Grant: Applied Research Tools and Instruments Grants

Durham College is requesting NSERC support for an Applied Research Tools and Instruments (ARTI) grant is to enhance the capacity of the College’s centre of research excellence in artificial intelligence, known as the AI Hub, to meet the growing demand for Multimodal Models (MM) and Generative AI-powered (GAI) innovative solutions for our partner organizations. The ARTI grant will enable us to purchase two High-Performance Servers, specifically optimized for artificial intelligence (AI), performance graphics, and analytics. The multi-server environment developed through these two servers will facilitate large data processing by distributing the computational workload across the two servers, enabling parallel processing and significantly reducing the time required for data analysis and manipulation. As part of our ongoing efforts to develop partnerships that support the local and provincial economy through applied research in disruptive technologies, DC’s AI Hub has been serving clients across multiple sectors in Durham Region and beyond since 2017. Over the past five years, we have partnered with over 102 Multi-Sectoral Organizations, demonstrating a strong track record of regional AI innovation support. Recently designated a Technology Access Centre, the AI Hub delivers high quality research and development and innovation services in alignment with client needs, and consistently achieves excellence in service delivery. With the launch of multiple GAI tools, organizations are approaching the AI Hub to build their own versions of these extremely large models. Our current infrastructure can only support small and medium-sized data and AI-related projects. Consequently, processing big data, training large models, and handling deep learning tasks take from a few hours to several days, negatively impacting our project timelines and budgets. Therefore, we have prioritized acquiring high-powered servers with better specifications to effectively handle MM and GAI tasks. The additional computational capacity created with the two requested servers will enable us to implement GAI, large language models trained on big and complex datasets and MM AI applications for our clients, adding incremental value to our capacity and further catalyzing regional adoption of AI technologies, resulting in increased efficiencies, new products, and enhanced customer experiences.