2017 Speakers

Pavel Richter

Pavel Richter

Pavel Richter is Chief Executive Officer of Open Knowledge International, a worldwide non-profit network of people passionate about openness, using technology to unlock information, and enabling people to take action on pressing social problems. OKI's mission is to empower Civil Society Organisations to use Open Data to improve people's lives. Their current projects, including Frictionless Data, OpenTrials, School of Data, and many more, provide citizens and organisations with the tools and skills to use data to change the world.

Before joining OKI, Pavel was Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland for five years, and pioneered the internationally acclaimed Wikidata project which is now the fastest growing project for open structured data. Pavel is in on the Advisory Board of Transparency International Germany and Code for Germany. He holds a Masters Degree in Political Science, History and Constitutional Law. He worked for 12 years as a management consultant in the IT and banking industry, before he started to focus on managing non-profit organisations.

Find Pavel on Twitter @pavel

Danny Chang

Danny Chang

Danny is entering his third year of an Honors Specialization in Astrophysics at Western University. As a passionate student advocate, Danny has played an active role within the University Students’ Council and, within his respective faculty, is serving as the President of the Science Students’ Council. He recognizes the importance of a more affordable and accessible education for students both in his faculty and across the province. Danny is excited to be a part of the "Open" movement and looks forward to exploring the potential of OER in Ontario higher education.

Stephen Spong

Stephen Spong

Stephen Spong is the Copyright Services Librarian at Centennial College, a role he has held since 2015. His portfolio includes a wide range of responsibilities related to intellectual property, academic integrity, and open education. He was previously a librarian at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and Osgoode Hall Law School Library. He holds a J.D. from Osgoode Hall Law School and a M.I. from the University of Toronto, and is a graduate of the Harvard University Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians. He can be found on Twitter at @thelibeerian.

Embriette Hyde

Embriette Hyde

Embriette is the Project Manager for the American Gut Project, one of the largest crowd-sourced citizen science project in the USA. She established the American Gut Project as a key force in microbiome research, highlighted through the White House's National Microbiome Initiative and expanded the project into Asia. She is passionate about bringing specific cohorts into the project, including fermented foods consumer and athlete focus groups.

Academically, Embriette joined the laboratory of Dr. Joseph Petrosino, director of the Alkek Center for Metagenomics and Microbiome Research at Baylor College of Medicine, where she deepened her work analyzing microbial communities. At the University of California, San Diego, she joined Dr. Rob Knight's lab to study both the environmental and human microbiomes, how the intricate ways the microbiome can affect our health, -- and what it means to be human. Collectively, her work garnered recognition in the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science.

Follow Embriette @embriettehyde

Michael Jones

Michael Jones

Michael Jones is Professor and Program Coordinator at Sheridan College for their joint Communication, Culture, Information and Technology program with the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Michael’s primary research interest is applied project-based learning pedagogy, particularly in engineering and information technology domains. He is also interested in the political economy of new media, business information technology solutions and online advertising/marketing.

Giulia Forsythe

Giulia Forsythe

Giulia Forsythe is the Special Projects Facilitator at the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation at Brock University where she supports teaching & lifelong learning for faculty and teaching assistants. Giulia is an advocate for open education and champions the use of creative commons licenced work, especially for her visual notes. You can find her at gforsythe.ca or on Twitter @giuliaforsythe

Stella Bastone

Stella Bastone

Stella Bastone (M.Ed) is an instructional designer and professor at George Brown College in Toronto. With almost 20 years of experience in technology-enabled learning environments, she is an advocate of open educational resources and promotes the use of Creative Commons licensing in her teaching. You can find her sporadically on Twitter at @StellaBastone .

Mark Gaudet

Mark Gaudet

Mark Gaudet is Product and Business Development Manager at the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). In this role, he leads CIRA’s business development for new DNS and domain name security product offerings that are complementary to its core .CA registration service.

