This is going to be a jam-packed posting with the AI experts at the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) virtual panel, a look back at a ‘testy’ exchange between Yoshua Bengio (one of Canada’s godfathers of AI) and a former diplomat from China, an update on Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon and his latest AI push, and a missive from the BC artificial intelligence community.
A Canadian Science Policy Centre AI panel on November 11, 2025
The Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) provides an October 9, 2025 update on an upcoming virtual panel being held on Remembrance Day,
[AI-Driven Misinformation Across Sectors Addressing a Cross-Societal Challenge]
Upcoming Virtual Panel[s]: November 11 [2025]
Artificial Intelligence is transforming how information is created and trusted, offering immense benefits across sectors like healthcare, education, finance, and public discourse—yet also amplifying risks such as misinformation, deepfakes, and scams that threaten public trust. This panel brings together experts from diverse fields [emphasis mine] to examine the manifestations and impacts of AI-driven misinformation and to discuss policy, regulatory, and technical solutions [emphasis mine]. The conversation will highlight practical measures—from digital literacy and content verification to platform accountability—aimed at strengthening resilience in Canada and globally.
For more information on the panel and to register, click below.
Odd timing for this event. Moving on, I found more information on the CSPC’s webpage for this event, Note: Unfortunately, links to the moderator’s and speakers’ bios could not be copied here,
Canadian Science Policy Centre Email info@sciencepolicy.ca
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This panel brings together cross-sectoral experts to examine how AI-driven misinformation manifests in their respective domains, its consequences, and how policy, regulation, and technical interventions can help mitigate harm. The discussion will explore practical pathways for action, such as digital literacy, risk audits, content verification technologies, platform responsibility, and regulatory frameworks. Attendees will leave with a nuanced understanding of both the risks and the resilience strategies being explored in Canada and globally.
Canada Research Chair in Internet & E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa See Bio
[Panelists]
Dr. Plinio Morita
Associate Professor / Director, Ubiquitous Health Technology Lab, University of Waterloo …
Dr. Nadia Naffi
Université Laval — Associate Professor of Educational Technology and expert on building human agency against AI-augmented disinformation and deepfakes. See Bio
Dr. Jutta Treviranus
Director, Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD U, Expert on AI misinformation in the Education sector and schools. See Bio
Dr. Fenwick McKelvey
Concordia University — Expert in political bots, information flows, and Canadian tech governance See Bio
Michael Geist has his own blog/website featuring posts on his ares of interest and featuring his podcast, Law Bytes. Jutta Treviranus is mentioned in my October 13, 2025 posting as a participant in “Who’s afraid of AI? Arts, Sciences, and the Futures of Intelligence,” a conference (October 23 – 24, 205) and arts festival at the University of Toronto (scroll down to find it) . She’s scheduled for a session on Thursday, October 23, 2025.
China, Canada, and the AI Action summit in February 2025
Zoe Kleinman’s February 10, 2025 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news online website also notes the encounter,
A former Chinese official poked fun at a major international AI safety report led by “AI Godfather” professor Yoshua Bengio and co-authored by 96 global experts – in front of him.
Fu Ying, former vice minister of foreign affairs and once China’s UK ambassador, is now an academic at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The pair were speaking at a panel discussion ahead of a two-day global AI summit starting in Paris on Monday [February 10, 2025].
The aim of the summit is to unite world leaders, tech executives, and academics to examine AI’s impact on society, governance, and the environment.
Fu Ying began by thanking Canada’s Prof Bengio for the “very, very long” document, adding that the Chinese translation stretched to around 400 pages and she hadn’t finished reading it.
She also had a dig at the title of the AI Safety Institute – of which Prof Bengio is a member.
China now has its own equivalent; but they decided to call it The AI Development and Safety Network, she said, because there are lots of institutes already but this wording emphasised the importance of collaboration.
The AI Action Summit is welcoming guests from 80 countries, with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Microsoft president Brad Smith and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai among the big names in US tech attending.
Elon Musk is not on the guest list but it is currently unknown whether he will decide to join them. [As of February 13, 2025, Mr. Musk did not attend the summit, which ended February 11, 2025.]
A key focus is regulating AI in an increasingly fractured world. The summit comes weeks after a seismic industry shift as China’s DeepSeek unveiled a powerful, low-cost AI model, challenging US dominance.
The pair’s heated exchanges were a symbol of global political jostling in the powerful AI arms race, but Fu Ying also expressed regret about the negative impact of current hostilities between the US and China on the progress of AI safety.
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She gave a carefully-crafted glimpse behind the curtain of China’s AI scene, describing an “explosive period” of innovation since the country first published its AI development plan in 2017, five years before ChatGPT became a viral sensation in the west.
She added that “when the pace [of development] is rapid, risky stuff occurs” but did not elaborate on what might have taken place.
“The Chinese move faster [than the west] but it’s full of problems,” she said.
Fu Ying argued that building AI tools on foundations which are open source, meaning everyone can see how they work and therefore contribute to improving them, was the most effective way to make sure the tech did not cause harm.
Most of the US tech giants do not share the tech which drives their products.
Open source offers humans “better opportunities to detect and solve problems”, she said, adding that “the lack of transparency among the giants makes people nervous”.
But Prof Bengio disagreed.
His view was that open source also left the tech wide open for criminals to misuse.
He did however concede that “from a safety point of view”, it was easier to spot issues with the viral Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek, which was built using open source architecture, than ChatGPT, whose code has not been shared by its creator OpenAI.
