Irvine-based Cylance Inc. has provided a gift donation of $50,000 to Computer Science Professors Alex Ihler and Padhraic Smyth to support the activities of UC Irvine’s Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems (CML). The funds will be used to support the Center’s weekly seminar series, to bring distinguished speakers to campus and for recruitment of new Ph.D. students in machine learning. Founded in 2012, Cylance now has 750 employees to help develop cybersecurity software using machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. Cylance is also a corporate partner of the UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences.

The first distinguished speaker seminar on Jan. 27, 2017 will be by Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a professor of computer science at CMU who was recently appointed director of artificial intelligence research at Apple.

“We are very grateful for this generous gift from Cylance, which will significantly enhance our ability to bring in leading researchers to speak at UCI and attract the brightest Ph.D. students to participate in our machine learning research program,” said Smyth.