The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Institute for Research, Borealis AI, has announced a collaboration with Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, to support an artificial intelligence (AI) research project on climate change.

“We see immense potential for technology to help address the challenges of climate change and are pleased to invest in these solutions with our partners in the AI ecosystem of Montreal, a world-class hub for machine learning research,” said Foteini Agrafioti, chief science officer at RBC and Head of Borealis AI. “Through this collaboration, Borealis AI researchers will support and work with Mila groups on computer vision and natural language processing algorithms.”

As part of this collaboration, together with RBC Quebec, Borealis AI donated $50,000 to Mila’s climate AI research efforts. This donation will help Mila develop a tool that uses AI technology to produce street view images that show the potential effects of climate change.

“Climate change is humanity’s biggest crisis and our hope is that we can apply machine learning to raise awareness regarding the future impacts of climate change, making it more concrete and more personalised, and ultimately trigger collective action,” says Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific director of Mila and professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal.

The tool’s goal is to raise awareness regarding climate change and to view the output of climate models in a visual way. When developed, the tool would allow a user to input a location and see a visual projection of the potential effects of extreme weather events at this location at street level, making these effects more visceral than traditional aerial and satellite images.