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Interesting, non? You can read more about Bengio’s views in an October 1, 2025 article by Rae Witte for Futurism.
In a Policy Forum, Yue Zhu and colleagues provide an overview of China’s emerging regulation for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and its potential contributions to global AI governance. Open-source AI systems from China are rapidly expanding worldwide, even as the country’s regulatory framework remains in flux. In general, AI governance suffers from fragmented approaches, a lack of clarity, and difficulty reconciling innovation with risk management, making global coordination especially hard in the face of rising controversy. Although no official AI law has yet been enacted, experts in China have drafted two influential proposals – the Model AI Law and the AI Law (Scholar’s Proposal) – which serve as key references for ongoing policy discussions. As the nation’s lawmakers prepare to draft a consolidated AI law, Zhu et al. note that the decisions will shape not only China’s innovation, but also global collaboration on AI safety, openness, and risk mitigation. Here, the authors discuss China’s emerging AI regulation as structured around 6 pillars, which, combined, stress exemptive laws, efficient adjudication, and experimentalist requirements, while safeguarding against extreme risks. This framework seeks to balance responsible oversight with pragmatic openness, allowing developers to innovate for the long term and collaborate across the global research community. According to Zhu et al., despite the need for greater clarity, harmonization, and simplification, China’s evolving model is poised to shape future legislation and contribute meaningfully to global AI governance by promoting both safety and innovation at a time when international cooperation on extreme risks is urgently needed.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
China’s emerging regulation toward an open future for AI by Yue Zhu, Bo He, Hongyu Fu, Naying Hu, Shaoqing Wu, Taolue Zhang, Xinyi Liu, Gang Xu, Linghan Zhang, and Hui Zhou. Science 9 Oct 2025Vol 390, Issue 6769 pp. 132-135 DOI: 10.1126/science.ady7922
This paper is behind a paywall.
No mention of Fu Ying or China’s ‘The AI Development and Safety Network’ but perhaps that’s in the paper.
Canada and its Minister of AI and Digital Innovation
Evan Solomon (born April 20, 1968)[citation needed] is a Canadian politician and broadcaster who has been the minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation since May 2025. A member of the Liberal Party, Solomon was elected as the member of Parliament (MP) for Toronto Centre in the April 2025 election.
He was the host of The Evan Solomon Show on Toronto-area talk radio station CFRB,[2] and a writer for Maclean’s magazine. He was the host of CTV’s national political news programs Power Play and Question Period.[3] In October 2022, he moved to New York City to accept a position with the Eurasia Group as publisher of GZERO Media.[4] Solomon continued with CTV News as a “special correspondent” reporting on Canadian politics and global affairs.”[4]
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Had you asked me what background one needs to be a ‘Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation’, media would not have been my first thought. That said, sometimes people can surprise you.
Solomon appears to be an enthusiast if a June 10, 2025 article by Anja Karadeglija for The Canadian Press is to be believed,
Canada’s new minister of artificial intelligence said Tuesday [June 10, 2025] he’ll put less emphasis on AI regulation and more on finding ways to harness the technology’s economic benefits [emphases mine].
In his first speech since becoming Canada’s first-ever AI minister, Evan Solomon said Canada will move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” to make sure the economy benefits from AI.
His regulatory focus will be on data protection and privacy, he told the audience at an event in Ottawa Tuesday morning organized by the think tank Canada 2020.
Solomon said regulation isn’t about finding “a saddle to throw on the bucking bronco called AI innovation. That’s hard. But it is to make sure that the horse doesn’t kick people in the face. And we need to protect people’s data and their privacy.”
The previous government introduced a privacy and AI regulation bill that targeted high-impact AI systems. It did not become law before the election was called.
That bill is “not gone, but we have to re-examine in this new environment where we’re going to be on that,” Solomon said.
He said constraints on AI have not worked at the international level.
“It’s really hard. There’s lots of leakages,” he said. “The United States and China have no desire to buy into any constraint or regulation.”
That doesn’t mean regulation won’t exist, he said, but it will have to be assembled in steps.
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Solomon’s comments follow a global shift among governments to focus on AI adoption and away from AI safety and governance.
The first global summit focusing on AI safety was held in 2023 as experts warned of the technology’s dangers — including the risk that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. At a global meeting in Korea last year, countries agreed to launch a network of publicly backed safety institutes.
But the mood had shifted by the time this year’s AI Action Summit began in Paris. …
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Solomon outlined several priorities for his ministry — scaling up Canada’s AI industry, driving adoption and ensuring Canadians have trust in and sovereignty over the technology.
He said that includes supporting Canadian AI companies like Cohere, which “means using government as essentially an industrial policy to champion our champions.”
The federal government is putting together a task force to guide its next steps on artificial intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon is promising an update to the government’s AI strategy.
Solomon told the All In artificial intelligence conference in Montreal on Wednesday [September 24, 2025] that the “refreshed” strategy will be tabled later this year, “almost two years ahead of schedule.”
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“We need to update and move quickly,” he said in a keynote speech at the start of the conference.
The task force will include about 20 representatives from industry, academia and civil society. The government says it won’t reveal the membership until later this week.
Solomon said task force members are being asked to consult with their networks, suggest “bold, practical” ideas and report back to him in November [2025].
The group will look at various topics related to AI, including research, adoption, commercialization, investment, infrastructure, skills, and safety and security. The government is also planning to solicit input from the public. [emphasis mine]
Canada was the first country to launch a national AI strategy [the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy announced in 2016], which the government updated in 2022. The strategy focuses on commercialization, the development and adoption of AI standards, talent and research.
