A Fantastic Reunion: XPRIZE Symposium on Creating Societal Change

A Fantastic Reunion: MSSI x XPRIZE Symposium on Creating Societal Change

On February 3rd, 2025, we gathered at McGill University’s Faculty Club Ballroom for an unforgettable day of collaboration and innovation. This event celebrated McGill’s induction into the XPRIZE Higher Education Network, marking a new era of research, entrepreneurship, and real-world impact.

As part of XPRIZE’s global future-positive movement, we explored how innovation can drive solutions for clean water, sustainable food, affordable housing, quality education, top-tier healthcare, and renewable energy. Every day, XPRIZE works to create a world of infinite possibilities—where imagination, collaboration, and technology shape a better future for all.

A special congratulations to our outstanding winners:

Laura Wasserson – As Co-founder amp; COO of Metalplant, Laura is at the forefront of sustainable material innovation, developing eco-friendly alternatives to traditional metals for a greener future.

Jordan Masys – The Co-founder amp; COO of Labfront, Jordan is transforming healthcare research by harnessing wearable technology to provide real-time data insights for scientific breakthroughs.

Etienne Laliberté – Co-founder & CEO of Rubisco AI, Etienne is revolutionizing plant science with AI-driven solutions to enhance sustainable agriculture.  Professor at Université de Montréal and the Co-founder & CEO of Rubisco AI, is revolutionizing the field of agricultural sustainability. With his expertise in plant biology and AI, Laliberté is dedicated to improving crop efficiency while reducing environmental impact.

Through Rubisco AI, he brings artificial intelligence into plant science, offering innovative solutions in precision agriculture and ecosystem monitoring. The company’s work enables farmers and researchers to make data-driven decisions, leading to more efficient resource management and healthier, more resilient crops.

Laliberté’s work bridges academia and industry, combining research on biodiversity and ecological resilience with practical applications that promote sustainable land use and food security. As a leader in AI-driven innovation, he collaborates with global stakeholders to shape the future of agriculture, proving that technology can be a powerful tool for sustainability.

The University celebrate this new collaboration Feb. 3 with a symposium that is to include a sneak peek at future XPRIZE competitions

McGill has partnered with XPRIZE Foundation, an organization that designs and sponsors multimillion-dollar global competitions to drive innovation and solve real-world problems.

McGill’s partnership means its faculty and students will receive preferred access to XPRIZE’s events and alumni, as well as to fellowships, internships and grant programs to support academic research and student engagement.

By  Stephanie Wereley

We are excited to announce that Rubisco AI contributed to the canopy tree mapping solution of the Limelight Rainforest team that won the $10M #XPRIZERainforest competition!

We worked with a team dedicated to forest monitoring using AI and drone imagery alongside researchers from Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle, Université de Montréal and McGill University and helped them to design an efficient tree crown detection and segmentation pipeline.

Our canopy tree mapping solution successfully detected and segmented crowns of >23k canopy trees over 100 ha of remote tropical Amazonian forest from high resolution imagery.

Our team trained a detection model over >55k new tree crown labels from rainforests across Brazil, Ecuador, and Panama. Tree crowns were segmented with high-quality detections predicted on the competition area. This approach has shown great performance for tree instance segmentation such as what we developed in our Rubisco AI proof of concept.

All of this work has been possible thanks to local botanist experts who helped us to collect tens of thousands of tree species labels from drone images, using ground truthing and photo-interpretation.

Overall, our team was able to estimate the aboveground carbon of every segmented canopy tree in the 100 ha plot. We found that all trees together stored over 3000 tons of carbon in their stems and branches.

Rubisco.ai

Data Infrastructure and Analytics
Headquarters
Montreal, Quebec
Privately Held
Founded
2024
Specialties
Computer vision, Artificial intelligence, Remote sensing, Forestry, Biodiversity, Vegetation, and Tree carbon

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Your groundbreaking work is shaping the future, and we are honored to celebrate your achievements.

Together, we’re driving real change.