The federal government announced a $40-million investment in Blackberry QNX, which will support Carleton’s research in autonomous systems.
According to a news release from the university, Carleton president Benoit-Antoine Bacon said the investment is expected to “generate 1,000 much-needed co-op placements, as well as new scholarships for young women and Indigenous people.”
Fred Afagh, interim dean of the faculty of engineering and design, said these co-op positions will encourage students’ experiential learning.
“Co-op placements give students hands-on experience to apply the theory and academic background that they develop at school,” he said. “Plus, they become a very good ground for them to connect for future employment.”
Afagh also said the investment includes more scholarships for Indigenous and female students, which will be “useful to increase their admission and existence in Carleton’s engineering programs.”
Cameron Davis, a Carleton software engineering student, said creating these co-op positions will teach students the skills required for the entry-level positions they will be applying for in their last years of university.
“In a lot of cases, even though engineering and computer science students have a lot of access to jobs, it’s somehow still hard to actually find work,” he said. “An issue that upper-years face is that a lot of the jobs that are available require you to have a certain amount of years of experience in a certain area. It’s very frustrating. Later on in your university career, you’ve done all this learning, yet you still struggle to find a job because these companies have very high expectations.
“Opening up more doorways for people to get that experience is important,” he added.
Rony Amaya, associate professor in the electronics department at Carleton, said research in autonomous systems, particularly on self-driving cars, “will affect everyone in the future by enabling smart cities, reducing air emissions and providing vehicular access to areas and groups otherwise inaccessible.”
According to Afagh, Carleton is a “leader” in the development of autonomous systems.
“One of the reasons we have been such a pioneer in this area is because Ottawa itself has been a pioneer at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels,” he said. “The region has been aiming to transform itself to become the connected autonomous vehicle hub of Canada.”
“By not constraining our current research to commercial available electronics, Carleton researchers can take advantage of their unique expertise in hardware, integrated circuits, and antennas to provide robust solutions to this complex challenge,” Amaya added.
Brendan Lucas, vice-president external of the Computer and Systems Engineering Society, said the unprecedented nature of the autonomous systems allows for more creativity.
“I, like many of my peers, am in this line of work to create. Research into autonomous systems will accelerate our development and help us improve upon what humans are already able to do,” he said.
According to Lucas, the investment is important because technology has been growing exponentially as a field around the world, but Canada is more of a “lacklustre player.”
“QNX is a really big office with what could be considered a really large potential for growth,” he said. “If QNX is able to participate in the future of automated vehicles in the same way that RIM/Blackberry participated in the early smartphone era, that would be really significant not only for Carleton, but for our country, as well.”
Graphic by Madison Venugopal
