Scott Hayes | [email protected]
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The sky's the limit with Tourism Jasper's new one-year partnership with Edmonton's Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) into its operations.
The project will both build AI capacity and explore applications of AI to help support Jasper's tourism operators.
This is an extension of an existing collaborative relationship that the organization has with Amii, explained James Jackson, president and CEO at Tourism Jasper.
"Both organizations felt as though the timing was right to just progress things, but really, what it comes down to is first, having the ability to share artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of the Dark Sky Festival. It aligns with the festival's underlying science foundation," Jackson said.
"But then selfishly for us as Tourism Jasper, we would love to be able to really lean into this space and be a leader in machine learning as it relates to destinations. That's really where we're hoping that this partnership will blossom into something really fantastic."
Amii researcher Patrick Pilarski was a presenter during last year's Dark Sky Festival and is set to return to Jasper for the 2023 fest.
Pilarski's experience in 2022 allowed him to see Tourism Jasper's commitment to integrating STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) into its planning for how people explore and engage with the park.
That inspired Amii to deepen its relationship with Tourism Jasper, said Stephanie Enders, Amii's vice president of product.
"We have really great relationships with organizations that want to make data driven decisions,” Enders said.
“I would say the tourism industry across the board was probably one of the industries that was looking at data to fuel their decisions for many, many decades.”
She noted that the AI research institute at the University of Alberta started in 2002.
AI research is now well-established and has the potential to help solve virtually limitless challenges in different areas of interest to the tourism industry, everything from light pollution monitoring, visitor management safety, wildlife conservation and beyond.
"Alongside our sister institutes – Vector Institute in Toronto and Mila in Montreal – we really do have the tools to advance this landscape of artificial intelligence for all Canadians,” Enders said.
“I really love how diverse the perspectives are, and what the huge range of research areas are."
Amii is in the process of recruiting 20 additional University of Alberta Research Chairs who will be embedded in various faculties, not just Computing Science.
"It's not just AI for the sake of AI ... we're seeing AI researchers in health, in Indigenous identity, in space, in energy,” Enders added.
“We're really seeing that overlay of this amazing technology into all kinds of domains."
The work begins with data, which Tourism Jasper already has a wealth of, Jackson said.
Over the last several years, the organization has concentrated on bolstering its data intelligence in various areas such as hotel performance to visitation to dispersion within the park.
"Now we have this really great data foundation, and we've been manually gleaning insights from that [so] we can optimize the destination's performance,” Jackson said.
“The vision is that hopefully with the assistance of Amii, we can leverage some machine learning tactics that can increase our efficiency at gleaning those insights from all that data.”
His hopes for the future are for Tourism Jasper to be extremely efficient with forecasting, especially in relation to the many externalities that affect travel such as weather, airline disruptions, booking patterns and the occasional pandemic.
"The idea is through this foundational body of work that we've done and then applying some machine learning to be able to analyze those externalities will be much more efficient at predicting travel for Jasper but also then influencing it, and that's directly related to what we do every day."
The really cool part of the partnership is that Amii is open to anything, Jackson said, adding that he thinks that the AI will identify some "low hanging fruit" either in its data or in the systems that Tourism Jasper can address immediately before deeper efficiencies arise.
"It might go in any number of directions and the technology is progressing so fast that we just knew that we had to step up and start to address this,” Jackson said.
”I'm really, really proud of this partnership."
