A $210 million investment. An R&D initiative to create more than 100 new, highly skilled jobs for Ontario. Seven leading Ontario universities supported by an IBM technology backbone that includes the fastest supercomputer in Canada and advanced analytics, agile and cloud technologies. Academics paired with IBM researchers to accelerate commercialization out of the lab and into the enterprise.
That announcement, one year ago at a major news event, brought together stakeholders representing the public and private sectors, collaborating to create a new economic cornerstone for Canada. The vision was for academia to work with industry to better manage and analyze massive data sets to solve critical world challenges in the spheres of health, cities and climate.
Fast-forward to today, and the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre has reached its one-year milestone. Skilled workers have been hired and more than 20 research projects have been initiated in the past 12 months, many collaborating directly with Ontario industry partners. The consortium is tackling:
- Healthcare issues including better diagnoses of Alzheimer’s and predicting how infectious diseases spread and how citizens would respond to quarantine measures
- Urban issues such as improving urban system design methods to better manage the transportation of people and goods and improve the quality of urban living
- Climate issues such as how to assess the impact of global warming on the Grand River -30-
