Concordia University and the telecommunications giant Ericsson will expand their existing partnership. The new 10-year agreement, announced Monday, will conduct more research focused on information and communications technologies.
The university and the Swedish company already had a collaboration agreement, in effect since 2011, which led to the publication of more than 60 scientific articles and the completion of several university projects. This relationship was established more than 20 years ago, says Mourad Debbabi, dean of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Cybersecurity Research Centre at Concordia University. A proximity that has led to “an extremely large number of patents,” he maintains.
Monday’s announcement expands the partnership already in place. The 10-year horizon will allow the partnership to go beyond funding individual projects to targeting long-term strategic directions. In addition, “we are expanding the areas of collaboration,” Debbabi said, including research and development, innovation and commercialization of discoveries, training and upskilling staff, and creating infrastructure — or access to Ericsson’s — to conduct research.
The company has not indicated the financial value of such a partnership, but it is a “significant agreement” if only because of its duration, according to Paul Baptista, head of university partnerships and ecosystems at Ericsson. Such agreements are attractive to the company, particularly in terms of employee training and the quality of the research conducted by Concordia professors, which helps address problems the company faces, he explains.
The work to be carried out under this agreement will cover several areas of information and communications technologies, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, 5G technology and cloud computing.
Concordia University becomes one of Ericsson’s seven “Tier 1” partners worldwide and the first in North America. This is “the highest level of collaboration between Ericsson and an academic institution,” the company and the university said in a joint statement.
The agreement is signed by the parent company of the company, based in Stockholm, but it is the Canadian subsidiary that will be the executor. “These will be researchers from Montreal. This is where we will do projects, recruit interns from Concordia. Everything will be done locally,” confirms Mr. Baptista.