The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) are pleased to announce the funding of a new Research Community to conduct unclassified research on cutting-edge technologies in areas of strategic importance to CSE and the Government of Canada, focusing on exploratory analysis for unstructured data.

Professor Benjamin Fung from the School of Information Studies, McGill University, and his team of 14 co-applicants and collaborators from 10 Canadian universities (Carleton, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Guelph, Laval, McGill, McMaster, Queen’s, Saskatchewan, the Royal Military College of Canada, and Victoria) have been awarded a total of $5.6 million over four years to support a large project entitled: “ZenithVector: Advanced Vectorization, Embedding, and Cybersecurity Analytics Toolkit for Scalable Intelligence”. The goal of this Research Community is to develop a comprehensive, multimodal solution for the exploratory analysis of large collections of unstructured data (e.g., text, code, and images). The project integrates advanced techniques to develop the building blocks necessary to understand, explore, and visualize collections of unstructured data in a way that makes sense to the human brain.

This is the second of four joint funding opportunities being offered by NSERC and CSE over the next four years, stemming from a Memorandum of Understanding between the two organizations to award Research Communities grants to Canadian university researchers. Each funding opportunity focuses on a different topic, and the next one is expected to launch in 2027.

The grants are being awarded through NSERC’s Alliance grants program.