HEC Montréal is proud to announce that it has received a $1,203,136 grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), under the Foundation’s Leading Edge Fund, for the School’s Calculation and Data Mining Laboratory. It will cost $3 million to create this new laboratory. The Quebec government will be matching the contribution by the CFI, and other partners will also be contributing. The project has been handled by Full Professor Michèle Breton, Director of the HEC Montréal Centre for Research on E-finance.

For HEC Montréal, the new Calculation and Data Mining Laboratory (LACED) is a priority if the School is to continue its high-level management research. The Laboratory, equipped with servers and workstations, will have databases in economics, finance, marketing and other management fields, and specialized software for processing such data and performing scientific simulations and calculations. This infrastructure will be used by faculty and graduate and postgraduate students for a variety of mainly multidisciplinary research purposes. Research themes include distribution management and logistics, integrated risk management, governance, macroeconomics, mathematical finance, data mining and energy and environmental management. The 10 main researchers involved in this project are: 

• Michèle Breton, Director, Centre for Research on E-finance and the Finance and Insurance Calculation Laboratory
• Jean-François Cordeau, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Logistics and Transportation
• Jean-Claude Cosset, Full Professor with the Department of International Business and Director of Research
• Georges Dionne, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Risk Management
• Pierre Hansen, holder of the Data Mining Chair
• Gilbert Laporte, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management
• Michel Normandin, Director of the Inter-university Centre on Risk, Economic Policy and Employment
• Suzanne Rivard, holder of the Chair in Strategic Management of Information Technology
• Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné, holder of the Chair in International Economics and Governance
• Georges Zaccour, holder of the Chair in Game Theory and Management

Partnerships

Many research projects at the LACED will be conducted in co-operation with private- and public-sector partners, working on real-life management problems. By simplifying collaboration between researchers and the industry, the LACED infrastructure will make it possible to quickly transfer knowledge and apply the best management practices in Quebec.

The new Laboratory will be an extension of the existing Finance and Insurance Calculation Laboratory (LACFAS), which also received CFI support and which has gradually come to be used by the entire HEC Montréal research community. In fact, researchers plan to pursue partnership projects with some companies with which multidisciplinary research has already been carried out, including the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the National Bank, Desjardins, the Bank of Canada, Hydro-Québec and Statistics Canada.

Lastly, in addition to the majority of research chairs at HEC Montréal, a number of institutional partners and research groups are involved in the LACED: the Institut de finance mathématique de Montréal (IFM2), the Inter-university Centre on Risk, Economic Policy and Employment (CIRPÉE), the Centre for Research on E-finance (CREF), the Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD) and the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT).