30 Most Reputable Companies of the Year 2022
The Silicon Review
“We are pretty much isolated from any competition, because of the truly innovative and unique characteristics of our solutions in all sectors.”
Fornux Inc is a Quebec-based software and technology company, deterministic memory manager for C and C++ applications, making them leak and crash-free. It operates across the globe.
The company was established in an R&D effort to target the most difficult problems in science such as memory management in C++ and astrophysics.
Fornux was founded in 2004.
To highlight and further understand what Fornux Inc stands for and seeks to explore in this segment, I sat down with Phil Bouchard (founder), who serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. Below is an excerpt.
Head to Head with Phil Bouchard
Q. Where does Fornux Inc. stand at the moment relative to other participants in the industry?
We are pretty much isolated from any competition, because of the truly innovative and unique characteristics of our solutions in all sectors. For example, C++ Superset is the only alternative out there capable of fixing implicitly all memory-oriented issues, as well as AI Powershift, which protects Python code from reverse-engineering by converting it into native C++ code. Acumen is also way far ahead of its alternatives such as Lidar because of its efficiency and accuracy in analyzing multiple objects in the same image.
Q. What can you tell us about Fornux C++ Superset? And how does it benefit the defense and aerospace sectors?
C++ Superset, as previously mentioned, will fix all memory-related issues implicitly at compile-time which will protect the resulting executable from crashes and possible memory leaks. It is also predictable, which means that the resulting application will always execute the same way given the same input parameters. Thus it will not add race conditions based on random factors.
Cybersecurity being an astronomical problem nowadays, and consisting of 70 percent of memory-related bugs, needs to be seriously studied and solved. C++ Superset offers a solution aimed to recompile legacy code and guarantees the resulting application will not suffer from general memory-related issues.
The aerospace sector can benefit from it as well, guaranteeing its embedded applications will not crash or have any memory leak, preventing the vehicles from catastrophic events because of possible snowball effects a crashing or leaking software can cause.
Q. What’s your take on Artificial Intelligence? And what is the Artificial Superintelligence concept all about?
Well, we are at the bottom of the ladder right now with deep learning. Artificial intelligence is quite vaster than artificial narrow intelligence. There’s also artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence, where the former represents the capabilities of a human being and the latter represents the ones of a transcendent being. What’s the distinction? We can “map” the brain of a human into a robot quite easily but the definition of intelligence is the capacity to abstract notions up to infinity, which represents quite a powerful potential to make proper extrapolations and predictions.
The reason for living off of our artificial intelligence engine is key to either making humankind move forward or slowing down civilization’s advancements. In our case, we are aiming for the former which will be constructive and beneficial to human civilization, but perhaps more difficult to achieve in contrast with the latter. But this is where the challenge that we’re up against is.
We also have our simple theory on how to represent various emotions generically in an artificial intelligence engine to make them more human-like to integrate them seamlessly into society.
Q. That’s not all Fornux does. What are its other focus areas?
We have also strong interests in astrophysics and general physics.
Firstly, we already have experiment proposals ready to challenge Relativity by Einstein with a simple Michelson-Morley experiment aboard the International Space Station. We even calculate the exact predictions of the wavelength divergence using our new groundbreaking theory called: Finite Theory that is already pre-approved by the ISS National Lab and will be performed upon the reception of sufficient funding.
Secondly, we also have the exact predictions with the gravitomagnetic acceleration, or in other words: antigravity. We already have positive confirmation on the gravitational acceleration shift, based on predetermined predictions using a Do It Yourself (DIY) at home type of experiment and the other approach will require the assistance of a professional scientific laboratory. So this is already revolutionary news, proving both the established predictions and General Relativity to be off by a large margin.
Q. How responsive is Fornux to the changing needs of its clients?
The new trends in the popular usages of the Python programming language led us to create AI Powershift to fix all the flaws that it provided such as its interpreted nature, making its execution less efficient and prone to reverse engineering. We also make our products very generic so they can be ported very easily on all platforms, keeping a wide market. AI Powershift which is also based on the underlying product: C++ Superset will always respect the ISO C++ Standards thus making it extremely robust, backward compatible, and reliable over the years. We proactively and objectively gather factors we judge important in our favor, minimizing abrupt changes in the industry. We also have multiple products and research projects which create diversity, but all for the same goal.
Q. No doubt Fornux is charting new territories in this segment. Given how frequently circumstances change, what plans for transformation are you pursuing to remain relevant now and in the future?
We aim to become an industry-standard in core C++ programming. Also, it’s important to note that we use our products to optimize later projects in artificial intelligence, such as Acumen. So this is an important proof of concept for long-term goals in contrast with many trends these days, where quick patches are stacked to achieve short-term profit, making it costly, if not impossible to maintain and support legacy code. After many years of working in the IT industry, that same mistake was repeatedly done so we are well aware of it. After taking a 180-degrees proactive strategy, careful architecture and multiple redesigns were reiterated until the most efficient, robust, extendable, and versatile code was achieved regarding the core memory manager. Again, we maximized the initial R&D efforts until near perfection in the core functionality is reached to minimize the long-term maintenance, patching, and support. Some of our technology cannot have any unforeseen problems, so we take the same approach for every project we intend to pursue.
Phil Bouchard | CTO & Founder
Phil Bouchard, born in Ottawa, Canada in 1977, studied at the University of Sherbrooke in Mathematics and Computer Science from 1996 to 99. He then worked for important companies and academic institutions such as Corel Corp, University of California San Diego, Ford Motor, General Dynamics Land Systems, and Morgan Stanley. As chaotic and frequent required work under pressure the commercial industry can have, he developed a very objective and competitive mindset and always kept suggesting ideas to help out his employers stay competitive against what the market has to offer.
His hobbies include ice hockey, ski, weight lifting, muay Thai, kung fu, and taekwondo. He is a black belt and a 1995 North American Taekwon-Do Championship finalist.