Farooq Naiyer

Farooq Naiyer

Farooq Naiyer is shared Chief Information Security Officer at ORION and eight post-secondary education institutions in Ontario. Previously he was part of the Cybersecurity and Privacy team at PwC in Canada where he led several cyber security engagements. He also led IT assurance teams for a leading Canadian retailer and held leadership roles in leading financial institutions in the Middle East and South Asia.

Jean-Noé Landry

Jean-Noé Landry

Executive Director of Open North, heads Canada’s leading civil society organization specialized in open data and civic technology. Open North’s work focuses on open data standards and engagement strategies, civil society advocacy efforts, and technological products and services.

Nosa Ero-Brown

Nosa Ero-Brown

Nosa Ero-Brown is the acting Director of the Open Government Office, Ontario’s Treasury Board Secretariat.

Nosa is responsible for the implementation of the Ontario government’s Open Government Strategy.  In this role she is working to provide access to high-value data and information that supports innovation and strengthens public policy – and testing new public engagement methods to involve Ontarians in decisions regarding the issues that impact their lives. In addition, Nosa is responsible for leading the implementation of Ontario’s commitments and action plan as part of the subnational pilot project of the Open Government Partnership.

Previously as Manager of Policy and Partnerships in the Open Government Office, Nosa was responsible for leading the development and implementation of Ontario’s Data Directive as part the province’s Open Government Strategy.  In this role she worked to provide access to high-value data and information that supports innovation and strengthens public policy – and testing new public engagement methods to involve Ontarians in decisions regarding the issues that impact their lives.

Nosa holds a Master’s Degree in Political Science from University of Toronto; she is also a graduate of the Lester B. Pearson United World College, Victoria BC.

Kevin Tuer

Kevin Tuer

Kevin Tuer is Managing Director of Canada’s Open Data Exchange, a national initiative launched in May 2015 with a mandate to help the private sector adopt and commercialize data from public and private sources for the purpose of enhancing their current products or creating new products.  Previously, Kevin was the founding Managing Director of the Canadian Digital Media Network (CDMN), a federal Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research, which is dedicated to establishing Canada as a world leader in Digital Media by enabling connections and collaboration of people across the country and bringing more digital solutions to market. He led the design and deployment of the Communitech Hub, a world leading innovation centre located in the Waterloo Region as well as the CDMN’s national network and associated programming strategy. Prior to launching the CDMN, Kevin held several engineering and senior management positions in the high tech industry including Senior Research Engineer with Computing Devices Canada (now General Dynamics Canada), VP Engineering for Control Advancements Inc.,  as well as co-founder and CTO of Handshake VR. Kevin holds a BASc (Honours) in Mechanical Engineering, a MASc in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.  Further information can be found at ca.linkedin.com/in/kevintuer/.

Yatish Kumar

Yatish Kumar

Yatish leads Corsa’s technical vision as well as supporting SDN OpenFlow direction in the broader industry as ONF Area Director for all ONF published specifications. He also sits on the ONF Chipmaker’s Advisory Board. Yatish has more than 23 years of networking industry experience. Prior to Corsa he was involved in a number of successful startups, including Catena Networks, which was acquired by Ciena for $500M in 2004. At Catena he led the design team responsible for developing the industry’s lowest power ADSL and POTS codecs which allowed Catena to become the leader in ADSL retrofits in all major RBOC accounts.

Prior to Catena, Yatish started his career at Nortel where he contributed to and managed the development of a number of mixed signal ICs including designs for ADSL, POTS, CDMA, Cable Modems and handsets.

As well he helped develop Nortel’s in-house CAD tools, for logic synthesis and simulation.

Yatish has developed patents in DSP architectures, and data compression. He has authored papers on high level synthesis, and embedded processor design. As well he contributed to the development of ITU 992.1, ANSI T1.413 and Telcordia GR909 standards, which are the basis for presently deployed ADSL modems.

Yatish holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Carleton University in Ottawa.

