Prime Minister of Canada
Justin Trudeau (born December 25, 1971) is Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister. He also serves as Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and Minister of Youth. Justin’s vision of Canada is a country where everyone has a real and fair chance to succeed. His experiences as a teacher, father, leader, and advocate for youth have shaped his dedication to Canadians – and his commitment to make Canada a place where everyone has the opportunities they need to thrive. The oldest of three boys, Justin grew up with the profound influence of his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and his mother, Margaret Trudeau. He was raised speaking both French and English and has family roots in both Eastern and Western Canada. This background helped spark his passion for public service and shaped his conviction that diversity is Canada’s strength. Justin studied literature at McGill University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 1994. He went on to complete the University of British Columbia’s education program, and spent several years teaching French, math, and other subjects in Vancouver. Teaching allowed him to make a positive impact in the lives of young people. He remains committed to hearing the voices of young Canadians, from the classroom to Parliament Hill. In 2002, Justin returned home to Montréal, where he met Sophie Grégoire, a Quebec TV and radio host. They married in 2005 and are now the proud parents of Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Before entering politics, Justin served as the Chair of Katimavik, on the board for the Canadian Avalanche Foundation, and as an advocate for young people and the environment. As a speaker at events and conferences around the country, he encouraged young people to engage with the issues important to them and participate as active citizens. These experiences made it increasingly clear to him that the issues young Canadians care about – education, the environment, their generation's economic prospects – needed a stronger voice. Justin entered politics to make change that would better serve all Canadians. In 2007, he built a community-based, grassroots campaign to win the Liberal Party nomination in the Montréal riding of Papineau. He was elected in 2008, and re-elected in 2011 and 2015. Justin was elected Leader of the Liberal Party in April 2013. His leadership campaign focused on building a new, truly national movement of progressive Canadians, bringing hundreds of thousands of Canadians into politics, most for the first time. He worked closely with his team to build a plan to create jobs, grow the economy, and strengthen the middle class. With Justin’s leadership, the Liberal plan emphasized fair economic opportunity for everyone, respect for and promotion of freedom and diversity, and a more democratic government that truly represents Canadians. On October 19, 2015, Justin led his party to victory, winning a majority government with seats in every province and territory across the country. He was sworn in on November 4, 2015. As Prime Minister, Justin leads a government that works hard every day to build an economy that works for the middle class and people working hard to join it. His team is focused on creating new jobs, fostering strength out of Canada’s rich diversity, fighting climate change, and achieving reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. A proud feminist, Justin appointed Canada’s first gender balanced Cabinet.
Executive Chairman, Alphabet Inc.
Eric Schmidt is the executive chairman of Alphabet, responsible for the external matters of all of the holding company's businesses, including Google Inc., advising their CEOs and leadership on business and policy issues. Eric joined Google in 2001 and helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader in technology. He served as Google’s Chief Executive Officer from 2001-2011, overseeing the company’s technical and business strategy alongside founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Under his leadership Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a strong culture of innovation.
Director, OpenAI
Shivon Zilis is a Director at OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company whose mission is to discover and enact the path to safe artificial general intelligence. Shivon is obsessed with machine intelligence for good, and cares most about data and machine intelligence transforming the world. Formerly, she was a partner and a founding member of Bloomberg Beta. Shivon has invested in over 30 machine intelligence companies. She is an ML7 fellow at Creative Destruction Lab, and was named as one of Forbes 30 under 30 in Venture Capital.
Vice President Product & Strategy, integrate.ai
Kathryn Hume is Vice President Product & Strategy for integrate.ai, a SaaS startup applying AI to drive growth and customer satisfaction for large enterprises. Kathryn is also a Venture Partner at ffVC, a seed- and early-stage technology venture capital firm, where she advises early-stage artificial intelligence companies and sources deal flow. As the former Director of Sales and Marketing at Fast Forward Labs, Kathryn led Fortune 500 companies to accelerate their machine learning and data science capabilities. Prior to that, she was a Principal Consultant in Intapp's Risk Practice, focused on data privacy, security, and compliance.
Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development
The Honourable Navdeep Bains is the Member of Parliament for Mississauga–Malton and was appointed Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development on November 4, 2015. He has extensive parliamentary experience, having represented Mississauga–Malton from 2004 to 2011. He served as Privy Councillor and Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister Paul Martin and then as Critic for Public Works and Government Services, the Treasury Board, International Trade, Natural Resources, and Small Business and Tourism. Minister Bains was an adjunct lecturer at the Master of Public Service program at the University of Waterloo and a distinguished visiting professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. His private sector experience includes several years at the Ford Motor Company of Canada. In addition to ties within the academic and business communities, he has held Director positions with social and cultural organizations within the non-profit sector. He is the recipient of a number of awards recognizing his work in promoting diversity in communities. Minister Bains has a Bachelor of Administrative Studies from York University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Windsor. He also holds a Certified Management Accountant designation. He is a long-time resident of Mississauga, where he lives now with his wife and two children.
Country Director, Google Canada
As Country Manager of Google Canada, Sabrina’s mission is to bring the best of our innovation to help Canada’s largest companies thrive, by building digital solutions that solve business problems for today and tomorrow. A trusted advisor to Canada’s C-Suite and an eleven year veteran at Google, Sabrina’s insights are based on 22 years of international marketing/PR, technology sales and general management experience at Procter & Gamble (Italy), Reckitt Benckiser (global), Ask Jeeves (UK), a mobile startup called Incirco (UK) and Google (UK & Canada). Sabrina is a board member of the Ryerson DMZ, North America’s top University Start-Up Incubator, and an advisor on the City of Toronto Innovation Economy Advisory Council and Move the Dial, an initiative to encourage more women in tech. Recognized by the Women’s Executive Council (WXN) as one of Canada’s top 100 most powerful women in 2015 and recipient of the 2014 Women in Communication Technology Diversity award, Sabrina’s personal mission is to inspire girls and women with the potential of technology.
Co-founder & CEO, DeepMind
Demis Hassabis is co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, a company which develops general-purpose learning algorithms and uses them to tackle the world’s greatest challenges. A child chess prodigy, Demis coded the classic game Theme Park at age 17. After graduating from Cambridge, he founded videogames company Elixir Studios and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. The journal Science declared his research one of 2007’s top breakthroughs. He is a five-time World Games Champion, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and recipient of the Royal Society Mullard Award and the Royal Academy of Engineering's Silver Medal. He was also featured on the 2017 Time 100.
CEO of Verve.ai; Chief Data Scientist, JONES
Dalia Asterbadi hails from a family of technology entrepreneurs. Dalia is the CEO of Verve.ai and Chief Data Scientist at JONES, focused in machine learning and augmented intelligence since 2012. As a respected marketing technologist and inventor of a patented augmented intelligence platform, she believes in pioneering the democratization of data science. Based in Toronto, she is committed to enabling Canadian startups to make a dent in the technology and business ecosystem.
Senior Vice President of Data and Analytics, Shopify
David Lennie is Senior Vice President of Data and Analytics at Shopify and joined the company in 2015. Prior to joining Shopify, David served as the Senior Vice President of Analytics at LearnVest and Director of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix. He brings a wealth of experience and knowledge in building data teams, warehouses, and analytics systems. David holds an M.B.A. from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Science degree from Northwestern University.
Principal Scientist, Google
Blaise leads a team at Google focusing on machine intelligence for mobile devices—including both basic research and new products. His group works extensively with deep neural nets for machine perception, distributed learning, and agents, as well as collaborating with academic institutions on connectomics research. Until 2014 he was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, where he worked in a variety of roles, from inventor to strategist, and led teams with strengths in interaction design, prototyping, computer vision and machine vision, augmented reality, wearable computing and graphics. Blaise has given TED talks on Seadragon and Photosynth (2007, 2012) and Bing Maps (2010). In 2008, he was awarded MIT’s prestigious TR35 (“35 under 35”).
CEO, Canvass Analytics
An entrepreneur by heart and profession, Humera is the founder and CEO of Canvass Analytics, where she drives the vision and strategy for changing the way industrial companies think about and use their data. Best known for developing corporate and product strategies to fuel business growth, Humera has been working with companies across the globe leading them to success. Humera worked for Cingular, AT&T and Bell Enterprise where she was responsible for defining innovative enterprise business solutions targeting several key industries – transport, manufacturing, retail and energy. She built several strategic business and technology alliances to generate revenue momentum and streamline solution delivery platforms. She is involved in various industry associations including Ambassador for the Tele-Management Forum, and is also a frequent speaker globally about both technology and Internet of Things ecosystems. She received various recognitions with most recent being a recipient of the Women of M2M/IoT award.
