TORONTO (Reuters) – A Toronto artificial intelligence institute set up in March with more than $150 million of public and private funding has named Carnegie Mellon professor Garth Gibson as its first chief executive.

The Vector Institute, which the Canadian government set up this year in a bid to help establish Toronto as a global hub for work in artificial intelligence, said on Monday that Gibson would head the institute from Jan. 2.

Gibson, 58, is a Toronto-area native who moved to the United States in the 1980s to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He took a teaching job at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he has also held several research and administrative posts.

Vector’s members include Canada’s largest banks as well as Silicon Valley technology firms Alphabet Inc’s Google and Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL].

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