Solomon also teased a “major quantum initiative” coming in October [2025?] to ensure both quantum computing talent and intellectual property stay in the country.
Solomon called digital sovereignty “the most pressing policy and democratic issue of our time” and stressed the importance of Canada having its own “digital economy that someone else can’t decide to turn off.”
Solomon said the federal government’s recent focus on major projects extends to artificial intelligence. He compared current conversations on Canada’s AI framework to the way earlier generations spoke about a national railroad or highway.
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He said his government will address concerns about AI by focusing on privacy reform and modernizing Canada’s 25-year-old privacy law.
“We’re going to include protections for consumers who are concerned about things like deep fakes and protection for children, because that’s a big, big issue. And we’re going to set clear standards for the use of data so innovators have clarity to unlock investment,” Solomon said.
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The government is consulting with the public? Experience suggests that when all the major decisions will have been made; the public consultation comments will mined so officials can make some minor, unimportant tweaks.
Canada’s AI Task Force and parts of the Empire Club talk are revealed in a September 26, 2025 article by Alex Riehl for BetaKit,
Inovia Capital partner Patrick Pichette, Cohere chief artificial intelligence (AI) officer Joelle Pineau, and Build Canada founder Dan Debow are among 26 members of AI minister Evan Solomon’s AI Strategy Task Force trusted to help the federal government renew its AI strategy.
Solomon revealed the roster, filled with leading Canadian researchers and business figures, while speaking at the Empire Club in Toronto on Friday morning [September 26, 2025]. He teased its formation at the ALL IN conference earlier this week [September 24, 2025], saying the team would include “innovative thinkers from across the country.”
The group will have 30 days to add to a collective consultation process in areas including research, talent, commercialization, safety, education, infrastructure, and security.
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The full AI Strategy Task Force is listed below; each member will consult their network on specific themes.
Research and Talent
Gail Murphy, professor of computer science and vice-president – research and innovation, University of British Columbia and vice-chair at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada
Diane Gutiw, VP – global AI research lead, CGI Canada and co-chair of the Advisory Council on AI
Michael Bowling, professor of computer science and principal investigator – Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Alberta and research fellow, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and Canada CIFAR AI chair
Arvind Gupta, professor of computer science, University of Toronto
Adoption across industry and governments
Olivier Blais, co-founder and VP of AI, Moov and co-chair of the Advisory Council on AI
Cari Covent, technology executive
Dan Debow, chair of the board, Build Canada
Commercialization of AI
Louis Têtu, executive chairman, Coveo
Michael Serbinis, founder and CEO, League and board chair of the Perimeter Institute
Adam Keating, CEO and Founder, CoLab
Scaling our champions and attracting investment
Patrick Pichette, general partner, Inovia Capital
Ajay Agrawal, professor of strategic management, University of Toronto, founder, Next Canada and founder, Creative Destruction Lab
Sonia Sennik, CEO, Creative Destruction Lab
Ben Bergen, president, Council of Canadian Innovators
Building safe AI systems and public trust in AI
Mary Wells, dean of engineering, University of Waterloo
Joelle Pineau, chief AI officer, Cohere
Taylor Owen, founding director, Center [sic] for Media, Technology and Democracy [McGill University]
Education and Skills
Natiea Vinson, CEO, First Nations Technology Council
Alex Laplante, VP – cash management technology Canada, Royal Bank of Canada and board member at Mitacs
David Naylor, professor of medicine – University of Toronto
Infrastructure
Garth Gibson, chief technology and AI officer, VDURA
Ian Rae, president and CEO, Aptum
Marc Etienne Ouimette, chair of the board, Digital Moment and member, OECD One AI Group of Experts, affiliate researcher, sovereign AI, Cambridge University Bennett School of Public Policy
Security
Shelly Bruce, distinguished fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation
James Neufeld, founder and CEO, Samdesk
Sam Ramadori, co-president and executive director, LawZero
With files from Josh Scott
If you have the time, Riehl ‘s September 26, 2025 article offers more depth than may be apparent in the excerpts I’ve chosen.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Arvind Gupta’s name. I’m glad to see he’s part of this Task Force (Research and Talent). The man was treated quite shamefully at the University of British Columbia. (For the curious, this August 18, 2015 article by Ken MacQueen for Maclean’s Magazine presents a somewhat sanitized [in my opinion] review of the situation.)
One final comment, the experts on the virtual panel and members of Solomon’s Task Force are largely from Ontario and Québec. There is minor representation from others parts of the country but it is minor.
British Columbia wants entry into the national AI discussion
Just after I finished writing up this post, I received Kris Krug’s (techartist, quasi-sage, cyberpunk anti-hero from the future) October 14, 2025 communication (received via email) regarding an initiative from the BC + AI community,
Growth vs Guardrails: BC’s Framework for Steering AI
Our open letter to Minister Solomon shares what we’ve learned building community-led AI governance and how BC can help.
Ottawa created a Minister of Artificial Intelligence and just launched a national task force to shape the country’s next AI strategy. The conversation is happening right now about who gets compute, who sets the rules, and whose future this technology will serve.
Our new feature, Growth vs Guardrails [see link to letter below for ‘guardrails’], is already making the rounds in those rooms. The message is simple: if Ottawa’s foot is on the gas, BC is the steering wheel and the brakes. We can model a clean, ethical, community-led path that keeps power with people and place.
This is the time to show up together. Not as scattered voices, but as a connected movement with purpose, vision, and political gravity.
