Concordia University appoints new co-directors to direct Applied AI Institute
Concordia University’s newly launched Applied AI Institute has announced the appointment of Tristan Glatard and Fenwick McKelvey as co-directors, to further its interdisciplinary activities, partnerships and interests.
Glatard holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) on Big Data Infrastructures for Neuroinformatics. Before coming to Concordia in 2016, he was a research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a visiting scholar at McGill University.
In 2021, Glatard co-founded the Applied AI Institute in 2021 along with Gina Cody School professors Kash Khorasani from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Nizar Bouguila from the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering. Khorasani and Bouguila remain involved in the institute as founding directors and will add their research expertise and leadership to the institute’s capabilities.
McKelvey, professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and Science, joins Glatard as the institute’s co-director. He studies the internet’s infrastructure, looking at the AIs, daemons — computer programs that run in the background — and bots lurking in our networks. These artificial intelligences pose new governance questions.
With over 95 professors and 200 graduate students, the institute collaborates with eight research centres across Concordia’s four faculties.
Their focus is on three research clusters that address AI applications’ impact on all members of society, creating deep learning methods for scientific medical imaging, and integrating AI into smart cities, industry and manufacturing, and aerospace.
A main priority of the institute will be to foster a diverse and inclusive environment.
Focus on partnerships and training
The Applied AI Institute will partner with industry and governments to solve real problems. Its relationship with Ericsson has been a proof-of-concept that has produced real-world results for both academia and industry.
From 2018 Ericsson has worked with Concordia and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to house three industrial research chairs at the Gina Cody School, specializing in: software-defined networking and network functions virtualization security; cloud and edge computing for 5G and beyond, and; model-based software management.
In addition, researchers affiliated with the institute have ongoing partnerships with businesses and organizations such as: Hydro-Québec, Thales, National Bank of Canada, Government of Quebec, Ciena, Ubisoft, CAE, IBM, Heyday, Brainbox AI, Mitacs, and NSERC.
Looking forward, the institute plans to offer an array of services to students, researchers and the AI community in general, including training opportunities and help to startups.
Article Topics
AI/ML | Ciena | Concordia University | Ericsson | ethics | governance | healthcare | Industry 4.0 | regulation | security | smart city
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