1993, closed 2000) *

Nanoelectronics Nanoelectronics refers to the use of nanotechnology in electronic components. The term covers a diverse set of devices and materials, with the common characteristic that they are so small that inter-atomic interactions and quantum mechanical ...

(established 1999, closed 2013) * Genetic Networks (established 2002, closed 2020) * Successful Societies (established 2002, closed 2019) * Institutions, Organizations & Growth (established 2004, closed 2020) * Social Interactions, Identity & Well-Being (established 2005, closed 2017) * Integrated Microbial Biodiversity (established 2007, closed 2017) * Molecular Architecture of Life (established 2014, closing 2020)

History

20th century

CIFAR was founded in 1982. The original idea for an institute for advanced studies came from John Leyerle, a professor of English and dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

who began rallying support for the concept in 1978. The centre would serve to "foster basic, conceptual research of high quality at an advanced level across the full spectrum of knowledge in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and life sciences." Fraser Mustard, a medical doctor and researcher in early childhood development, was appointed as founding president of CIFAR in January 1982. The first 25 years of its history is covered in the book ''A Generation of Excellence'' by Craig Brown. CIFAR fellows published several papers in 1994, including "Why are some people healthy and others not", that argued policies driven by population health could address

health disparities Health equity arises from access to the social determinants of health, specifically from wealth, power and prestige. Individuals who have consistently been deprived of these three determinants are significantly disadvantaged from health inequit ...

. They named 10 determinants of health, listing socio-economic status as the most influential. The government adopted the term population health and renamed a branch of the

Public Health Agency of Canada The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC; ) is an agency of the Government of Canada that is responsible for public health, emergency preparedness and response, and infectious and chronic disease control and prevention. History The PHAC was f ...

"Population and Public Health."

21st century

In 2004,

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI". Hinton is Univer ...

began leading CIFAR's Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception program. Its members included

Yoshua Bengio Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian-French computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the AI institute Montreal In ...

and

Yann LeCun Yann André Le Cun ( , ; usually spelled LeCun; born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Pr ...

, among other neuroscientists, computer scientists, biologists, electrical engineers, physicists, and psychologists. Together, they confirmed Hinton's conviction about the power of neural networks when they created computing systems that mimicked human intelligence. Today, the three are widely acknowledged as the pioneers of

deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

. In 2019, the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(ACM) named Hinton, Bengio and LeCun as recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep

neural network A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perfor ...

s a critical component of computing. In April 2012, the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

Sustainable Development Solutions Network published the first

World Happiness Report The World Happiness Report is a publication that contains articles and rankings of national happiness, based on respondent ratings of their own lives, which the report also correlates with various (quality of) life factors. Since 2024, the r ...

co-authored by CIFAR Senior Fellow John F. Helliwell at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

; Lord

Richard Layard Peter Richard Grenville Layard, Baron Layard FBA (born 15 March 1934) is a British labour economist, co-director of the Community Wellbeing programme at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and co-editor of t ...

, Director of the Well-Being Programme at LSE's Centre for Economic Performance; and Professor

Jeffrey Sachs Jeffrey David Sachs ( ; born November 5, 1954) is an American economist and public policy analyst who is a professor at Columbia University, where he was formerly director of The Earth Institute. He worked on the topics of sustainable develop ...

, Director of

The Earth Institute {{Infobox organization , name = The Earth Institute , image = Ei blue1.gif , map_size = , map_alt = , map_caption = , map2 = , type = , tax_id ...

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

, Director of the SDSN, and Special Advisor to the

UN Secretary General The secretary-general of the United Nations (UNSG or UNSECGEN) is the chief administrative officer of the United Nations and head of the United Nations Secretariat, one of the United Nations System#Six principal organs, six principal organs of ...

. In 2017,

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED; ; )''Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada'' is the applied title under the Federal Identity Program; the legal title is Department of Industry (). is a Ministry (government ...

(ISED) renewed and enhanced its funding for CIFAR, investing $35 million over five years. The government also announced that CIFAR will administer a $125 million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy for research and talent. In 2022, CIFAR announced the second phase of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which includes up to $208 million in federal support to CIFAR over ten years.

Notable people

CIFAR has been led by a series of notable Presidents: Fraser Mustard from 1982 to 1996, J. Stefan Dupré from 1996 to 2000,

Chaviva Hošek Chaviva Milada Hošek, ; (born 6 October 1946) is a Canadian academic, feminist and former politician. Background Hošek was born in Chomutov, Czechoslovakia. Her mother was imprisoned in Auschwitz during World War II. The family initially move ...

from 2001 to 2012, and Alan Bernstein from 2012 to 2022. The current President, as of 2023, is

. Since the institute's inception, 23 Nobel laureates have been associated with CIFAR. *

Daron Acemoglu Kamer Daron Acemoğlu (;, ; born September 3, 1967) is a Turkish Americans, Turkish-American economist of Armenians in Turkey, Armenian descent who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1993, where he is currently the Ja ...

* George A. Akerlof *

Sidney Altman Sidney Altman (May 7, 1939 – April 5, 2022) was a Canadian-American molecular biologist, who was the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University. In 1989, he shared the Nobel Prize in ...

* Philip W. Anderson *

Kenneth Arrow Kenneth Joseph Arrow (August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, mathematician and political theorist. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1957, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972, along with ...

Willard Boyle Willard Sterling Boyle, (August 19, 1924May 7, 2011) was a Canadian physicist. He was a pioneer in the field of laser technology and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm he ...

Walter Gilbert Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932) is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate. Education and early life Walter Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932, into a Jewish family, the so ...

Leland H. Hartwell Leland Harrison "Lee" Hartwell (born October 30, 1939) is an American former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse an ...

Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (; ; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist best known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memor ...

* Brian Kobilka *

Robert B. Laughlin Robert Betts Laughlin (born November 1, 1950) is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Along with Horst L. Störmer of Columbia University and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton Universi ...

Anthony J. Leggett Sir Anthony James Leggett (born 26 March 1938) is a British–American theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Leggett is widely recognised as a world leader in the theory of low-tempe ...

* Art McDonald *

Roger B. Myerson Roger Bruce Myerson (born March 29, 1951) is an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago. He holds the title of the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The Pearson Institute for the ...

* James Peebles * John C. Polanyi * Richard J. Roberts * James A. Robinson *

Paul Romer Paul Michael Romer (born November 6, 1955) is an American economist and policy entrepreneur who is a Seidner University Professor in Finance at Boston College. Romer is best known as the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and for co- ...

* Michael Smith *

Eric Wieschaus Eric Francis Wieschaus (born June 8, 1947 in South Bend, Indiana) is an American Evolutionary developmental biology, evolutionary developmental biologist and 1995 Nobel Prize-winner. Early life Born in South Bend, Indiana, he attended John Carro ...

David Wineland David Jeffery Wineland (born February 24, 1944) is an American physicist at the Physical Measurement Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). His most notable contributions include the laser cooling of trapped ...

Notes

External links

Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
{{authority control Organizations established in 1982 1982 establishments in Ontario Research institutes in Canada