National Post (National Edition)
Slow takeoff to smooth landing
In 2004, the dialogue over a cup of coffee between Alex Sauriol and Moodie Cheikh, co-founders of Searidge Technologies, went something like this:
“Wouldn’t it be cool to have a global company?” “Yeah that would be cool.” “Maybe we should have a technology?” “Yeah we should.” Of course there is much more to the story than that self-effacing anecdote. According to Cheikh, they actually tossed around ideas for the better part of two years.
“There were so many cool things happening in tech in 2005. I was a generalist, Alex was a bit more technology focused, but not in a specific industry.”
The common ground they had, however, was that they wanted to do business around the world.
“We realized doing something with airports just made sense. As we started looking into that space, and how planes were controlled, we thought what a neat opportunity to take some cool technology and apply it in the industry.”
Ottawa-based Searidge launched in January 2006. “We were going to build a tech company specializing in airports and air traffic control,” Cheikh says.
“We didn’t quite know the problem we wanted to solve yet, so we did some consulting contracts and began exploring our network. Nav Canada is headquartered here, so we were able to learn a lot about the state of air traffic control around the world.” NAV Canada is a privately held company that operates Canada’s civil air navigation space, and is the world’s second-largest air navigation service by traffic volume.
They ultimately landed on the idea of remote (or digital) air traffic control tower operations to minimize or eliminate the need for physical towers.
“It hit us in the face,” Cheikh says. “What is going to restrict growth is that there won’t be enough room on the ground.
“We decided to focus on technology to help airports and air traffic control providers increase efficiency in that area.”
By 2006, they were able to take revenue from their consulting contracts, and leverage such government tax incentive programs as Scientific Research & Experimental Development and the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program.
“Every little thing we could do to extend our dollars, we would do. We even opened a small office in Gatineau to take advantage of provincial funding there,” Cheikh says.
Searidge has morphed into a major player in remote air traffic control tower platforms, competing with the best and the largest defence contractors in the world.
Today it has customers on every continent but Africa and serves major airports in 35 countries.
Sauriol believes Searidge has become one of the bestknown boutique operations in aviation.
“We’re Ottawa’s best-kept secret. Even though there’s a massive difference in weight between us and defence contractors like Saab, we do quite well.”
Despite the fact that Nav Canada was nearby, their first deals were international.
“We ended up in Abu Dhabi, Germany and the U.S. before Canada,” Sauriol says. “When NAV Canada came around to look at the technology in 2010, they decided to buy a majority interest.”
Just this month, Nav Canada entered a new international investment partnership with NATS, the U.K.-based air traffic management company; they will be equal shareholders in Searidge, which will continue to operate as an independent company.
More than a decade into product development, Searidge this March launched an integrated AI platform. Called Aimee, it’s an advanced neural network framework enabling the development of AI-based solutions for air traffic control and airport efficiency.
It has four key functional areas: computer vision processing, natural language processing, flight data/surveillance processing and analysis, and weather processing.
“It was built on the backs of the graphics and video work we did and uses a lot of the same back-end technology,” Sauriol says. “With Aimee, there are all sorts of other areas we can get into.”
Deep learning can aid in such areas as training new controllers and predicting traffic flow.
“You can make better decisions,” he says, “based on information such as weather and wind patterns over the last 10 years, and estimate the likelihood of a flight being on time (to) manage resources on the ground more effectively.
“For example, if Heathrow knows a flight from Dubai will be one hour late and will arrive in five hours, it can figure out how to squeeze another flight in and out of the gate. There’s a lot of efficiency to be gained with that.”
He stresses that Searidge is not in the business of replacing air traffic controllers.
“The airfield is littered with surveillance, flight, weather, lighting and other data. “We are suggesting there are better ways to manage it that enable controllers to do a better job.”
And, he says, Searidge is “well positioned to bring a fairly conservative, slow-tochange industry into a new AI era.”
TECHNOLOGY TO HELP AIRPORTS AND AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL PROVIDERS INCREASE EFFICIENCY.