Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

The Center of Expertise in Smart Prototyping (CEPI) contributes to rapid innovation in companies through applied research activities aimed at developing tools and techniques that reduce the risk associated with the development of product prototypes. Our business model is based on a partnership with industry, co-funded with public and private grants, where intellectual property ownership is transferred to the companies. We also meet an urgent need of local employers for multidisciplinary graduates able to rapidly contribute to their product development. IT Manager is a Canadian SME based in Ottawa, who delivers software-as-a-service that enables IT administrators to remotely monitor and manage their computer networks and systems. They currently have over 450 customers worldwide. IT Manager is interested in adding Artificial Intelligence to their software in order to automatically scan the network and systems (called nodes), detect and identify new nodes and nodes which have disappeared since the last scan (laptops for instance), decide what to monitor and how to do it, detect performance deterioration or faults (incidents), predict potential incidents, notify the IT administrators of the incidents, and take actions to prevent or resolve the incidents. To do this, our research proposes to design, train, validate, and test Artificial Intelligence (AI) models which will drive the IT Manager software. It is proposed to structure the research project into phases. Phase 1 is about exploring AI models for the automatic detection and prediction of some classes of incidents (to be further defined when the project starts). Phase 1 is the focus of this NSERC Engage grant. We anticipate addressing the other phases in a subsequent NSERC Applied R&D grant.