Andrés L. Dorado

Andrés L. Dorado

Andrés Dorado is the Business Analytics Program Manager for the City of Edmonton’s Analytics Centre of Excellence and is responsible and accountable for setting the vision and strategy for data warehousing and business intelligence in the City as well as the development of data driven solutions that lead to improved corporate business outcomes.

Edmonton is a leader in the advancement of the principles of open government and open data. Through their Open City Policy, endorsed by City Council in April 2015, they have repeatedly shown that they are a City that believes in the concept that data is ‘Open by Default’. In addition, they have been nationally recognized on three separate occasions for the innovative work that we are doing to enhance the lives of citizens through the operational practices that they are embracing to be transparent, inclusive and collaborative.

The City of Edmonton fully believes in the value of Open Data and the benefits that it can bring to numerous stakeholders including Citizens, Businesses, Academia, Researchers and Entrepreneurs. Through their Open Lab and Open Science programs as well as through the creation and facilitation of the Metropolitan Edmonton Open Data Committee, they have led the way in Canada in the number of innovative methods that that they have released, used, and showcased Open Data.

Lewis Wynne-Jones

Lewis Wynne-Jones

Lewis Wynne-Jones is the head of data acquisition for ThinkData Works, a Toronto-based startup with a core focus on the aggregation and distribution of public data. Their external data management platform Namara is connected to every open data portal in Canada and the USA, providing everyone from civic hackers to business leaders immediate access to over 100,000 standardized data sets.

For two years Wynne-Jones has been finding, monitoring, and managing updates to over 1000 data portals, an activity that has exposed him to the best and worst of the open data movement. A relative newcomer to digital research, he is energetically committed to demystifying data for luddites such as himself.

You can contact ThinkData on Twitter @thinkdataworks

Mary O’Farrell Bowers

Mary O’Farrell Bowers

Mary O’Farrell- Bowers has worked as a post-secondary educator in a number of roles over the past 30 years including counsellor, faculty, dean, campus principal, and currently as Vice President Academic, Canadore College. In all her roles Mary has been a strong advocate for student access and success, and brings this experience to support and promote student opportunities in Northern Ontario. As a new comer to the north she is delighted to be involved in the Northern Colleges Collaborative Programming (NCCP) project and views the project as an innovative, collaborative opportunity to increase post-secondary access in the north.

Ariela Levy

Ariela Levy

Ariela Levy is the Senior Manager Operations at Sunnybrook Hospital.

Lena Patterson

Lena Patterson

Session: Diverse, Talented: The (Work)force Awakens

Lena has been a part of the eCampusOntario team since the organization opened shop in August 2015. She worked closely with the government to establish the consortium model in Ontario and now heads up a growing project team in her role as Senior Director, Programs and Stakeholder Relations. Lena focuses on cross-pollination, collaboration and the promotion of open education, access and innovation in online and technology-enabled teaching and learning across the province. Lena has an MA from Dalhousie University and is a student in the Doctorate of Education (EdD) in Educational Leadership program at Western University. You can find her on twitter @lpatter10 and blogging at chatter.themasthead.ca.

Katya Pereyaslavska

Katya Pereyaslavska

Katya Pereyaslavska has worked on a number of accessibility-related projects including publications on digital inclusivity. She leads accessibility initiatives at Scholars Portal, Ontario Council of University Libraries, including the Accessible Content E-Portal (ACE). She is currently supervising the completion of the Report on Accessible Media (ROAM).

Kimberly Silk

Kimberly Silk

Kimberly Silk is a librarian with a background in academic and data librarianship and a passion for conducting research to evaluate how libraries impact their communities.

She is co-author of “So Much More: The Economic Impact of Toronto Public Library on the City of Toronto,” published in 2013 and the first library economic impact study of its kind in Canada. As Principal Consultant of BrightSail Research, she continues to work with public libraries across Canada to extend this methodology. In 2014 she created the Library Research Network, a not-for-profit, curated, web-based repository of research relevant to public, academic, government and special libraries. Her most recent collaboration with Dr. Bill Irwin, “Creating a Culture of Evaluation: Taking Your Library from Talk to Action“, was published by OLA Press in April 2017.

