Bell is one of MITACS' biggest champions, and one of its biggest beneficiaries. It has been collaborating with the network since it was established in 1999.

"We were there from the beginning," says Alan Bernardi, General Manager of Bell University Labs, and a member of the MITACS Research Management Committee. "Having the best mathematical researchers in the country working together to help Bell solve real-world challenges is a real asset for our company."

Through its Bell University Laboratories program, the company partners with 41 Canadian universities on more than 80 research projects, including five MITACS projects in the areas of quantum information processing, commodity pricing, data mining, communication network efficiency and circuit optimization. Such industry-academia partnerships are helping to maintain Canada's global leadership in information and communications technologies.

Today, research advances from Bell-MITACS projects have been leveraged and are delivering positive results for Bell . For example, new algorithms developed in the project "Statistical Learning of Complex Data with Complex Distribution" led by Dr. Yoshua Bengio at the Université de Montréal are being used by Bell. "Based on the results from Dr. Bengio's team, our interaction has become more strategic, more sophisticated and more relevant to our clients," says Bernardi.

In another MITACS project, Bell is working with Dr. Paul Van Oorschot at Carleton University to study computer worms and other malicious software and network intrusions.

The mathematics community is also benefiting from the partnership. Bell offers both researchers and graduate students an opportunity to apply their theories and concepts to day-to-day industrial problems. While Mr. Bernardi admits they're not always the easiest problems to solve, they are "real problems with real constraints."

Bell Canada's longstanding relationship with MITACS and the country's academic community has raised awareness of the value sophisticated mathematical tools can deliver to business at all levels in the organization. "The ability to showcase real-world examples of how math can be applied to identify and solve business problems continues to drive the success of our efforts."