The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation (NBIF) is an independent funding corporation. In January, Jeff White, its CEO, Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Minister of Official Languages and Minister responsible for ACOA, and Jenica Atwin, Member of Parliament for Fredericton, officially launched the new “NBIF Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fund”. The objective of the Fund is to bring together academic researchers and companies to collaborate.

New Brunswick is a Canadian province of about 750,000 inhabitants, located south of Quebec, on the Atlantic coast. Artificial intelligence is, as in Canada (and all developed countries), considered a major strategic asset for economic growth, employment and innovation. The Canadian government has decided to support financially via the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), an agency managed by the federal government, this fund dedicated to AI. Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Minister of Official Languages and Minister responsible for ACOA, states:

“We are committed to expanding opportunities like the NBIF AI Fund, which has the potential to strengthen the Canadian ecosystem and generate unprecedented social and economic benefits. This fund will help keep our workers and industries competitive over the long term, to the benefit of all Canadians.”

NBIF and AI

The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation is an agency that seeks to promote entrepreneurship: it invests in start-ups, helps innovative companies get off the ground, funds applied research to develop new intellectual property, helps commercialize university and institutional research. FNIB defines AI as:

“the constellation of technologies that work together to enable machines to sense, understand, act and learn with human-like intelligence. This includes machine learning, neural networks and other related technologies.”

Programs supported by the fund will focus on applied AI development projects and their deployment in industry to provide access to AI expertise, talent and research for Atlantic Canadian businesses to increase their productivity and competitiveness. Academic studies will not be supported. 3.2M will be invested in this dedicated AI fund to:

– Help industry partners advance through the maturity phases of AI.
– Accelerate ongoing applied AI research programs.
– Engage industry in AI research via collaborative events and share successes.
– Provide a suite of targeted applied research programs.

Fund Objectives

The objective of this fund is to assist and foster the creation of new industry-academia collaborations by allowing an industry partner to explore a small project related to an artificial intelligence (AI) application with an academic partner at no cost. The project must be focused on using applied AI to solve an industrial problem, with the potential to advance the industrial partner’s problem definition to at least a proof of concept within nine months.

Funding of the fund

ACOA is contributing 1.3 million, an additional $850,000 is coming from researchers and industry partners. Jeff White, CEO, NB Innovation Foundation, states:

“This fund will accelerate the creation and adoption of artificial intelligence solutions for businesses through strategic partnerships with New Brunswick research experts from our educational and research institutions. In addition, it will support the training and development of experts who will be critical to delivering these solutions to industry. The adoption of AI technologies will increase the resiliency and competitiveness of New Brunswick businesses facing ever-changing market conditions.”

Translated from Canada : Un nouveau fonds dédié à l’intelligence artificielle pour accélérer la capacité de recherche appliquée