Over the past few months, almost 100 of us have joined as the new BC + AI Ecosystem Association non-profit as Founding Members. Builders. Artists. Researchers. Investors. Educators. Policymakers. People who believe that tech should serve communities, not the other way around.
Now we’re opening the door wider. Join and you’ll be part of the core group that built this from the ground up. Your membership is declaration that British Columbia deserves to shape its own AI future with ethics, creativity, and care.
If you’ve been watching from the sidelines, this is the time to lean in. We don’t do panels. We do portals. And this is the biggest one we’ve opened yet.
See you inside,
Kris Krüg Executive Director BC + AI Ecosystem Association kk@bc-ai.ca | bc-ai.ca
Canada just spun up a 30-day sprint to shape its next AI strategy. Minister Evan Solomon assembled 26 experts (mostly industry and academia) to advise on research, adoption, commercialization, safety, skills, and infrastructure.
On paper, it’s a pivot moment. In practice, it’s already drawing fire. Too much weight on scaling, not enough on governance. Too many boardrooms, not enough frontlines. Too much Ottawa, not enough ground truth.
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This is Canada’s chance to reset the DNA of its AI ecosystem.
But only if we choose regeneration over extraction, sovereign data governance over corporate capture, and community benefit over narrow interests.
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The Problem With The Task Force
Research says: The group’s stacked with expertise. But critics flag the imbalance. Where’s healthcare? Where’s civil society beyond token representation? Where are the people who’ll feel AI’s impact first: frontline workers, artists, community organizers?
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The worry:Commercialization and scaling overshadow public trust, governance, and equitable outcomes. Again.
The numbers back this up: Only 24% of Canadians have AI training. Just 38% feel confident in their knowledge. Nearly two-thirds see potential harm. 71% would trust AI more under public regulation.
We’re building a national strategy on a foundation of low literacy and eroding trust. That’s not a recipe for sovereignty. That’s a recipe for capture.
Principles for a National AI Strategy: What BC + AI Stands For
I stumbled across this June 8, 2022 AMC Networks news release in the last place I was expecting (i.e., a self-described global entertainment company’s website) to see a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) announcement,
AMC NETWORKS CONTENT ROOM TEAMS WITH THE AD COUNCIL TO EMPOWER GIRLS IN STEM, FEATURING “THE WALKING DEAD”
AMC Networks Content Room and the Ad Council, a non-profit and leading producer of social impact campaigns for 80 years, announced today a series of new public service advertisements (PSAs) that will highlight the power of girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) against the backdrop of the global hit series “The Walking Dead.” In the spots, behind-the-scenes talent of the popular franchise, including DirectorAisha Tyler, Costume DesignerVera Chow and Art DirectorJasmine Garnet, showcase how STEM is used to bring the post-apocalyptic world of “The Walking Dead” to life on screen. Created by AMC Networks Content Room, the PSAs are part of the Ad Council’s national She Can STEM campaign, which encourages girls, trans youth and non-binary youth around the country to get excited about and interested in STEM.
The new creative consists of TV spots and custom videos created specifically for TikTok and Instagram. The spots also feature Gitanjali Rao, a 16-year-old scientist, inventor and activist, interviewing Tyler, Chow and Garnet discussing how they and their teams use STEM in the production of “The Walking Dead.” Using before and after visuals, each piece highlights the unique and unexpected uses of STEM in the making of the series. In addition to being part of the larger Ad Council campaign, the spots will be available on “The Walking Dead’s” social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube pages, and across AMC Networks linear channels and digital platforms.
Said Kim Granito, EVP of AMC Networks Content Room: “We are thrilled to partner with the Ad Council to inspire young girls in STEM through the unexpected backdrop of ‘The Walking Dead.’ Over the last 11 years, this universe has been created by an array of insanely talented women that utilize STEM every day in their roles. This campaign will broaden perceptions of STEM beyond the stereotypes of lab coats and beakers, and hopefully inspire the next generation of talented women in STEM. Aisha Tyler, Vera Chow and Jasmine Garnet were a dream to work with and their shared enthusiasm for this mission is inspiring.”
“Careers in STEM are varied and can touch all aspects of our lives. We are proud to partner with AMC Networks Content Room on this latest work for the She Can STEM campaign. With it, we hope to inspire young girls, non-binary youth, and trans youth to recognize that their passion for STEM can impact countless industries – including the entertainment industry,” said Michelle Hillman, Chief Campaign Development Officer, Ad Council.
Women make up nearly half of the total college-educated workforce in the U.S., but they only constitute 27% of the STEM workforce, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Research shows that many girls lose interest in STEM as early as middle school, and this path continues through high school and college, ultimately leading to an underrepresentation of women in STEM careers. She Can STEM aims to dismantle the intimidating perceived barrier of STEM fields by showing girls, non-binary youth, and trans youth how fun, messy, diverse and accessible STEM can be, encouraging them to dive in, no matter where they are in their STEM journey.
Since the launch of She Can STEM in September 2018, the campaign has been supported by a variety of corporate, non-profit and media partners. The current funder of the campaign is IF/THEN, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies. Non-profit partners include Black Girls Code, ChickTech, Girl Scouts of the USA, Girls Inc., Girls Who Code, National Center for Women & Information Technology, The New York Academy of Sciences and Society of Women Engineers.
About AMC Networks Inc.
