Cooperation with Industry in Real-time Systems at Crim

Given the increasing pressures on the private sector to be competitive in the world marketplace , governments , industry, and universities have come to understand the importance of encouraging technology development within the framework of technology transfer. The Computer (science) Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM) or in French, le Centre de recherche informa-tique de Montreal, was created in 1985 to address such needs by pooling resources from the public, private, and para-public sectors in the province of Qu ebec to perform R&D activities in key areas of information technologies including real-time systems. In this article, we begin by presenting CRIM, its mission and activities, and then we describe the kinds of education and technology transfer which take place at CRIM with speciic emphasis on two collaborative projects involving industrial partners, CRIM staa, university professors and their graduate students in the area of computerized control systems. 1 CRIM at a glance Traditional university-industry cooperation works well when there are few players involved, such as a single professor or perhaps a small team of professors (and their graduate students) at the same university collaborating with a single company. Indeed, most universities have created industrial liaison centers to help university professors prepare research contracts, deene and administer intellectual property policy, commercialize their research and establish contacts with potential industrial sponsors. But when there are many players involved such as several companies, diierent research organizations and several professors from diierent universities , the administrative and technical aspects of deening a single project with multiple goals, and of keeping the ball rolling, requires much more than the scientiic expertise that university professors can provide. For this reason and in response to a university-led initiative, the Computer (science) Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM) was created by the Qu ebec government in 1985 as a private, non-proot corporation. CRIM's base funding is provided by the provincial Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Science and Technology (MICST) and supports the infrastructure necessary to initiate and conduct R&D projects. CRIM is managed by a Board of Directors with 16 members: 7 university representatives (mostly Vice-Rectors), 7 industrial representatives , 1 representative from the provincial government , and CRIM's President and CEO. As of this writing, CRIM has a total of 92 members, including 75 companies active in various information technologies, and 10 universities in Qu ebec. Today, CRIM's mandate is deened in terms of four broad interconnected goals: To implement pre-competitive …