Always ahead of the curve in Artificial Intelligence
Revolutionizing Canada's potential for AI in health, natural resources, agriculture, productivity, services & workforce development.
Capturing the economic potential of made-in-Canada AI technology solutions & leadership.
At DIGITAL, we are helping Canadian companies get ahead of the curve by advancing the development, commercialization and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across numerous sectors. We’ve made over $200M co-investment commitments into a total portfolio size of $506M of collaborative AI investments that span health care, natural resources and agriculture, productivity and services. This is in addition to over $12M of co-investment commitments we’ve made into a total portfolio size of $40M of workforce development programming to increase AI-based skillsets and leadership for Canadians.
Our role in convening some of the most innovative, Canadian-led digital technology consortiums in the world is supporting Canada’s global leadership in ethical and responsible deployment of AI, while fostering a more innovative and competitive Canadian economy. This work has included our current Horizon AI program supporting Canada’s Pan-Canadian AI Strategy through the commercialization and adoption of made-in-Canada AI solutions; and building Canada’s presence in emerging market opportunities.
Since 2018, our work has resulted in the following:
- 132
- AI-Enabled Products & Services in Market from AI Co-Investments
- 1,400+
- Partner Organizations spanning Industry, Academia & Government
- $500M+
- Total AI Portfolio
- $13.8B
- Potential Revenue of AI Portfolio
HEALTH PORTFOLIO
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Accelerating Cancer Trials with Digital Twins
AI has the power to transform clinical trial design by speeding up timelines and reducing failure rates associated with bringing novel, efficacious cancer treatments to patients in need. Altis Lab’s computational imaging platform, Nota, allows biopharma sponsors to manage and automatically analyze imaging data from past and current clinical trials using prognostic AI models. Clinical development teams use these AI models to predict disease progression for each patient enrolled in their clinical trial, generating a computational control arm of digital twins.
Project lead:
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Telewound Care Canada
Through adoption of AI-powered wound care applications, clinicians can collect objective, unbiased wound data in an instant; be supported in making more appropriate, autonomous treatment decisions in real-time; and high-risk patients can be flagged to enable early intervention and prevent complications. Swift Medical’s work is accelerating the adoption, evaluation and commercialization of Swift Medical’s AI-powered wound assessment, decision support and predictive care technologies.
Project lead:
“Working with DIGITAL has greatly accelerated the pace of innovation at Swift Medical, deepening our IP strategy and assets. This has sharpened our competitive edge against global competitors, raised our profile in health technology, and allowed us to provide much more value to our healthcare customers – and ultimately their patients – with the technology we've developed and commercialized through the project.”
Justin Allport
Co-Founder and Chief Engineer, Swift Medical
NATURAL RESOURCES & AGRICULTURE PORTFOLIO
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Data Driven Surgical Mining
Novamera’s data-driven, real-time ‘Surgical Mining’ suite of technologies is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to allow mining companies to extract additional mineral deposits on existing and currently unmined projects, supporting increased production while reducing waste by up to 95%, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 44% and at a fraction of traditional costs. Their combination of hardware and software solutions generates real-time digital twin models of deposits; prescribes a course for surgical, low-impact extraction; and informs how and where to drill with real-time adjustments while using conventional drilling equipment.
Project lead:
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Precision Agriculture to Improve Crop Health
By applying computational biochemistry, genomics, machine learning (ML), computer vision and robotics, Terramera and their partners were able to develop new pest and pathogen controls to manage disease in field crops, minimize the use of pesticides, and secure export markets. Their work established the foundations of a computational biochemistry platform to facilitate digital data collection that enables computational models for developing new agricultural fungicidal formulations for wheat leaf rust, which is caused by fungal infections and attacks some of Canada’s most important crops, including wheat and barley.
Project Lead:
"This project was instrumental in kickstarting Metaspectral's foray into infrared imaging. Metaspectral's technology now allows users to train, deploy and derive insights from machine learning models using hyperspectral data in real-time, which was made possible in part through data compression technology developed during the project."
Francis Doumet
CEO, Metaspectral
PRODUCTIVITY & SERVICES PORTFOLIO
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AI-Enabled Metaverse Campus
OVA’s AI-driven immersive StellarX software is a 3D content creation platform that empowers professionals across various industries to develop intelligent, adaptive and interactive environments tailored to the needs of their organization. By leveraging spatial computing and ML, users can co-create with AI to animate assets, add interactions and create scenarios. This allows users to focus on what’s truly important, making the solution especially valuable for industries such as aviation and emergency response that require rapid content creation and decision-making. By streamlining remote collaboration and training, as well as tackling other logistically complex situations through a multi-user setting, they are rendering operations in these sectors entirely cost-effective.
Project Lead:
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The Learning Factory Digital Twin
By integrating advanced materials research with emerging manufacturing technologies, products can be made lighter, stronger, smarter, more durable and energy efficient, while minimizing production costs. Led by Avcorp Industries alongside a consortium of partners, their work demonstrated a functional blueprint of a digital twin solution for the manufacturing processes of aerospace components, allowing for hands-on learning and research to drive continuous improvements through real-time monitoring, quality control and AI tools for predictive manufacturing analytics.
Project Lead:
"The Learning Factory Digital Twin project was a resounding success. Having supported multiple FTEs, developed new commercial partnerships and the ecosystem of innovation we created between consortium partners was crucial in advancing our understanding of what it takes to create and deploy multi-disciplinary technologies into a cohesive and complementary solution. We have something amazing here, and the world is taking note."
Charles Lavigne
CEO, LlamaZOO
TALENT & WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
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OWL: Increasing Public Works Capacity in Remote Communities
Nearly 70% of rural water systems in Canada are categorized a medium to high risk of disruption (2016), potentially compromising access to over 500,000+ Canadians and especially impacting Indigenous communities. This project is evolving the Community Circle’s OWL platform into a suite of educational and training tools by leveraging conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality (XR) to enhance education to rural communities for better public works training on small water systems, operations and reducing water health risks. Further, it enables operators to find the right content at the right time in the moments that matter by utilizing AI support.
Project Lead:
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Athena Pathways
There is fierce competition for artificial intelligence (AI) talent in both Canada and around the world. At the same time, there is a significant gender imbalance in the field with the World Economic Forum raising the alarm, noting only 22 per cent of AI professionals globally are female (2022). This project provided over 570 girls and women, from middle to post-secondary students as well as professionals and leaders, with training, internships and mentorship in computing science and gender diversity in AI. Their work distributed over 320 scholarships, connected over 70 mentorship relationships and saw direct hiring of program participants by hiring partners.
Project Lead:
“I can't think of a better way to achieve progress than to create equal opportunities for women to get exposure to real-world experiences in the AI and tech industry while completing their academic training.”
Maryam Sadeghi
Co-Founder & CEO, MetaOptima
