This spring, as Canada headed into what would be the country’s second-worst wildfire season on record, MacEwan University students were partnering with FireSafe AI to support the Edmonton-based company focused on wildfire detection and response.
But when MacEwan’s work-integrated learning team initially approached Nafaa Haddou, Bachelor of Science ’16, FireSafe AI’s founder, about taking on a student intern for the summer, he had other ideas.
“I thought back to my own time as a student at MacEwan and about how I could make the most impact,” says the alum. “It got me thinking about tiger teams – taking a specific problem and having multiple people work to solve it.”
That idea inspired the Griffin Team Challenge, a work-integrated learning course offered throughout May in the Spring 2025 term.
Once Haddou identified specific issues that would help advance his business, two teams of students from across disciplines came together to see how they could address them. But the FireSafe cofounder and CEO wasn’t content with identifying issues and throwing them to the students to address.
“This wasn’t about meeting the students once or twice and getting a report – my staff and engineers worked with students throughout the month and provided resources,” says Haddou. “We were actively working as a team, and the students were essentially full interns.”
In that role, the two student teams ultimately created two final products: a marketing dashboard and an emotionally intelligent AI customer service agent, called Sophia.
The student team that built Sophia trained the chatbot using information from FireSafe AI and designed it to provide human-like responses to answer frequently asked questions on the company’s website. “When I approach a problem, it’s through the paradigm of computer science,” says Ryan Bernal, who was team lead for Sophia. “But our team included people from business, design and even a chemistry student, and it was quite interesting to see how everyone approached the problem differently.”
Collaborating across disciplines in that way, says Bernal, made the whole experience feel like the real world in a way that many project-based courses just can’t. That was precisely what Haddou was hoping for.
“Rather than handing over a final product, I wanted them to walk us through the process of getting there, to show us the documentation and deliver a package that someone else could understand and implement,” says Haddou. “I wanted students to focus on their decisions to get to the solutions they created.”
From microbiologist to digital fire fighter
A major wildfire event in 2021 that hit his family’s hometown in Algeria carved a new curve in Nafaa Haddou’s career path. “Amid the devastation of losing close family friends, my brother and I asked ourselves what we could do. We understood technology and systems, and could build things, so we started doing outreach to understand the challenges and problems in protecting communities and industry against wildfire.”
That ultimately led the Haddou brothers to create FireSafe AI, leveraging satellite and drone footage using AI to find non-intuitive patterns and cameravision to assess and detect fire, smoke and ignition triggers, such as lightning.
The journey from studying molecular biology at MacEwan to running a technology company may seem unusual, but to Haddou, it makes perfect sense. “As I told students in the Griffin Team Challenge, the skills you learn in university apply to more than one domain – you aren’t limited only to what your degree says. It’s about the core values you take from the experience and how you approach problems.”
Today, FireSafe is in the early stages of commercialization, with projects at pilot sites in communities around Alberta, in Paraguay and the United States.
Nafaa Haddou speaks to attendees of the Griffins Team Challenge in June.
How they came to the solutions they did was also the focus when students presented their work to a room filled with industry experts (and potential future employers). “The goal was for students to showcase themselves, and to network and build connections that might ideally turn into other opportunities.”
And that long-range vision extends to Haddou’s hope for the Griffins Team Challenge experience. “Part of this work was about identifying how to make the experience reproducible so other small, medium and even large enterprises could put themselves in FireSafe AI’s position and have students help address their business challenges.”