Since 2015 she has worked with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) as Special Projects Officer where she collaborates with academic libraries and other stakeholders to coordinate research projects to support transformations in scholarly communication.

From 2008 to 2015 Kim was the Data Librarian at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) at the University of Toronto. At MPI, she developed integrated library and research services to support the MPI research process, and gained expertise in the role of public assets, such as libraries, parks, schools and museums, on the prosperity of cities and regions.

Ann Pappert

Ann Pappert

Ann Pappert is a strategic and energetic public sector leader whose 20+ years of experience across multiple provinces and cities brings an expansive perspective to her vision for “opening up” government.

An early advocate of open data and open engagement, Ann is focused on the realization of open governance and championing our next generation of transformational public sector leaders.

Her recent work as the CAO of the City of Guelph resulted in it being awarded the Institute of Public Administration of Canada's (IPAC) Bronze award for 'bold innovative leadership' in the municipal public sector.

Ann is currently writing on how to implement significant cultural change within government; the leadership essentials required to deliver a truly 'open' culture within the public service; and practical lessons on embedding holistic design into the structures, policies and delivery systems of cities.

Lisa Grothier

Lisa Grothier

As the Chief Information Officer for St. Lawrence College, Lisa provides oversight for Administrative and Academic technology strategy and operations.  Lisa is keenly focused on “students first” and believes that a strategic, responsive, and customer-focused Information Technology department can be a significant contributor to the success of students and staff.

With technology at the heart of transformational change in higher education, it is imperative that the IT department be strategically integrated with our teaching, learning and corporate business functions.  To this end, she sits on several college committees, councils and advisories to ensure that appropriate technologies and solutions can be considered and integrated in a rapidly changing technology landscape.

Lisa holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer and Information Science from Queen’s University and in brings over 30 years of experience in the business of IT and education, focusing the last six years in higher education.

Lisa also chairs the Ontario College Council of Chief Information Officers (OCCCIO) which provides advocacy, collaboration and support for Ontario’s 24 College IT departments and their important role in our province’s higher education sustainability strategy.

Ritch Dusome

Ritch Dusome

Ritch Dusome is President & CEO of CENGN – Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks. He has held this position since its inception in September 2014 and is also both a Board Member for the organization and an OPNFV ambassador. CENGN is an Ontario, Federal, and Industry funded consortium focused on Next Generation Networking including areas such as Open Compute Data Centre, Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, Internet of Things, and Open Standards.  Ritch has over 30 years of Data Centre, Networking and Internet Experience working at a variety of companies including: CENGN, Cisco Systems, Bell Canada, and TD Bank. Ritch holds a B.Sc. from the University of Ottawa and is also a 10-year CCIE Emeritus alumni and Enterprise Architect.

Luc Roy

Luc Roy

Luc Roy is the Chief Information Officer for Laurentian University and co-owner of Old Rock Roastery. As CIO, Luc is responsible for IT, Media and Web services for the university. In 1987, Luc graduated from the University of Ottawa with a Bachelor of Science, Computer Science. Luc worked as the Director of Product Marketing for Bay Networks (acquired by Nortel Networks) and many of its subsidiaries for 13 years. He continued to work in the computer networking industry as Vice President - Product Planning for Chantry Networks Inc. (acquired by Siemens), Vice President - Wireless Strategy for Siemens Enterprise Communications, Vice President - Market Management for Siemens Canada, Vice President - Wireless Strategy for Enterasys Networks, Director of Marketing for Greenfield Networks (acquired by Cisco) and Vice President - Product Management and Marketing for BlueCat Networks.

Rory McGreal

Rory McGreal

Prof. Rory McGreal is the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning/International Council for Open and Distance Education Chair in Open Educational Resources (OER); and Director of  the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University. He is also  co-Editor of IRRODL (International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning).  He is the founder of the OER Knowledge Cloud, a repository of research articles on OER. Previous positions include Assoc. VP Research, Executive Director of TeleEducation NB, a Canadian province-wide  elearning network and Supervisor at Contact North/Contact Nord in Ontario.  He is also the recipient of  several national and international awards for open and distance learning.

