Now that I’ve given you all a more general overview of some of the Ottawa science events that have been keeping me on my toes, I thought I’d follow-up with a couple of shorter, slightly more detailed blogs on certain events that caught my attention. The CFI AGM was one such event, mostly as a result of their speaker, Tom Jenkins, who was very though provoking. See more detailed notes below:
The CFI AGM was well attended with guests from a wide variety of SBDAs, Universities as well as other funding agencies, think tanks, media outlets etc.
The Annual report presentation was short and sweet and is available online. CFI seems to be financially sound and is planning towards 2017 which is always promising.
Annual report here: http://www.innovation.ca/en/accountability/annual-reports
Tom Jenkins was an excellent speaker, and he spoke to some of the hurdles he sees moving forward in this digital age, including the importance of strong infrastructure, but also in having Canada always striving to be ahead of the curve in ICT development (his talk was more focused on the place of Canada in the global landscape). He also spoke to the necessity of moving out of our comfort zones/traditional methods into new ways of displaying/presenting information, giving the example of the standard written instruction manual vs. instructional videos now available online that actually demonstrate how to do something. He compared Canadian ICT investments to US investments in ICT and pointed out that it was important that Canadians try to stay in step with the US (current investments are quite a bit lower than that seen in the US, and Canada also falls within the bottom 3rd in ICT investments in OECD countries (he mentioned the OECD remark when questioned directly about it but seemed to have some hesitation). He also mentioned that with the rate that information was growing in the digital environment, he felt that the person/country/group who is able to create what he called the “dewy decimal system” for the internet “Data Management” was going to be a key leader/player in the future digital economy. In addition he spoke to the fact that Google was recently overtaken by Facebook in the digital landscape and that soon the focus would shift from the tool makers “the Google and Facebooks of the world” to the Tool Users (he used the example that we no longer know or care about who invented video(makers), but tend more to focus on who doing what with it (users)), and that we should be ready for this shift. The slide deck he presented is available here.
Where does Tom Jenkins think future innovations in the digital world will be? The Semantic Web.