Innovative Solutions Canada - 2 new challenges have launched!
Think you can solve either of these challenges? Compete for funding to prove your feasibility and develop a solution!
Interrogator for Fiber Bragg Grating Distributed Sensing Arrays
The National Research Council's (NRC's) Security and Disruptive Technologies (SDT) Research Centre hosts a number research teams exploring the fundamentals and applications of ultrafast quantum optics, quantum photonics and fiber optics. Over the past decade, the Fibre Photonics team within SDT have developed state-of-the-art ultrafast laser inscription of FBG technology that can be used for sensing in extreme environments (high temperatures, pressures and ionizing conditions). Methods and techniques developed by the team remove several key processing steps in traditional FBG manufacturing which enables the fabrication of quasi-distributed FBG sensor arrays with potentially hundreds to thousands of FBG sensors on a given fiber. These techniques have been transferred to Canadian industry through licensing. There is a wide range of applications of such sensor arrays including structural health monitoring of civil structures (bridges, hydro-electric dams, wind turbines etc.), energy production and environmental monitoring (oil pipelines, gas turbines), green technologies (electric vehicle battery performance), that cannot be cost-effectively addressed using existing technology. An important limitation of this new quasi-distributed sensing technology is that traditional FBG sensor interrogation methods are limited in the number of sensing elements that can be measured. Cost competitive equipment that can measure up to thousands of sensors is required in order to unleash the full potential of the ultrafast laser inscription intellectual property developed by NRC. However, none is commercially available. In this challenge, the NRC is seeking the demonstration of a data acquisition system (interrogator) with the ability to interrogate both spectrally and spatially hundreds if not thousands of FBG sensing elements that are present on distributed fiber optic sensing array on a single optical fiber. This challenge closes December 16th, 2pm EST!
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AI decryption service
The RCMP, along with all Canadian law enforcement, is currently facing the dilemma of criminals using sophisticated encryption to circumvent and otherwise prevent investigators from lawfully accessing data seized during the course of criminal investigations. The use of these encryption techniques by individuals engaging in illegal behaviour greatly diminishes their risk of prosecution. It is public knowledge that police can obtain judicial authority to search a device, but they cannot compel an individual to provide a password. This scenario greatly incentivizes individuals to use some form of encryption on all their data as a secondary insurance against legal prosecution. The RCMP is looking to develop an AI system that can ingest material seized during an investigation and generate case specific word lists which will be utilized in an attempt to decrypt the seized data. This AI should be able to ingest and process forensic data files as the source material. This challenges closes on December 16, 2pm EST!
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