Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster Announces the first Cohort of Projects

Seven Projects with $40 Million of Investment in Precision Health, Data Commons, and Digital Twins

VANCOUVER, March 5, 2019 /CNW/ - Today, Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster announced its first cohort of projects. The projects total $40 million of investment over three years; and is comprised of $15 million of co-investment from the Supercluster that has leveraged over $25 million from industry, research and academic partners. The first cohort is focused on advancing Canada's development and application of digital technologies to solve some of the most pressing challenges in the natural resources, healthcare, and industrial sectors. These projects can strengthen the early detection and treatment of skin cancers, improve the prediction of manufacturing failures and analyze the economic and environmental impacts of resource projects. Together, these projects will increase Canada's competitiveness, improve healthcare outcomes and accelerate economic growth.

Each of the project teams bring together a broad consortium of partners that includes industry adopters, technology leaders, start-ups, small and mid-sized businesses, digital innovators and research organizations. Every project is industry-led, with each project team including five to nine partners collaborating to tackle ambitious technology development challenges that require their collective expertise to solve. The partners leverage British Columbia's and Canada's powers in data analytics, genomics, quantum computing, and virtual, mixed and augmented reality.

The seven projects approved under the Technology Leadership Programs are:

• Learning Factory Digital Twin
• Predictive Analytics for Manufacturing Processes
• Forest Machinery Connectivity
• Earth Data Store
• Tailored Health – Pharmacogenetics
• Dermatology Point-of-Care Intelligent Network
• Secure Health & Genomics Data Platform

"We are thrilled to celebrate the launch of our first cohort of seven technology leadership projects," says Sue Paish, CEO of the Digital Technology Supercluster. "We are proud to be delivering on the promise of the Innovation Superclusters Initiative so early in our mandate. The investments between the Supercluster and our project partners will propel Canada forward as a digital innovation leader, drive increased economic growth, and create jobs across the province and country."

"Our government is partnering with industry to enhance Canada's innovation ecosystem and create good jobs for Canadians," said the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development. "These seven projects, under the Digital Supercluster, is a big step forward in advancing data and digital technologies, creating positive impacts across our country and economy."

"Receiving a test result can be life-changing for some Canadians," said Ohad Arazi, Chief Strategy Officer, TELUS Health. "This revolutionary new Pharmacogenetics Supercluster project will enable advanced digital technology to seamlessly integrate testing into the primary care EMR and pharmacy ecosystems improving the flow of information from doctor to patient for better health outcomes."

"Canadian business face new challenges, but also new opportunities presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. By integrating technologies including AI, simulation, IIoT, big data fusion, and visualization, we can invent new ways of digitally twinning the manufacturing process. These digital twins will then be used to derive new meaningful insights, enhance the learning process and accelerate not only business outcomes but also educational outcomes for Canadian industries," said Charles Lavigne, CEO and Co-founder of LlamaZOO Interactive. "LlamaZOO is excited to work with our Digital Technology Supercluster partners and to have the opportunity to accelerate economic growth, productivity, and competitiveness in Canada."

"Every problem that the Digital Supercluster is tackling requires creativity and technology innovation across multiple disciplines. Specifically, predictive manufacturing promises to increase productivity, decrease failures and anticipate the maintenance that large-scale manufacturers require to stay up and running," said Warren Wall, Executive Vice President, D-Wave. "We are proud to be the technology provider bringing quantum computing to help address many of these difficult problems and look forward to ongoing collaboration to solve these real-world challenges."

"It's rewarding to see the first projects launch within Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster initiative," says Edoardo De Martin, General Manager for Microsoft Vancouver. "Among them, the Earth Data Store project (EDS) will create a new ecosystem for Canadian research and commerce, empowering members with an innovative cloud-based, distributed data archive and application platform to create geospatially-derived analytics products that are focused on customer verticals."

About Digital Technology Supercluster

Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster is an industry-led innovation consortium centered in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Supercluster aims to position Canada as a global leader in digital technologies by bringing together small, medium-sized and large companies, post-secondary institutions, research organizations and not-for-profits. The Supercluster co-invests in ambitious technology development projects and new solutions to improve the sustainability and competitiveness of natural resources, healthcare and industrial sectors and energize the economy. Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster manages the investments provided by the Government of Canada and the public and private organizations which constitute its membership. www.digitalsupercluster.ca.

About Technology Leadership Programs

The Supercluster delivers three Technology Leadership Programs to enable wide-scale adoption of digital transformation platforms in key industrial segments and develop and commercialize new products, services and platforms. The suite of Technology Leadership Programs includes: Precision Health Program, Data Commons Program and Digital Twins Program. These programs are core to the Supercluster securing Canada's global leadership in digital innovation and securing the social and economic benefits for Canadians.

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Kathleen Reid, Communications Specialist, [email protected], 604-724-1242