AMC Networks (Nasdaq: AMCX) is a global entertainment company known for its popular and critically-acclaimed content. Its brands include targeted streaming services AMC+, Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance Now, ALLBLK, and the newest addition to its targeted streaming portfolio, the anime-focused HIDIVE streaming service, in addition to AMC, BBC AMERICA (operated through a joint venture with BBC Studios), IFC, SundanceTV, WE tv and IFC Films. AMC Studios, the Company’s in-house studio, production and distribution operation, is behind some of the biggest titles and brands known to a global audience, including The Walking Dead, the Anne Rice catalog and the Agatha Christie library. The Company also operates AMC Networks International, its international programming business, and 25/7 Media, its production services business.
About Content Room
Content Room is AMC Networks’ award-winning branded entertainment studio that collaborates with advertising partners to build brand stories and create bespoke experiences across an expanding range of digital, social, and linear platforms. Content Room enables brands to fully tap into the company’s premium programming, distinct IP, deep talent roster and filmmaking roots through an array of creative partnership opportunities— from premium branded content and integrations— to franchise and gaming extensions.
Content Room is also home to the award-winning digital content studio which produces dozens of original series annually, which expands popular AMC Networks scripted programming for both fans and advertising partners by leveraging the built-in massive series and talent fandoms.
The Ad Council The Ad Council is where creativity and causes converge. The non-profit organization brings together the most creative minds in advertising, media, technology and marketing to address many of the nation’s most important causes. The Ad Council has created many of the most iconic campaigns in advertising history. Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk. Smokey Bear. Love Has No Labels.
The Ad Council’s innovative social good campaigns raise awareness, inspire action and save lives. To learn more, visit AdCouncil.org, follow the Ad Council’s communities on Facebook and Twitter, and view the creative on YouTube.
You can find the ‘She Can Stem’ Ad Council initiative here.
Canadian women and the AI4Good Lab
A June 9, 2022 posting on the Borealis AI website describes an artificial intelligence (AI) initiative designed to encourage women to enter the field,
The AI4Good Lab is one of those programs that creates exponential opportunities. As the leading Canadian AI-training initiative for women-identified STEM students, the lab helps encourage diversity in the field of AI. Participants work together to use AI to solve a social problem, delivering untold benefits to their local communities. And they work shoulder-to-shoulder with other leaders in the field of AI, building their networks and expanding the ecosystem.
At this year’s [2022] AI4Good Lab Industry Night, program partners – like Borealis AI, RBC [Royal Bank of Canada], DeepMind, Ivado and Google – had an opportunity to (virtually) meet the nearly 90 participants of this year’s program. Many of the program’s alumni were also in attendance. So, too, were representatives from CIFAR [Canadian Institute for Advanced Research], one of Canada’s leading global research organizations.
Industry participants – including Dr. Eirene Seiradaki, Director of Research Partnerships at Borealis AI, Carey Mende-Gibson, RBC’s Location Intelligence ambassador, and Lucy Liu, Director of Data Science at RBC – talked with attendees about their experiences in the AI industry, discussed career opportunities and explored various career paths that the participants could take in the industry. For the entire two hours, our three tables and our virtually cozy couches were filled to capacity. It was only after the end of the event that we had the chance to exchange visits to the tables of our partners from CIFAR and AMII [Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute]. Eirene did not miss the opportunity to catch up with our good friend, Warren Johnston, and hear first-hand the news from AMII’s recent AI Week 2022.
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Borealis AI is funded by the Royal Bank of Canada. Somebody wrote this for the homepage (presumably tongue in cheek),
The AI4Good Lab is a 7-week program that equips women and people of marginalized genders with the skills to build their own machine learning projects. We emphasize mentorship and curiosity-driven learning to prepare our participants for a career in AI.
The program is designed to open doors for those who have historically been underrepresented in the AI industry. Together, we are building a more inclusive and diverse tech culture in Canada while inspiring the next generation of leaders to use AI as a tool for social good.
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A most recent programme ran (May 3 – June 21, 2022) in Montréal, Toronto, and Edmonton.
There are a number of AI for Good initiatives including this one from the International Telecommunications Union (a United Nations Agency).
For the curious, I have a May 10, 2018 post “The Royal Bank of Canada reports ‘Humans wanted’ and some thoughts on the future of work, robots, and artificial intelligence” where I ‘examine’ RBC and its AI initiatives.
Image:: Norwegian Atlantic Walrus. Photo: Tor Lund / WWF [Downloaded from: https://eminetra.co.uk/climate-change-the-walrus-from-space-project-is-calling-on-the-general-public-to-help-search-for-animals-on-satellite-imagery-climate-news/755984/]
Yesterday (October 14, 2021), the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) announced their Walrus from Space project in a press release,
WWF and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) are seeking the public’s help to search for walrus in thousands of satellite images taken from space, with the aim of learning more about how walrus will be impacted by the climate crisis. It’s hoped half a million people worldwide will join the new ‘Walrus from Space’ research project, a census of Atlantic walrus and walrus from the Laptev Sea, using satellite images provided by space and intelligence company Maxar Technologies’ DigitalGlobe.
Walrus are facing the reality of the climate crisis: their Arctic home is warming almost three times faster than the rest of the world and roughly 13% of summer sea ice is disappearing per decade.
From the comfort of their own homes, aspiring conservationists around the world can study the satellite pictures online, spot areas where walrus haul out onto land, and then count them. The data collected in this census of Atlantic and Laptev walrus will give scientists a clearer picture of how each population is doing—without disturbing the animals. The data will also help inform management decisions aimed at conservation efforts for the species.