Peter Singh

Peter Singh

Peter Singh is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Toronto District School Board, the largest and one of the most diverse school boards in Canada. Serving approximately 246,000 students in 584 schools throughout Toronto, and more than 160,000 life-long learners.

Stephen Abram

Stephen Abram

Stephen Abram, MLS, is executive director of the Federation of Ontario Public Libraries where he represents Ontario’s over 300 public library systems to all levels of government.  He has deep roots in Canada's library sector as a strategy and direction planning consultant for libraries and the information industry is principal of Lighthouse Consulting Inc.

He has been president of the Ontario Library Association, the Special Libraries Association and the Canadian Library Association.  He is a renowned library trend watcher, keynote speaker, innovator and author of Stephen’s Lighthouse blog – the top blog in the sector globally – as well as hundreds of articles and a number of books.  Stephen's recent books include contributions to the most recent textbook for library science, Information Services Today: An Introduction, ALA Editions' bestselling Out Front with Stephen Abram, Boomers & Beyond, Libraries 2020, Creating a Culture of Evaluation: Taking your Library from Talk to Action, and Reinventing Reference: How Libraries Deliver Value in the Age of Google.

He teaches at the graduate level at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (iSchool) as well as planning iSchool Symposia. He has held executive leadership positions in libraries and at Cengage Learning (Gale), SirsiDynix, Thomson Publishing, ProQuest and IHS.

Stephen tweets at @sabram.

 

Alan Darnell

Alan Darnell

Alan Darnell is the director of Scholar’s Portal, a shared service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) that is truly collaborative. Founded in 2002, Scholars Portal provides a shared technology infrastructure across 21 university libraries in Ontario, enabling data management and resource sharing that can further the work conducted by Ontario universities via Scholars Portal online services and the online inter-library loan platform.

Tom Gee

Tom-Gee-ORION-THINK2017-speaker

Tom Gee is the manager of the Neuroinformatics Group at the Rotman Research Institute, and the manager of Software Development at Indoc Research. He has 30 years of experience in systems development for research, starting his career with the Defence Research & Defense Canada creating real-time, safety-critical, distributed embedded data acquisition and control systems for high altitude and acceleration protection.

Most recently over the last seven years, Tom has been helping design, implement, deploy and maintain informatics systems for large scale collaborative projects involving multiple imaging modalities, clinical and molecular data flows, and significant amounts of sensitive health information from research and clinical domains.

The Brain-CODE platform of the Ontario Brain Institute is one such key project, which supports five major programs with hundreds of researchers across 35 different institutions across Ontario and beyond. Tom is also involved in the deployment of the Toronto Dementia Research Alliance database, a "research embedded in clinical care" system with novel privacy and security elements to be installed at five major research hospitals across Toronto.

Tom on Twitter: @twgee

David Rotenberg

David Rotenberg

David Rotenberg is the Manager of Scientific Computing / Research Informatics at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

With a background in medical physics, David’s research focuses on the development of novel MRI acquisition methods and the exploration of metrics and biomarkers of neuropsychiatric disorders.

In his role as Manager of Scientific Computing, David leads a team of informatics specialists with inter-disciplinary and cross-platform expertise, dedicated to supporting CAMH Research programs. The Research Informatics team administers CAMH’s high performance computing and storage environments, including the CAMH Neuroinformatics Platform, a secure managed database infrastructure to store, organize and analyze multi-modal research data. These platforms support advanced neuropsychiatric research analytics across multiple research domains, including imaging (MRI / PET / EEG), ‘omics (genetics, epigenetics, proteomics, transcriptomics) and clinical data.

