Archived events
Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?
October 3, 2023 @ Vancouver, BC
This month’s event was presented by
Meet the panelists
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David Seymour is Vice President and General Manager in Office Media Group at Microsoft Vancouver. He has been part of Microsoft’s Vancouver team since the acquisition of the game development studio Bigpark in 2009. In the last decade, David has delivered a range of products, from experiences for new hardware including Kinect, Xbox One, and Hololens, to software experiences from JoyRide and Kinect Sports 2, to MSN, Office 3D, Mixed Reality Viewer, Paint 3D and 3D Viewer. Today, his development team delivers Windows Photos to 500 million monthly users and photo editing components to OneDrive and the Edge Browser. In addition, he delivers new M365 video experiences within Teams, Yammer, and other productivity apps.
He began his career in IT, working for Compugen and IBM Global Services. Shifting industries to video game development in 2001, David joined Radical Entertainment as a lead designer with successive positions at Electronic Arts and Slant Six Games. As a member of the Vancouver leadership team, David has been a strong advocate for growth and has prioritized local studio culture, product development and thought leadership. David thrives on building software and services that enable people to be more creative, effective, and expressive. He brings this passion to the team and sees tremendous opportunity to leverage it within our British Columbia and Cascadia partnerships.
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Edoardo De Martin is a passionate builder of teams and technologies that help companies, communities and sectors reach their highest potential. As a B.C.-born advocate of Canada’s tech industry, he is passionately focused on taking action that enables Canadians to lead, and to benefit from, the global market for digital technologies ranging from holographic applications for the industrial metaverse to a digital twining platform using AI to monitoring plant health for agriculture.
Before joining the Digital Supercluster as its Chief Development Officer, De Martin served as President and Chief Technology Officer, and then interim CEO, of Langley, B.C.-based CubicFarm Systems.
Prior to that, De Martin was both a General Manager of the Microsoft Vancouver Development Centre and Microsoft 356 Dynamics organization. While under his leadership, the Microsoft Vancouver site grew from 300 to 1,700 team members opening two new offices. Earlier in his career, as Franchise Development Director for Vancouver-based Electronic Arts, he led the delivery of Need for Speed Underground, a top-selling video game worldwide. De Martin quickly developed a reputation for operational excellence within the gaming industry, and earned back-to-back “Best Company” honors, during his years with Next Level Games.
Today, De Martin serves on the boards of Innovate BC, the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, the Richmond Hospital Foundation, and LlamaZOO Interactive Inc. He also volunteers his time as mentor at Creative Destruction Labs working with early stage companies as they begin their business journey.
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Terri Griffith holds the Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. Terri brings evidence-based leadership and innovation to organizations ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 100. She spent two decades in Silicon Valley and, in 2012, was honoured as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. She shares these ideas through books, academic publications, terrigriffith.com, and freelance work (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review). Her most recent research uses a “bottom-up” approach to automation, including artificial intelligence. This focus started with Terri’s research on telecommuting (remote work), an interest that began for her in 1984. Her undergraduate degree is from UC Berkeley; her MS and Ph.D. are from Carnegie Mellon. She was the 2022 President of ISSIP, The International Society of Service Innovation Professionals, where she is now on the Strategic Council. Her professional service includes past editorial roles for Organization Science, MIS Quarterly, and other journals focused on technology, organizations, and performance.
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Marc leads KPMG Ignition in the Greater Vancouver Area, supporting clients in the areas of innovation, digital and emerging technologies. He has had the good fortune to work with clients across public and private sectors both in North America as well as across Africa, giving him a unique perspective on technology and innovation as forces for good.
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Dr. Sylvain Moreno is a world leader in innovation and computational neuroscience. He is the founder of the Circle Innovation model. A model that has created exponential economic growth for SMEs in Canada across several fields of business. He is an Associate Professor in Computational Neuroscience at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Moreno has been a member of the New York Academy of Science since 2006 and several prestigious scientific organizations. He has been the recipient of many awards from national and international organizations, such as the 2021 ISSIP Excellence in Service Innovation Award and The Brainstorm Innovation Prize from Stanford Medical School (2017). His work has received widespread press in various media outlets, including The New York Times and Forbes. He has authored over 90 scientific publications and patents with real-world impacts in education and clinical environments.
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Calvin positions his product leadership at the intersection of AI and product strategy. At Borealis AI, he leads the product management team to derive strategic connections from data to solve RBC client problems with machine learning. Calvin comes from a technical background in Electrical Biomedical Engineering, an MBA, and ten years of experience creating high-performing teams. He has helped companies develop data products and platforms, prescriptive and predictive analytics software, and modern user experiences that are powered by AI. Inventing new ways for clients to interact with our Banks, Calvin maintains a responsible lens on AI's impact on our future.