Co-Founder & CEO, Rubikloud
Kerry Liu is the Co-Founder & CEO at Rubikloud, where he leads three important functions: people, sales, and technology disruption. Rubikloud is the world's most advanced machine learning platform for large retailers. By delivering in market recommendations on loyalty and merchandising campaigns, Rubikloud significantly lifts revenue and saves operational time. In his role, Kerry works to manage and maintain a thriving company culture that recruits the best and brightest in the industry, while also maintaining relationships with global retailers and investors. Kerry is passionate about machine learning and big data, and enjoys providing enterprise retailers with the tools and knowledge needed to enhance their overall business goals.
Director of Machine Learning, Kindred
Inmar Givoni is the Director of Machine Learning at Kindred, where her team develops algorithms for machine intelligence, at the intersection of robotics and AI. Prior to that, she was the VP of Big Data at Kobo, where she led her team in applying machine learning and big data techniques to drive ecommerce, customer satisfaction, CRM, and personalization in the e-pubs and e-readers business. She first joined Kobo in 2013 as a senior research scientist working on content analysis, website optimization, and reading modelling among other things. Prior to that, Inmar was a member of technical staff at Altera (now Intel) where she worked on optimization algorithms for cutting-edge programmable logic devices.
Director of Data Products, Wattpad
Wendy is the Director of Data Products at Wattpad, the global multiplatform entertainment company for original stories. She leads strategy on Wattpad's machine learning, discovery, and analytics initiatives, and has a strong interest in exploring the potentials of AI for social good. In her past lives, Wendy has worked in product analytics, game telemetry, and for a brief period, in econometrics, exploring impacts of technology innovation on NAIRU.
Vice President, Google; Chief Scientific Advisor, Vector Institute; Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Geoffrey designs machine learning algorithms. His aim is to discover neural network learning procedures that are efficient at finding complex structure in large, high-dimensional datasets. His research group at the University of Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification. He is now a Google Engineering Fellow and manages the Toronto branch of the Google Brain Team. Geoffrey Hinton is a fellow of the Royal Society and his awards include the NSERC Herzberg Gold medal, the IEEE James Clerk Maxwell Gold medal, the BBVA award for Information and Communication technology, the Killam prize for Engineering, the Rumelhart prize and the IJCAI Research Excellence Award.
Director, Ethics and Governance of AI Fund
Tim Hwang (@timhwang) is Director at the Ethics and Governance of AI Fund, a philanthropic initiative focused on ensuring the development of artificial intelligence in the public interest. He previously led Intelligence & Autonomy, a research project on the societal impact of machine intelligence supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Dubbed the "The Busiest Man on the Internet" by Forbes in 2014, his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired Magazine, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.
Scientist at SickKids; Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto
Dr Goldenberg is a Scientist in Genetics and Genome Biology at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. She is also a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Dr Goldenberg’s lab develops machine learning approaches that efficiently combine many types of patient measurements to refine diagnosis, improve prognosis and personalise drug response prediction in the context of complex human diseases.
PhD Candidate, Machine Learning, University of Toronto
Jamie Kiros is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto supervised by Dr. Richard Zemel and Dr. Ruslan Salakhutdinov. Her recent work has focused on problems at the intersection of language and vision, such as multimodal representation learning, image captioning, aligning books and movies and learning ordered representations. She is also interested in deep reinforcement learning as well as sequence-to-sequence learning problems such as machine translation.
Research Scientist, Lead of Google Brain (Montreal)
Hugo leads the Google Brain group in Montreal. Hugo has done research in deep learning for more than 10 years and published several influential scientific papers in the field. His previous work includes unsupervised pretraining with autoencoders, denoising autoencoders, visual attention-based classification, neural autoregressive distribution models. He also has a popular online course on deep learning and neural networks, freely accessible on YouTube.
CEO, Botler.AI
Amir joined a startup as a programmer after finishing his Masters in Montreal, went on to become the CTO, and rebrand the startup to Relevant AI. He had to abruptly leave everything behind in Canada due to his immigration issues. Wanting to solve his own problems with immigration through AI, he built a tool which evolved into what Botler AI is today. Amir's mission in life is to harness AI for social good. Amir has a Masters of Engineering in Quality System Engineering.
Research Scientist, Google
Françoise Beaufays is a research scientist at Google, where she leads a team of engineers, researchers and linguists working on speech recognition and mobile keyboard input. Her area of scientific expertise covers neural networks, acoustic modeling, language modeling and other technologies related to natural language processing. Her scientific interests revolve around data science and machine intelligence and on bringing their magic to technology users around the world. Beaufays studied mechanical and electrical engineering in Brussels, Belgium. She holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. minor in Italian literature, both from Stanford University.
