Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The big data revolution has begun. A new kind of entrepreneurship is emerging, and businesses are moving*away from solely relying on hard-won human experience to rather favor innovative data-driven approaches,*which are more accurate, cost effective and robust. Their main motivation is to take advantage of the volume*and great variety of newly available data (e.g., social media interactions, web traffic logs, text records, image*databases, etc.). Intact Insurance, the industrial partner, is no stranger to the recent advancements in data*analytics and foresees the tremendous potential that the big data paradigm has to offer to the insurance industry.*This paradigm shift implies the creation of data-driven processes for important aspects of insurance businesses,*such as estimating the risk, detecting frauds, simplifying subscriptions, forecasting long-term costs of sinisters,*or accelerating claim processing. Any improvements on these processes will result in benefits both to the*insurer and the customers, by reducing costs to both parties and improving service delivery.*A lot of research is currently devoted to the extended family of data sciences, Artificial Intelligence only*being the tip of this massive iceberg. Through this Collaborative Research and Development project, Intact*Insurance and the Big Data Research Center (BRDC) of Université Laval will collaborate to foster the creation*of new data science technologies. Effort will be put to improve general problems of big data analytics, in the*context of insurance: extraction of information from textual documents, identification of complex concepts in*images, making sense of sensor data, recognizing patterns to make accurate predictions. This ambitious*research project will lead to significant improvements to the business processes of Intact, while strengthening*the multidisciplinary research initiatives at the BDRC and establishing the participating researchers as leader in*their respective fields. Moreover, the innovations will not only help Intact establish itself as a world leader on*exploiting big data in the field of insurance, but will also affect other Canadian industries and lead to improved*productivity, innovation and excellence.