The Vector Institute’s governing board includes Google, Uber and many of Canada’s largest banks. The institute is being set up as a global hub for artificial intelligence.

The Vector Institute, which the Canadian government set up earlier this year in a bid to help establish Toronto as a global hub in artificial intelligence with more than $150 million of public and private funding, has named Garth Gibson, a Carnegie Mellon professor, as its first chief executive.

Gibson will head the institute from January 2 2018.

A native of the Toronto-area, Gibson, 58, moved to the U.S. in the 1980s to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and took up a job at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he has also held several research and administrative posts.

The Vector Institute’s members include Canada’s largest banks, Alphabet Inc’s Google Inc, and Uber Technologies Inc.

The institute’s offices and laboratories are currently under construction at the University of Toronto, where artificial-intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton conducted breakthrough research in deep learning and trained some of the most accomplished researchers in the field.