Media Releases

Super-computing partnership celebrates first anniversary

April 8, 2013

TORONTO, ON – 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 water­shed.

On April 10, please join IBM Cana­da Pres­i­dent John Lutz, gov­ern­ment offi­cials and rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, West­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, Queens Uni­ver­si­ty, Ontario Uni­ver­si­ty Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, Uni­ver­si­ty of Water­loo, Ottawa Uni­ver­si­ty and McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty, as they cel­e­brate this mile­stone.

EVENT DETAILS

What:  

  • Hear first-hand as researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, West­ern Uni­ver­si­ty and Uni­ver­si­ty of Water­loo their progress.
  • Vis­it a “research show­case” high­light­ing dozens of oth­er research ini­tia­tives
  • Learn about five new research projects and oth­er mile­stone achieve­ments

When: Wednes­day April 10, 2013,  9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

Where: IBM Inno­va­tion Cen­tre, 120 Bloor Street East, Toron­to, ON

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For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact:

UofT Media Rela­tions
Tel: 416–978-0100
media.relations@utoronto.ca