Innovation Policy Lab

Canada should be exempt from restrictions on foreign investment in U.S. startups: U of T expert in the National Post

davidlee1 — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 15:32:15 +0000

Canada should be exempt from restrictions on foreign investment in U.S. startups: U of T expert in the National Post

davidlee1 Fri, 10/04/2019 - 11:32

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U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin during a meeting with business leaders at the White House (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

Topic

Global Lens

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Global

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Innovation Policy Lab

Startups

United States

New regulations proposed by the U.S. Treasury Department could stifle Canadian investment in U.S. startups, warns Whitney Haring-Smith, a visiting fellow at the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, in a National Post op-ed.

Haring-Smith (pictured left), managing partner at U.S. venture capital firm Anzu Partners, outlines the potential fallout from regulations that would increase U.S. scrutiny on “non-control” or minority investments in American startups from foreign investors.

He writes that while the regulations will likely allow for a small number of “excepted foreign states,” there’s no guarantee the Trump administration will place Canada on that list.

“Beyond campaign speeches and angry tweets, tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum have been justified as part of a ‘national security threat’ to the United States,” Haring-Smith writes. “In this environment, nothing can be taken for granted.”

While the U.S. has good reason to place restrictions on investors from China or Russia, he writes, including Canada in that group could result in Canadian authorities responding in kind against U.S. investments in Canadian companies – with both countries’ innovation ecosystems suffering as a result.

“For the future of North American economic development, it is critical that Canada be an ‘excepted foreign state’ under these new rules,” Haring-Smith writes.

Read Haring-Smith's op-ed in the National Post

From fighting fungus to improving innovation: U of T researchers lead CIFAR interdisciplinary research programs

Romi Levine — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 16:43:21 +0000

From fighting fungus to improving innovation: U of T researchers lead CIFAR interdisciplinary research programs

Romi Levine Mon, 04/29/2019 - 12:43

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(From left) U of T's Barbara Sherwood Lollar, Dan Breznitz, Leah Cowen and Aephraim Steinberg are leading CIFAR research programs

Romi Levine

Topic

Our Community

Ontario Impact

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

CIFAR

Department of Physics

Earth Sciences

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Medicine

Innovation Policy Lab

Molecular Genetics

Political Science

Research & Innovation

Drug-resistant germs like the fungus Candida auris are making their way into hospitals around the world, stumping scientists who are trying to trace their often-mysterious origins.

But a group of international researchers from a diverse range of disciplines, including microbiology, evolution, food security and immunology, are hoping that by working together they can address the potential harm to humans, wildlife and agriculture.

The newly created program, called Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities, is co-directed by Leah Cowen, a professor and chair of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto, and Joseph Heitman, a professor and chair of molecular genetics and microbiology at the Duke University School of Medicine. It is one of four research programs led by U of T faculty that make up the new 13-program portfolio of CIFAR, a Canadian-based organization that looks to address some of the world’s most pressing issues through interdisciplinary research.

“Through CIFAR, University of Toronto researchers have been able to engage with a global network of scholars across disciplines and borders to tackle complex challenges,” said Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation. “This highlights the international demand for U of T’s expertise in a range of areas – from public policy to geochemistry.”

The other U of T-led CIFAR research programs include:

Innovation, Equity and the Future of Prosperity, co-directed by Dan Breznitz, who is the co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, Susan Helper, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University, and Amos Zehavi, a professor at Tel Aviv University and a senior associate at the Innovation Policy Lab.
This program is one of two in the social sciences that CIFAR has added this year – the first since 2004.
Earth 4D: Subsurface Science and Exploration, co-directed by University Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar in U of T’s department of Earth sciences and John Mustard, a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University.
Quantum Information Science – a renewed program, co-directed by Aephraim Steinberg, a professor of physics at U of T, and David Poulin, a professor at Université de Sherbrooke.

Breznitz said the CIFAR program gives his research group a platform to look at innovation in a different light. While there are proven benefits that come with innovation – from economic growth to personal well-being – those benefits are not always distributed equally.

The program looks to combine research on innovation technology and distribution – two areas Breznitz said are heavily siloed – in order to create an action plan that leads to meaningful change.

Inequality can take many forms in the innovation sphere, said Breznitz, offering the example of how innovation is funded.

“The main vehicle for financing innovation is venture capital,” he said, adding this usually means giving a small group of people large sums of money in the hopes they can deliver exponential returns.

“What you're really creating is an industry completely obsessed with financial access,” he said. “Those who succeed, the people who basically get the lottery ticket, are people who are already extremely well-off.

“Ninety per cent of people are left out.”

The first step in launching the program will be to create a common language between researchers – a challenge when they come from many different backgrounds like law, engineering, geography, sociology and economics.

“That's going to be both hard and the most fun,” said Breznitz. “I've got a very big, new sandbox to play with.”

Sherwood Lollar's program, Earth 4D, is taking an innovative approach to studying our own planet. It calls for thinking about Earth as we do other planets in our solar system by taking a closer look at how each of its elements interact with one another – from the interior to the surface and into the atmosphere.

“Interestingly, when we think about our own planet, that's not typically the way science has gone about it,” she said. “If you think about the breadth of work we do on this planet, it tends to be: ‘We need to understand this problem over there and that problem over here.’”