Walrus use sea ice for resting and to give birth to their young. As sea ice diminishes, more walrus are forced to seek refuge on land, congregating for the chance to rest. Overcrowded beaches can have fatal consequences; walrus are easily frightened, and when spooked they stampede towards the water, trampling one another in their panic. Resting on land (as opposed to sea ice) may also force walrus to swim further and expand more energy to reach their food—food which in turn is being negatively impacted by the warming and acidification of the ocean.
In addition walrus can also be disturbed by shipping traffic and industrial development as the loss of sea ice makes the Arctic more accessible. Walrus are almost certainly going to be impacted by the climate crisis, which could result in significant population declines.
Rod Downie, chief polar adviser at WWF, said:
“Walrus are an iconic species of great cultural significance to the people of the Arctic, but climate change is melting their icy home. It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of the climate and nature emergency, but this project enables individuals to take action to understand a species threatened by the climate crisis, and to help to safeguard their future. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay there; the climate crisis is a global problem, bigger than any person, species or region. Ahead of hosting this year’s global climate summit, the UK must raise its ambition and keep all of its climate promises—for the sake of the walrus, and the world.”
Previous population estimates are based upon the best data and knowledge available, but there are challenges associated with working with marine mammals in such a vast, remote and largely inaccessible place. This project will build upon the knowledge of Indigenous communities, using satellite technology to provide an up-to-date count of Atlantic and Laptev walrus populations.
Hannah Cubaynes, wildlife from space research associate at British Antarctic Survey, said:
“Assessing walrus populations by traditional methods is very difficult as they live in extremely remote areas, spend much of their time on the sea ice and move around a lot, Satellite images can solve this problem as they can survey huge tracts of coastline to assess where walrus are and help us count the ones that we find. “However, doing that for all the Atlantic and Laptev walrus will take huge amounts of imagery, too much for a single scientist or small team, so we need help from thousands of citizen scientists to help us learn more about this iconic animal.”
Earlier this year Cub Scouts from across the UK became walrus spotters to test the platform ahead of its public release. The Scouts have been a partner of WWF since the early 1970s, and over 57 million scouts globally are engaged in environmental projects.
Cub Scout Imogen Scullard, age 9, said:
“I love learning about the planet and how it works. We need to protect it from climate change. We are helping the planet by doing the walrus count with space satellites, which is really cool. It was a hard thing to do but we stuck at it”
The ‘Walrus From Space’ project, which is supported by players of the People’s Postcode Lottery, as well as RBC Tech For Nature and WWF supporters, aims to recruit more than 500,000 citizen scientists over the next five years. Over the course of the project counting methods will be continually refined and improved as data is gathered.
Laura Chow, head of charities at People’s Postcode Lottery, said:
“We’re delighted that players’ support is bringing this fantastic project to life. We encourage everyone to get involved in finding walrus so they can play a part in helping us better understand the effects of climate change on this species and their ecosystem. “Players of People’s Postcode Lottery are supporting this project as part of our Postcode Climate Challenge initiative, which is providing 12 charities with an additional £24 million for projects tackling climate change this year.”
Aspiring conservationists can help protect the species by going to wwf.org.uk/walrusfromspace where they can register to participate, and then be guided through a training module before joining the walrus census.
No. They are not. (You can check here on the Arctic Countries webpage of The Arctic Institute website.)
Nonetheless and leaving aside that the Arctic and the Antarctic are literally polar opposites, I gather that the British Government in the form of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), is quite interested in the Arctic, viz.: the Walrus from Space project.
If you keep digging you’ll find a chain of UK government agencies, from the BAS About page (at the bottom), Note: Links have been removed,,
British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is a component of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom that directs research and innovation funding, funded through the science budget of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy [emphases mine].
Interesting, non?
There doesn’t have to be a sinister connection between a government agency devoted to supporting business and industry and a climate change project. If we are to grapple with climate change in a significant way, we will need cooperation from many groups and coutnries (some of which may have been adversaries in the past).
Of course, the problem with the business community is that efforts aimed at the public good are often publicity stunts.
For anyone curious about the businesses mentioned in the press release, Maxar Technologies can be found here, Maxar’s DigitalGlobe here, and RBC (Royal of Bank of Canada) Tech for Nature here.
BTW, I love that walrus picture at the beginning of this posting.
On the heels of the March 22, 2017 federal budget announcement of $125M for a Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, the University of Toronto (U of T) has announced the inception of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in a March 28, 2017 news release by Jennifer Robinson (Note: Links have been removed),
A team of globally renowned researchers at the University of Toronto is driving the planning of a new institute staking Toronto’s and Canada’s claim as the global leader in AI.
Geoffrey Hinton, a University Professor Emeritus in computer science at U of T and vice-president engineering fellow at Google, will serve as the chief scientific adviser of the newly created Vector Institute based in downtown Toronto.
“The University of Toronto has long been considered a global leader in artificial intelligence research,” said U of T President Meric Gertler. “It’s wonderful to see that expertise act as an anchor to bring together researchers, government and private sector actors through the Vector Institute, enabling them to aim even higher in leading advancements in this fast-growing, critical field.”
As part of the Government of Canada’s Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Vector will share $125 million in federal funding with fellow institutes in Montreal and Edmonton. All three will conduct research and secure talent to cement Canada’s position as a world leader in AI.
In addition, Vector is expected to receive funding from the Province of Ontario and more than 30 top Canadian and global companies eager to tap this pool of talent to grow their businesses. The institute will also work closely with other Ontario universities with AI talent.
(See my March 24, 2017 posting; scroll down about 25% for the science part, including the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy of the budget.)
