Northern Industries Innovation Fund: Sparkgeo Consulting

NORTHERN INDUSTRIES INNOVATION FUND:

Spark Geo Consulting

Photo: Sparkgeo Consulting

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PINE BEETLE RECOVERY

SMALL BUSINESS

Sparkgeo Consulting seeks to create data specialist jobs through NIIF rebate

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is the ability for a machine to think and learn, while machine learning (ML) is a variety of AI that teaches a machine to do a digital job which a human could do, but not at the same pace.

Sparkgeo Consulting, a Prince George company that creates custom geospatial software, believes that you cannot have AI or ML without training data – and that is a job for humans.

“For instance, a human can look at an aerial photo and discern a vehicle in it. A human could look at a few hundred pictures a day; however, a human cannot be multiplied and then asked to work 24 hours a day until a task is complete,” said Will Cadell, CEO, Sparkgeo. “That is a much better job for a machine, but humans are still needed to teach the machines the tasks that need to be done.”

To further explore the idea of training data, Sparkgeo applied for and received a $50,000 rebate through Northern Development’s Northern Industries Initiative Fund (NIIF). The project explores whether Sparkgeo can create a team of Artificial Intelligence (AI) data specialists from underemployed resource workers through the following:

• Opening a data lab in Prince George • Developing basic technology to capture training data • Developing basic training procedures in the capture of training data • Publicizing in an effort to attract both ends of the market

This project demonstrates that a resource community’s employment profile can be diversified with modern technology jobs. “Through our work with geographic technology, we know that machine learning will revolutionize how our society at large uses data,” said Cadell. “We intend to be deeply involved in this market and we feel that our local community can benefit too.”

Sparkgeo believes that, given the recent downturn in the local resource economies, the company can find people interested in diversifying their skills into a very different industry.

“We have hired one person for this project and fully expect to continue to build a team around this topic,” said Cadell. “There is enormous potential in this technology and we intend to leverage it fully.”