By Darrell Etherington From TechCrunch

Google has invested a total of $4.5 million CAD ($3.4M US) in AI research in Montreal’s Institute for Learning Algorithms, with an academic fund covering three years that will help pay for seven faculty members across various Montreal academic institutions, including the University of Montreal and McGill. The investment is also continued backing for deep learning expert Yoshua Bengio’s work, and is part of Google’s continued bet on Canada’s strong expertise in machine learning and AI research, both of which are becoming increasingly important to its core business.

To that end, along with the investment, Google is also opening a brand new deep learning and AI research group in Montreal at its existing office in the city. The new team will be a remote arm of its Google Brain team based in Mountain View, and will be led locally by Hugo Larochelle, a deep learning expert who’s returning home to Montreal from a role with Twitter in Boston specifically for the new position.