Not obvious in last week’s coverage of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy is that the much lauded Hinton has been living in the US and working for Google. These latest announcements (Pan-Canadian AI Strategy and Vector Institute) mean that he’s moving back.
A March 28, 2017 article by Kate Allen for TorontoStar.com provides more details about the Vector Institute, Hinton, and the Canadian ‘brain drain’ as it applies to artificial intelligence, (Note: A link has been removed)
Toronto will host a new institute devoted to artificial intelligence, a major gambit to bolster a field of research pioneered in Canada but consistently drained of talent by major U.S. technology companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The Vector Institute, an independent non-profit affiliated with the University of Toronto, will hire about 25 new faculty and research scientists. It will be backed by more than $150 million in public and corporate funding in an unusual hybridization of pure research and business-minded commercial goals.
The province will spend $50 million over five years, while the federal government, which announced a $125-million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy in last week’s budget, is providing at least $40 million, backers say. More than two dozen companies have committed millions more over 10 years, including $5 million each from sponsors including Google, Air Canada, Loblaws, and Canada’s five biggest banks [Bank of Montreal (BMO). Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce ({CIBC} President’s Choice Financial}, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Scotiabank (Tangerine), Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Canada Trust)].
The mode of artificial intelligence that the Vector Institute will focus on, deep learning, has seen remarkable results in recent years, particularly in image and speech recognition. Geoffrey Hinton, considered the “godfather” of deep learning for the breakthroughs he made while a professor at U of T, has worked for Google since 2013 in California and Toronto.
Hinton will move back to Canada to lead a research team based at the tech giant’s Toronto offices and act as chief scientific adviser of the new institute.
…
Researchers trained in Canadian artificial intelligence labs fill the ranks of major technology companies, working on tools like instant language translation, facial recognition, and recommendation services. Academic institutions and startups in Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal and Edmonton boast leaders in the field, but other researchers have left for U.S. universities and corporate labs.
The goals of the Vector Institute are to retain, repatriate and attract AI talent, to create more trained experts, and to feed that expertise into existing Canadian companies and startups.
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Hospitals are expected to be a major partner, since health care is an intriguing application for AI. Last month, researchers from Stanford University announced they had trained a deep learning algorithm to identify potentially cancerous skin lesions with accuracy comparable to human dermatologists. The Toronto company Deep Genomics is using deep learning to read genomes and identify mutations that may lead to disease, among other things.
Intelligent algorithms can also be applied to tasks that might seem less virtuous, like reading private data to better target advertising. Zemel [Richard Zemel, the institute’s research director and a professor of computer science at U of T] says the centre is creating an ethics working group [emphasis mine] and maintaining ties with organizations that promote fairness and transparency in machine learning. As for privacy concerns, “that’s something we are well aware of. We don’t have a well-formed policy yet but we will fairly soon.”
The institute’s annual funding pales in comparison to the revenues of the American tech giants, which are measured in tens of billions. The risk the institute’s backers are taking is simply creating an even more robust machine learning PhD mill for the U.S.
“They obviously won’t all stay in Canada, but Toronto industry is very keen to get them,” Hinton said. “I think Trump might help there.” Two researchers on Hinton’s new Toronto-based team are Iranian, one of the countries targeted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel bans.
Ethics do seem to be a bit of an afterthought. Presumably the Vector Institute’s ‘ethics working group’ won’t include any regular folks. Is there any thought to what the rest of us think about these developments? As there will also be some collaboration with other proposed AI institutes including ones at the University of Montreal (Université de Montréal) and the University of Alberta (Kate McGillivray’s article coming up shortly mentions them), might the ethics group be centered in either Edmonton or Montreal? Interestingly, two Canadians (Timothy Caulfield at the University of Alberta and Eric Racine at Université de Montréa) testified at the US Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues Feb. 10 – 11, 2014 meeting, the Brain research, ethics, and nanotechnology. Still speculating here but I imagine Caulfield and/or Racine could be persuaded to extend their expertise in ethics and the human brain to AI and its neural networks.
Getting back to the topic at hand the ‘AI sceneCanada’, Allen’s article is worth reading in its entirety if you have the time.
Kate McGillivray’s March 29, 2017 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) news online provides more details about the Canadian AI situation and the new strategies,
With artificial intelligence set to transform our world, a new institute is putting Toronto to the front of the line to lead the charge.
The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, made possible by funding from the federal government revealed in the 2017 budget, will move into new digs in the MaRS Discovery District by the end of the year.
…
Vector’s funding comes partially from a $125 million investment announced in last Wednesday’s federal budget to launch a pan-Canadian artificial intelligence strategy, with similar institutes being established in Montreal and Edmonton.
“[A.I.] cuts across pretty well every sector of the economy,” said Dr. Alan Bernstein, CEO and president of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the organization tasked with administering the federal program.
“Silicon Valley and England and other places really jumped on it, so we kind of lost the lead a little bit. I think the Canadian federal government has now realized that,” he said.
Stopping up the brain drain
Critical to the strategy’s success is building a homegrown base of A.I. experts and innovators — a problem in the last decade, despite pioneering work on so-called “Deep Learning” by Canadian scholars such as Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, a former University of Toronto professor who will now serve as Vector’s chief scientific advisor.
With few university faculty positions in Canada and with many innovative companies headquartered elsewhere, it has been tough to keep the few graduates specializing in A.I. in town.
“We were paying to educate people and shipping them south,” explained Ed Clark, chair of the Vector Institute and business advisor to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.
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The existence of that “fantastic science” will lean heavily on how much buy-in Vector and Canada’s other two A.I. centres get.
