Mila Announces Four New Canada-CIFAR AI Chairs and One Renewal

Four Mila academic members have been appointed Canada-CIFAR AI Chairs, while Amir-massoud Farahmand’s existing chair has been renewed. Mila announced the appointments on October 6, 2026. The program provides university-affiliated professors with long-term, dedicated funding for research and training the next generation of AI leaders in Canada.

The Canada-CIFAR AI Chairs Program is part of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

Four appointments, four research directions

• Felix Dangel, an assistant professor at Concordia University and associate academic member at Mila, studies ways to improve neural-network learning. His research uses second-order properties, including the curvature of the loss landscape—the mathematical surface describing a network’s errors. Mila says his work aims to make learning algorithms faster, easier to interpret and more efficient in their use of computing resources.
• David Meger, an associate professor at McGill University and associate academic member at Mila, focuses on physical AI systems and autonomous robotics. His approach combines 3D spatial perception with data-efficient reinforcement learning. The goal is to improve robots’ adaptability and their ability to operate in complex real-world environments.
• AJung Moon, an assistant professor at McGill University and core academic member at Mila, works across robotics, ethics and human-machine interaction. Her research program aims to develop practical algorithmic governance frameworks and inform public policy on the responsible development of autonomous systems.
• Eva Portelance, an assistant professor at HEC Montréal and associate academic member at Mila, connects AI research with linguistics and cognitive science. She uses computational models to study human language acquisition. Mila describes two linked aims for that work: improving neural architectures, the structures underlying neural networks, and enriching theories of cognitive learning.

The program aims to recruit top AI researchers from around the world to Canada while supporting existing talent.

Mila, describing the Canada-CIFAR AI Chairs Program

Continued support for learning agents

The renewal goes to Amir-massoud Farahmand, an associate professor at Polytechnique Montréal and core academic member at Mila. His research examines the computational and statistical mechanisms needed to design efficient AI agents. These are systems that interact with their environment and adapt to improve their performance over time. Mila says the renewal recognizes his work on improving those agents’ long-term performance.