I flew in from Pearson Airport (Toronto) into Ottawa late evening yesterday (May 1st) with my colleague Yves Demers after attending a well organized 2 day event at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC). The event was celebrating 20 years of the Ontario Centres of Excellence, (OCE) and in conjunction was also the Discovery 2007: To Next technology conference.

OCE is the champion for innovation in Ontario. OCE’s sole responsibility is to create an Ontario that is synonymous with ingenuity. By building the competitive potency our changing world demands. In so doing transforming the province into a global innovation powerhouse.

The Ontario Centres of Excellence is accelerating innovation across the province. Propelling research from idea to income. Cultivating bolder attitudes towards invention and investment. And locating the footholds innovators need to reach new heights.

S4Potential was one of the many participants (approx 150) at this year’s event. The highlight of our presence was to showcase our efforts and ambitions to take our current programs to the next level - incorporating Artificial Intelligence into our platform and programs.  We are working in collaboration with Carleton University HOTlab and the University of Toronto (U of T).

Both are playing a crucial role in advancing, our current platform. The Carleton University Hotlab is responsible for doing the research {experimentation} and data analysis, which is based on numerous human factors such as how people interact with computers and personality styles such as extro and intro and learning styles such as…auditory vs. visual.

Carleton University will then provide U of T with the critical characteristics that are able to distinguish personality and learning type. This data will then be used by the University of Toronto and developed into algorithms, and the combination of work from both universities is then incorporated into the S4Potential platform and used in the development of our programs.

The end result is a program which adapts to a user based on the user’s personality and learning styles thereby giving the user an experience that is unique to them.

OCE is good at that! Fostering partnerships between educational institutions and the private sector to develop breakthrough products and technologies. There were various examples of the situation I just described at the event.

I also got the chance to look around the exhibitor hall and it is truly amazing to see the kinds of things that were on display, a couple caught my attention, including BTI Photonics, microWDM solutions which allows you to add fiber bandwidth and new high- capacity services quickly, cost effectively and without compromise. Having this solution is particularly useful for streaming video or files, corporate multimedia presentations, on-demand consumer programming.

Another very interesting group I had a chance to talk to was SimonSays voice; and they are a two year old startup specializing in audio data mining and keyword spotting.  Their speech recognition technology automatically transcribes audio data into text files making them easy to search through, easy to organize and easy to analyze. Simon Says say their engine is among the most robust in the marketplace and works on audio from a wide array of sources (recorded files, VOIP calls, conventional phone calls) and for a wide array of compression formats (mp3).

There was an excellent speech given by Sandra Pupatello, the Minister for Economic Development and Trade during the lunch hour yesterday. She kept the audience engaged by driving home the point of making Ontario a leader in innovation and getting the best out of our people - this province’s greatest asset is the people and their ability to drive innovation. Other notable speakers were David McFadden, Chair of the OCE and the Hon. David R Peterson, PC, QC of Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP.

Overall, it was a good event for S4 to attend and not only because of the exposure that we got, but also to get a sense of what lies ahead in terms of the marketplace and what it has to offer now and in the future.

(Beau Sackey is responsible for business development at s4potential, a provider of excellent web or computer based CBT training and other e-training programs for correctional, health, social and corporate organizations.)