Dean Lessard

Dean Lessard

Dean has been the Lead for Northern College on the Northern Colleges Collaborative Project (NCCP) since its inception. With almost twenty (20) years in elementary, secondary and post-secondary education, Dean is a proud ‘Northerner’ with a passion for technology enhanced learning designed to increase student access to high quality educational opportunities. The NCCP has demonstrated to Dean the power of collaboration in sparking creativity, inspiring innovation and developing models for sustainable practice.

Erin Oner

Erin Oner

Erin Oner is the Coordinator/Professor of Business Marketing and Business Admin Marketing at Confederation College. Prior to her role with Confederation College, Erin spent ten years first studying and then working in Sydney Australia as part of Baxter Healthcare Australia’s Healthcare Solutions Team in strategic business development.

Erin was later promoted to National Account Manager for Ramsay Healthcare who is Australia’s largest private hospital group and worked on the development and VIP rebate programs within the private healthcare sector for several years before heading back home to Canada .

Erin holds an MBA and a Bachelors Degree in International Business Management and has accrued educational, private business and corporate business development experience, both domestically and abroad.  Cultural awareness born of language study and immersion in Mexico, South America, Turkey and Australia are a positive resources that Erin uses daily, in her role as a Coordinator and in the classroom.

Patrick McCurdy

Patrick McCurdy

Patrick McCurdy (PhD, LSE) is Associate Professor in the Department Communication at the University of Ottawa.

His research draws from media and communication, journalism as well as social movement studies to study media as a site and source of social struggle and contestation. Most recently, Patrick’s work has studied the evolution of oil/tar sands advertising and campaigning from 1970 to present day with his project Mediatoil.

Mediatoil offers the public an online, searchable database of oil/tar sands promotional material and in August 2016 won first in prize in Compute Canada/SSHRC’s national competition The Human Dimensions Open Data Challenge. Patrick’s work has been published in several academic journals and he is the co-author of Protest Camps and the co-editor of three books Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance (Policy Press 2017), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (Palgrave 2013) and Mediation and Protest Movements (Intellect 2013).

He may be found on Twitter as @pmmcc

Richard Pietro

Richard Pietro

Richard Pietro socializes open government and open data by creating civic engagement as art through his company OGT Productions. Some of his projects include the 2014 Open Government Tour and "Open" - the world's first short film on open government, open data, and open source.

He also worked collaboratively with the Ontario Ministry of Housing to develop a new way for creating, publishing, and activating Open Data sets, a process he calls “Open Data in Reverse.” This initiative even helped the government win a nationally recognized award for engagement.

Most recently, his Open Data Iron Chef workshop has garnered attention due to its innovative way for introducing open government and open data to students at both the secondary and university levels.

Find Richard on Twitter @richardpietro

Mita Williams

Mita Williams

Mita is a science librarian at the Leddy Library of the University of Windsor.

She is also on the Board of Directors of Hackforge, a hackerspace based in Windsor. It is a collective of technology enthusiasts, software engineers, hardware hackers, librarians, and expatriates from the automotive industry. Hackforge is community-oriented, focused on team projects that bring people together and pointed in the same direction.

Also, Mita leads Open Data Windsor Essex. ODWE is Hackforge’s special interest group dedicated to supporting and encouraging efforts in open data. Funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, ODWE advocates for open data and assists organizations in our community share their work in a manner that’s accessible and open for everyone.

Browse her past projects as speaker, event organizer, and gamer on her website and find Mita on Twitter @copystar

Tracey P. Lauriault

Tracey P. Lauriault

Tracey P. Lauriault, is assistant professor of Critical Media and Big Data, Media Studies and Communication in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. Her areas of expertise are, critical data studies; small, big and spatial data policy; data infrastructures and open data, open government, geospatial data, open smart cities, and the preservation and archiving of data.

She is a research associate with the European Research Council funded Programmable City Project led by Rob Kitchin at Maynooth University in Ireland and the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University in Canada. She is a Steering Committee member of Research Data Canada; on the board of Open North, a member of the Institute for Data Science at Carleton and is winner of the 2016 Inaugural Open Data Leadership award for Canada. She is also the convener and host of the Data Power 2017 Conference to be held in Ottawa in June.

