With the 2015 arrival of Professor Andrea Lodi at the helm of Polytechnique Montréal’s CERC – Data Science for Real-Time Decision-Making team, Québec consolidated its leading position in one of science’s most dynamic and revolutionary fields: big data.
“Never before has humanity had so much information at its disposal. We can get data from just about anywhere, from sensors, mobile devices, in industries as diverse as transportation, retail, logistics, tele- communications, and healthcare. The central question that interests us is: how can we use this data to make decisions that will improve people’s lives,” explains Professor Lodi.
Anchored in Montreal’s artificial intelligence ecosystem, the Chair led by Professor Lodi maintains collaborations with the IVADO Data Valorization Institute, Scale.AI, IVADO Labs, ÉlementAI, and also with the industrial sector, as well as hospitals, and humanitarian organizations.
Combining machine learning with mathematical optimization, the CERC team simultaneously runs dozens of decision support projects across various fields. From helping with kidney transplant decisions at the Center hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), to planning drone trajectories during humanitarian disasters, to stock market fraud detection, the Chair uses advances in artificial intelligence to benefit all of society. The CERC team is also working to advance basic research at the intersection of machine learning and operations research, in turn pushing the frontiers of knowledge in both fields. The group also seeks to democratize these technological advances for all industries by supporting open source software projects, such as the Extensible Combinatorial Optimization Learning Environments (Ecole) library, in collaboration with other teams of developers worldwide. (www.ecole.ai)
