Bell, Telus projects get go-ahead in superclusters announcement

OTTAWA — Two “superclusters” involving BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. are among the five that will receive funding as part of the federal government’s $950 million initiative, according to an announcement Thursday at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. The superclusters initiative was first proposed in the 2016 federal budget, and is meant to create public-private partnerships with technology companies and academic institutions that are focused on a specific theme and located in similar region. The government announced the finalists in October. Telus is part of the Digital Technology supercluster on the west coast, and Bell will be participating in the Montreal-based AI-powered supercluster. André Beaulieu, Bell’s senior vice-president of corporate services, told The Wire Report in a phone interview that “all the projects’ structures will, in one way or another, use telecoms technology — particularly fibre, for very high bandwidth and particularly wireless data.” In Bell’s case, its intelligent supply chain group has been dubbed Scale.ai (for Supply Chains And Logistics Excellence.AI). The next steps of the consortium—which hopes to elevate Canada’s ability to contribute to the global supply chain—will be to decide on and and make a push for standardization across participating industries, according to its website. But when that occurs they hope to unleash some of today’s promising machine learning, cloud networks and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and achieve some pretty lofty goals like creating a “circular economy”— the ideal of a “cradle to cradle” (compared to today’s cradle to grave) system with no waste. Beaulieu pointed to the fact that today’s supply chain and procurement for many entities — governments, and businesses large and small — is based on “20th century technology.” That means “by definition, it is unintelligent, it's data poor and it's inefficient. The supercluster aims to reverse these three things,” he said. The B.C. supercluster will use Canadian telecom networks as well as “advanced data collection, analytics and visualization,” Telus’ chief corporate officer, Josh Blair, said in a statement published on Thursday to coincide with the announcement. Taking advantage of data analytics combined with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the group has chosen three main projects to start with. It will apply data science to securely study genomic health and combat cancer, use earth-imaging and remote sensors to improve land-use and environmental sustainability, and build simulated virtual spaces in VR and AR of the data already collected on infrastructure like hospitals and roads. “You can do full simulations of what if scenarios, before you pour too much capital into one particular area,” said Bill Tam, president and CEO of the BC Tech Association, a leading partner of the Digital Technology group with Telus. “Some of the companies in our consortium are working with truck manufacturers around building simulations on truck sizing and hood shapes. All in virtual reality,” he said in an interview at Thursday’s announcement. Whittled down from a short list of nine proposals, the other winners announced on Thursday were groups which will focus on oceans from Atlantic Canada, advanced manufacturing in Ontario, and developing plant protein technology in Saskatchewan. The announcement drew some criticism Thursday, as Opposition Innovation critic Maxime Bernier shared an image comparing the move to a rigged lottery through social media. “Under the pretext stimulating innovation, Justin Trudeau and his minister Navdeep Bains will hand out close to $1 billion to well-connected business consortia,” he said. — With reporting by Bryson Masse at bmasse@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Bell, Telus projects get go-ahead in superclusters announcement

News | February 16, 2018

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Bell, Telus projects get go-ahead in superclusters announcement

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