Toronto’s portion of the $125 million is a “great start,” said Bernstein, but taken alone, “it’s not enough money.”
“My estimate of the right amount of money to make a difference is a half a billion or so, and I think we will get there,” he said.
Jessica Murphy’s March 29, 2017 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) news online offers some intriguing detail about the Canadian AI scene,
Canadian researchers have been behind some recent major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Now, the country is betting on becoming a big player in one of the hottest fields in technology, with help from the likes of Google and RBC [Royal Bank of Canada].
In an unassuming building on the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, Geoff Hinton laboured for years on the “lunatic fringe” of academia and artificial intelligence, pursuing research in an area of AI called neural networks.
Also known as “deep learning”, neural networks are computer programs that learn in similar way to human brains. The field showed early promise in the 1980s, but the tech sector turned its attention to other AI methods after that promise seemed slow to develop.
“The approaches that I thought were silly were in the ascendancy and the approach that I thought was the right approach was regarded as silly,” says the British-born [emphasis mine] professor, who splits his time between the university and Google, where he is a vice-president of engineering fellow.
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Neural networks are used by the likes of Netflix to recommend what you should binge watch and smartphones with voice assistance tools. Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI used them to win against a human in the ancient game of Go in 2016.
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Foteini Agrafioti, who heads up the new RBC Research in Machine Learning lab at the University of Toronto, said those recent innovations made AI attractive to researchers and the tech industry.
“Anything that’s powering Google’s engines right now is powered by deep learning,” she says.
Developments in the field helped jumpstart innovation and paved the way for the technology’s commercialisation. They also captured the attention of Google, IBM and Microsoft, and kicked off a hiring race in the field.
The renewed focus on neural networks has boosted the careers of early Canadian AI machine learning pioneers like Hinton, the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio, and University of Alberta’s Richard Sutton.
Money from big tech is coming north, along with investments by domestic corporations like banking multinational RBC and auto parts giant Magna, and millions of dollars in government funding.
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Former banking executive Ed Clark will head the institute, and says the goal is to make Toronto, which has the largest concentration of AI-related industries in Canada, one of the top five places in the world for AI innovation and business.
The founders also want it to serve as a magnet and retention tool for top talent aggressively head-hunted by US firms.
Clark says they want to “wake up” Canadian industry to the possibilities of AI, which is expected to have a massive impact on fields like healthcare, banking, manufacturing and transportation.
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Google invested C$4.5m (US$3.4m/£2.7m) last November [2016] in the University of Montreal’s Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.
Microsoft is funding a Montreal startup, Element AI. The Seattle-based company also announced it would acquire Montreal-based Maluuba and help fund AI research at the University of Montreal and McGill University.
Thomson Reuters and General Motors both recently moved AI labs to Toronto.
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RBC is also investing in the future of AI in Canada, including opening a machine learning lab headed by Agrafioti, co-funding a program to bring global AI talent and entrepreneurs to Toronto, and collaborating with Sutton and the University of Alberta’s Machine Intelligence Institute.
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Canadian tech also sees the travel uncertainty created by the Trump administration in the US as making Canada more attractive to foreign talent. (One of Clark’s the selling points is that Toronto as an “open and diverse” city).
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This may reverse the ‘brain drain’ but it appears Canada’s role as a ‘branch plant economy’ for foreign (usually US) companies could become an important discussion once more. From the ‘Foreign ownership of companies of Canada’ Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),
Historically, foreign ownership was a political issue in Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it was believed by some that U.S. investment had reached new heights (though its levels had actually remained stable for decades), and then in the 1980s, during debates over the Free Trade Agreement.
But the situation has changed, since in the interim period Canada itself became a major investor and owner of foreign corporations. Since the 1980s, Canada’s levels of investment and ownership in foreign companies have been larger than foreign investment and ownership in Canada. In some smaller countries, such as Montenegro, Canadian investment is sizable enough to make up a major portion of the economy. In Northern Ireland, for example, Canada is the largest foreign investor. By becoming foreign owners themselves, Canadians have become far less politically concerned about investment within Canada.
Of note is that Canada’s largest companies by value, and largest employers, tend to be foreign-owned in a way that is more typical of a developing nation than a G8 member. The best example is the automotive sector, one of Canada’s most important industries. It is dominated by American, German, and Japanese giants. Although this situation is not unique to Canada in the global context, it is unique among G-8 nations, and many other relatively small nations also have national automotive companies.
It’s interesting to note that sometimes Canadian companies are the big investors but that doesn’t change our basic position. And, as I’ve noted in other postings (including the March 24, 2017 posting), these government investments in science and technology won’t necessarily lead to a move away from our ‘branch plant economy’ towards an innovative Canada.
BTW, I noted that reference to Hinton as ‘British-born’ in the BBC article. He was educated in the UK and subsidized by UK taxpayers (from his Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),
Hinton was educated at King’s College, Cambridge graduating in 1970, with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology.[1] He continued his study at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1977 for research supervised by H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins.[3][12]
It seems Canadians are not the only ones to experience ‘brain drains’.
Finally, I wrote at length about a recent initiative taking place between the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) and the University of Washington (Seattle, Washington), the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative in a Feb. 28, 2017 posting noting that the initiative is being funded by Microsoft to the tune $1M and is part of a larger cooperative effort between the province of British Columbia and the state of Washington. Artificial intelligence is not the only area where US technology companies are hedging their bets (against Trump’s administration which seems determined to terrify people from crossing US borders) by investing in Canada.