Partner, Real Ventures
Janet is passionate about helping entrepreneurs and their businesses reach their full potential. Her background is a combination of founding and building successful entrepreneurial ventures and making an impact at leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, McKinsey & Co., and eBay. Janet is a General Partner at Real Ventures, Canada’s largest and most active early-stage venture capital firm. Janet has led investments in a dozen companies and works actively with Real’s portfolio companies to help them accelerate growth and create meaningful impact. Janet launched Kijiji.ca and grew it to become one of the most visited websites in Canada. Subsequently, she led the Kijiji Global business, accelerating growth in North America, Europe, and Asia. Prior to launching Kijiji, Janet was at eBay in Silicon Valley where she led multiple “non-collectibles” categories and helped transform eBay from a collectibles to a mainstream marketplace. She also founded and built a successful consulting business and was CEO at a Toronto-based start-up in the online content and commerce space. Janet was a varsity long-distance runner and competed internationally in triathlons. Today she balances her active lifestyle with being a wife and mother to her eleven-year old son.
CEO of Sidewalk Labs
Dan leads the urban innovation company he launched with Google to improve cities for residents, businesses and city governments. Prior to founding Sidewalk Labs, he was president and CEO of Bloomberg L.P and previously served as deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding for the City of New York. With Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Dan led the city’s dramatic economic resurgence, spearheading the effort to reverse New York’s fiscal crisis after 9/11 through a five-borough economic development strategy, including the creation of PlaNYC, a 127-point plan designed to create the first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city.
Head of Engineering at Sidewalk Labs
Craig leads the engineering team, which develops new technologies to improve quality of life in cities. Before joining Sidewalk Labs, Craig founded Google’s first remote engineering center, located in New York City. In his role as Engineering Director at Google, he oversaw the development of products including Google Local (now Maps) and Froogle (now Google Shopping), as well as features of web search such as Question Answering and Web Definitions.
Digital storyteller and singer/songwriter
Taryn Southern is a digital storyteller and singer/songwriter with 500,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel and more than 500 million views across her internet videos. A former actress and TV host, in 2013, Taryn founded Happy Cat Media, which provides digital consulting services and production services for brands and media companies. Passionate about the intersection of science, tech, and storytelling, Taryn was recently named one of the top 20 Women in VR (DigitalLA) and one of the first people to perform a live concert in virtual reality. Her current producing projects include a series of immersive VR music videos for YouTube, a feature length documentary on the human brain directed by Academy Award nominee Morgan Spurlock, and an album composed entirely with artificial intelligence. The debut single “Break Free,” released this September, has received more than 1.4 million views on YouTube.
Principal Engineer, Hubba
Leah has been working in the industry since her college days. Ultimately, she decided to continue her postgraduate education at York University receiving her Master's of Computer Science in Bioinformatics publishing in BMC Genomics. After completing her degree, she moved to New York to work in the field and eventually ended up in the video game industry at Rockstar Games which had been a long-time dream job since she first decided to pursue software engineering. While spending a year and a half working on GTA V and being a fully accredited developer was a great experience, she finally decided to move to beautiful Santa Monica, California to join Riot games as one of the engineers on the Esports Engineering team. She spent a year and a half building the tools and infrastructure to support the professional League of Legends gameplay before moving back home to Toronto to be with family. Initially, she continued remote work with Riot as a tech lead and major contributor to their Esports architecture until she ultimately decided that her career growth would only continue to thrive with a more local organization. Now, she's at Hubba as a Principal Engineer and is building out the Machine Learning team for the organization. She is extremely excited to offer her previous experiences and knowledge to help Hubba grow and evolve in the AI and Machine Learning space.
President and CEO, Waterfront Toronto
Will is responsible for leading the revitalization of Toronto’s waterfront, bringing together the most innovative approaches to sustainable development, excellence in urban design, real estate development leading technology infrastructure. Prior to joining Waterfront Toronto Will was President of Communitas Development and served as Director of Planning and Development for the City of Boulder. Will is well-known nationally as a development and thought leader, building new and existing communities into sustainable, accessible, vibrant and beautiful places. His experience in community engagement, district-scale sustainability, building equitable and inclusive communities, and transit-oriented development serves is an ideal match for Waterfront Toronto’s overall approach and vision for community- and city-building.
Senior Vice President, Research Group, Element AI
Philippe cofounded Element AI in 2016 and currently leads its applied and fundamental research groups. His team has helped tackle some of the biggest and most interesting business challenges using machine learning. Philippe's prior explorations included multidimensional time-series analysis during his PhD at Université de Montréal, and bipedal walking control as a postdoc at UBC. He also worked five years at Google as a Senior Developer and Technical Lead Manager, partly with the Chrome Machine Learning team. When he has some free time, Philippe likes to invent new boardgames, and sometimes get them published.
