The New, AI Tech Hub Emerging At U de M
SHIPPAGAN – Université de Moncton’s Shippagan Campus is poised to get a major upgrade and become a regional tech hub after it was chosen as the home of a new artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics hub.
“This is a very important, relevant project not only for us, but for all industries and enterprises that are our partners in the region,” said Sid-Ahmed Selouani, the vice-president of U de M’s Shippagan Campus.
The AI and robotics hub, expected to cost about $500,000, has received $197,000 in support from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), and $110,000 from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.
ACOA says the hub will develop industrial processes to help the manufacturing and seafood sectors, as well as “respond to the increased need for training of a specialized workforce.”
Selouani told Huddle the hub will provide high-level training, courses, and workshops in robotics and artificial intelligence for students at the undergraduate and graduate level. The idea is to provide support to the “economic ecosystem” in the Francophone community in northeast New Brunswick.
“Today, we have four Ph.D. students and two masters students involved but we aim to recruit more students and will also have undergrad students and technicians also,” he said.
Local Boon
Selouani says the technology developed at the hub will be a benefit to the larger community, with AI and robotics bringing things like automation and AI-augmented quality control to industries operating in the region.
He noted the Shippagan region is a coastal area with a variety of industries — including fisheries, peat production, and manufacturing sector entities — all of which can benefit from the automation and sophistication that comes with integrating artificial intelligence and robotics into their business.
ACOA touted the robotics hub as an economic boon for the Acadian Coast community of around just over 2,500.
Selouani said the research at the new AI hub can be implemented into everything from quality control in a lobster plant to the detection of cancerous tissues in biopsies.
“In 2023, it will be a game-changer in many industries and sectors, so in Shippagan, we aim to have a facility and infrastructure to be ready to help our industries and enterprises tackle the issues to give them knowledge and to educate the people,” he said.
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The establishment of an AI and robotics hub at the Shippagan Campus will help augment enrollment, said Selouani. He noted that, already, the Shippagan Campus’ Human-System Interaction Research Laboratory is open to gradeschoolers in a bid to showcase and grow interest in the burgeoning field.
“The future is to give such skills to them, to be ready and have a region that’s not disconnected from what happens in the world of industry and automation and process optimization,” he said.
“We have more than 20 years of experience in this field and our own algorithms.”
The most recently announced round of funding comes just shy of two years after ACOA, Mitacs, and the NFIB invested more than $1.7 million into U de M’s Center for Artificial Intelligence at the institution’s Moncton campus, and created a Master’s of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Program that started this year.
One of the Center For Artificial Intelligence’s early projects, according to information from NB Power, was to develop AI to help monitor data on power poles, transformers and vegetation growth across the Crown-owned utility’s 28,000 kilometres of power lines.
Sam Macdonald is a Huddle reporter in Moncton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].