Verena Roberts

Verena Roberts

Verena Roberts is a passionate online and blended K-12 educator and consultant from Calgary, Alberta, Canada and is currently a Technology for Learning Specialist with Rocky View Schools. She is also a Michigan Virtual Research Institute Fellow and Werkland School of Education (University of Calgary) doctoral student who is completing her EdD in Learning Sciences. Her primary research focus is in open learning in K-12 learning environments. She has consulted facilitated and developed a wide range of open networked learning projects with a focus on open educational resources, emerging blended learning opportunities and personalized professional learning pathways for teachers with Mozilla, CANeLearn, ERLC and iNACOL. Some of her open projects include cMOOCS like #Digifoot12, #ETMOOC, #OCLMOOC, the ABOER K-12 Multiplying K-12 OER project as well as the #Gamified project.  Verena has presented at a wide variety of national and international conferences and is the iNACOL 2013 Award Recipient for K12 Innovation in Blended and Online Learning for developing TheOC@ADLC (The Open Classroom at Alberta Distance Learning Centre).

Roy Thomas

Roy Thomas

Roy Thomas is the Manager of Business Solutions for Ontario’s Community Services I&IT Cluster.  With a background ranging from maintaining mission critical mainframe systems to building emerging, mobile-friendly solutions, he has extensive experience in both the management and hands-on delivery of all aspects of the software development lifecycle.  Roy has also been working closely with Open Government community to define datasets which would maximize the outcome of the Government’s Open Data efforts and realize the full potential of data.   Currently, he is managing an enterprise transfer payment solution being implemented across the Ontario Public Sector to help streamline business processes and consolidate service delivery to a single authoritative source of information.

Carl Virtanen

Carl Virtanen

Carl is the Associate Director and co-founder of HPC4Health, a high-performance computing (HPC) centre focused on healthcare, and the Director and Research Lead, UHN Digital. He has more than 20 years of experience researching and managing data in the “omics” field and has worked in the pharmaceutical sector, software development, consulting and systems administration.

At the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Carl built and currently manages the Princess Margaret’s computational and bioinformatics core, which is a platform that researchers from across the hospital can access for their scientific work. His team is also responsible for overseeing the development and validation of data processing pipelines associated with clinical genetic testing within the hospitals Molecular Pathology Lab.

At the HPC4Health, Carl works with the Scientific Director to support the strategic direction and vision of the HPC4Health operation, which is to make secure access to HPC resources available for research hospitals within Ontario and to spearhead new initiatives in sharing health related data. The HPC4Health works closely with its partners within Compute Ontario and Compute Canada to achieve its aims.

Find Carl on Twitter @HPC4Health

Doug Lindner

Doug Lindner

Mr. Lindner is the Director of Systems Engineering for Juniper Networks, joining the Canadian team in January, 2000.  With over 30 years of experience in the networking and communications industry, Doug has been involved with the design, deployment and support of large-scale network projects across Canada, the US and overseas in support of new and advanced network applications, network security, and cloud solutions, with a particular focus on digital transformation.

Doug leads the Systems Engineering team for Juniper’s Canadian Service Provider, Enterprise and Partner organizations supporting our customers and partners across Canada

Richard Garner

Richard Garner

Richard's 20 year media background is mainly in broadcast television as a producer of multiple shows and content for a variety of national networks. In 2007, Richard became Vice President of Programming for The Score Television Network and in 2012, Richard became VP of Media and Communications for The Stronach Group. Richard has also hosted numerous radio and television shows.

Richard has been working with ORION to produce a video series called "Faces of Innovation" that showcases the game-changing research, education and innovation occurring throughout Ontario that relies upon on the ORION’s digital infrastructure. In 2015, Faces of Innovation won Platinum at Association of Marketing and Communications Professionals’ annual AVA Digital Awards.