"Dragon", CBC Dragons’ Den | Co-Founder, Clearbanc
Michele Romanow is an engineer and a serial entrepreneur who started three companies before her 28th birthday. The youngest ever entrepreneur to join CBC’s hit show Dragons’ Den, Michele is the co-founder of e-commerce platforms Buytopia.ca and SnapSaves (acquired by Groupon), which have saved millions of users hundreds of millions of dollars. Ranked in WXN’s “100 Most Powerful in Canada” and listed as the only Canadian on Forbes’ “Millennial on a Mission” list. Her current venture Clearbanc is offering financial services for freelancers and entrepreneurs. Buytopia ranked the #3 on the Profit Hot 50 list of fastest growing companies, #1 on Chatelaine's W100 list of fastest growing companies and was a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award and the RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards. Michele was previously the Director of Strategy for Sears. Michele holds an engineering degree and an MBA from Queen's University where she received the Queen's Tricolour.Michele is a director on the board of Vail Resorts (NYSE: MTN), Shad Valley and Freshii.
Executive Director, Ryerson City Building Institute
Cherise Burda is Executive Director of the Ryerson City Building Institute, where she addresses critical urban challenges through research, policy advancement and public engagement. Prior to assuming this role, Cherise was the Ontario Director of the Pembina Institute, Canada’s leading clean energy think-and-do tank, where she led a team of experts conducting research, advocacy and communications strategies for transportation, sustainable cities and clean energy solutions in Ontario. Cherise has authored dozens of publications on these issues and in 2013 Cherise was appointed the Premier of Ontario’s transit investment strategy. Before returning to Toronto in 2007, Cherise spent twelve years in British Columbia where she held roles as a program director for the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver and senior researcher at University of Victoria’s Polis Project at the Faculty of Law. She holds an M.A. in environmental legislation and policy, a BSc. in environmental science and a B.Ed. Cherise grew up in the 905 where much of her family still lives.
Engineering Director, Google Canada
Steven Woods is the Senior Engineering Director for Google Canada located in Google’s Engineering Headquarters in Kitchener-Waterloo. Since 2008, Steven has applied his entrepreneurial talents to building Google’s engineering and product efforts across a wide array of products. A serial entrepreneur before Google, Steven built companies in software services and infrastructure, in-game advertising, and consumers. Steven is Chairman of the board of Communitech and board member of several Canadian companies. Steven holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan and a Masters and PhD in Computer Science (Mathematics) from the University of Waterloo. Steven received the JW Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation from U of W in 2010.
Director of Strategic Initiatives, City of Toronto
Siri Agrell is the Director of Strategic Initiatives for Mayor John Tory, where she oversees files including the innovation economy, government modernization and federal intergovernmental relations. She previously served as Deputy Director of Communications for Premier Kathleen Wynne and was a journalist for more than a decade, most recently as the Urban Affairs reporter for The Globe and Mail.
Reporter, The New York Times
Cade Metz is a reporter with The New York Times, covering artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging technologies. He recently signed with various book publishers, including Penguin Dutton in the U.S and Random House in the U.K., to write a non-fiction narrative about the tiny clan of A.I visionaries who are rapidly changing our world.
CEO, MetaOptima Technology Inc
Maryam Sadeghi, director of Digital Health Hub and CEO at MetaOptima Technology Inc, completed her PhD in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in the Medical Image Analysis lab working closely with BC Cancer Agency and Skin Care Center at UBC Dermatology. She is interested in e-Health and m-Health applications as innovative patient-centric digital health solutions. In 2012, she founded the company MetaOptima Technology Inc. in Vancouver, Canada, developing intelligent technologies for health-related real life problems
Serverless Developer Advocate, Google
Bret is on the Google Cloud Platform team at Google, focusing on serverless products like Google Cloud Functions, App Engine, Firebase, machine learning APIs, and more. He's currently an aspiring Node.js developer. Prior to Google, Bret worked in the cloud industry at Rackspace as a software engineer. He's often on the running trail, volleyball court or kickball field.
Machine Learning Developer Advocate, Google
Yufeng is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform, where he is trying to make machine learning more understandable and usable for all. He enjoys hearing about new and interesting applications of machine learning, share your use case with him on Twitter @YufengG.