Sherwood Lollar’s team will be focusing on four themes: water, and how water resources are being altered by climate change; energy, from the need to drive technology to how subsurface life sustains itself without the sun; the origin and evolution of life on this planet; and the concept of time and how it affects the other themes.

“We decided we really were at a place and point in time where there was an opportunity to transform how we think about Earth,” said Sherwood Lollar.

To do so, she said it was necessary to bring together a group of researchers who not only bring a wide range of expertise, but are at different points in their careers.

“Intergenerational exchange is really important in this group,” she said. “One of the things I love about it is we're already seeing people who didn't know each other, and didn’t work together, coming together to do this kind of work.

“CIFAR is a very unique and effective agent in the Canadian intellectual and research landscape because their mandate is specifically to try to bring together [researchers in] pursuit of big fundamental questions that have been wrestled with across the board – by society, by science, by engineering, by humanities – but to do it in a new way,” said Sherwood Lollar.

Steinberg’s quantum information science program launched in 2002 and has been renewed three times, most recently this year. The group explores the potential of the growing field of quantum information science, including its applications in disciplines like physics, engineering and computer science.

“What a program like ours needs to do is not just build a computer and solve the problem that FedEx has already ordered, but rather try to demonstrate what determines which of the right problems to use a quantum computer for,” Steinberg said in a video posted on CIFAR’s website.

As for Cowen, her research program coincides with a growing awareness and concern about dangerous fungi, including Candida auris, which was recently covered by the New York Times.

The fungus first appeared in Japan in 2009 and has since spread across the globe, said Cowen.

"It has this amazing ability to survive on surfaces so it's causing outbreaks in hospitals."

Human activity – including global trade, modern medicine and climate change – is intensifying the impact of fungi, according to Cowen. “The fungal kingdom includes as many as six million eukaryotic species and is tremendously diverse in terms of the kind of organisms included and also the impact on global health, agriculture, biodiversity, ecology, manufacturing and even biomedical research.”

Because the implications are so far-reaching, Cowen said there’s a need to bring together researchers from a number of fields who can look at the fungal kingdom from different angles.

“We have brought together these amazing people that are much greater than the sum of the parts,” she said.

Cowen’s program will look at a number of challenges related to fungi, including: the emergence and spread of fungi; how fungi are adapting and interacting with their hosts; what makes some fungi resistant to anti-fungal drugs and fungicide; and developing strategies to thwart fungal diseases.

“It's the first time ever we've brought together this kind of diversity to do a research program to tackle these challenges,” Cowen said.

With a file from Perry King

U of T, Toronto experts offer insight into the ‘promise and peril’ of building smart cities

Romi Levine — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 05:00:00 +0000

U of T, Toronto experts offer insight into the ‘promise and peril’ of building smart cities

Romi Levine Mon, 01/29/2018 - 00:00

Cutline

Data and inclusiveness are big considerations when it comes to building smarter cities, say Toronto urban experts (photo by Erik Eastman via Unsplash)

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Cities

Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work

Innovation Policy Lab

Institute on Municipal Finance & Governance

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Technology

There was a rush of excitement in Toronto when Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, announced in October its intention to build a new, tech-focused community on Toronto’s waterfront.

Political leaders including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mayor John Tory lauded the initiative, with Trudeau saying the new neighbourhood will be a testbed for new technologies “that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities.” He added that he hopes this model will be embraced all over the world.

With few concrete plans for what Sidewalk Toronto will look like, the possibilities are almost endless. This makes it the ultimate experiment into what a “smart city” could look like – giving Toronto’s urbanists a lot to talk about.

On Thursday, experts from the University of Toronto and across the city shared their insight on what future of cities might look like at Promise and Peril in the Smart City: Local Government in the Age of Digital Urbanism, presented by the Institute on Municipal Finance & Governance (IMFG) and the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs on U of T’s downtown Toronto campus.

“When we talk about smart cities, we want to acknowledge the fact that there's this huge amount of technology that could be applied to making cities more efficient ... but doing it in a way that acknowledges that cities are basically human places full of buildings,” said John Lorinc, Spacing magazine’s senior editor, who moderated the event.

Panelists included Zachary Spicer, a researcher at IMFG, Tracey Cook, executive director of municipal licensing and standards for the City of Toronto, Peter Sloly, a partner and national security and justice lead at Deloitte and former Toronto deputy police chief, and Pamela Robinson, an associate professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University.

“There's a lot of enthusiasm about being able to remake cities using technology and to rethink how cities operate,” said Spicer. “If we have the opportunity to remake cities and to rethink them, we can probably put them on a more equitable foundation and create opportunity for people who don't currently have it.”

Spicer’s words of caution are a thread that ran through the night’s discussion: While smart cities can be innovative and sustainable spaces full of opportunity, they run the risk of leaving members of the population out of the equation, deepening urban inequality.

Often the most vulnerable populations, like low-income and older residents, do not have access to the internet, he said, so they miss the opportunity to take advantage of many tech-focused urban initiatives.

Promise and Peril speakers from left to right: Lorinc, Cook, Spicer, Robinson, Sloly (photo by Romi Levine)

“We need to understand how this kind of technology maps itself on all of the people of Toronto and we need to start asking more people what they desire from this technology and what their fears are,” said Robinson, pointing to the research of David Hulchanski, professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work on the growing gap between the city’s rich and poor.

Building smarter cities also means reacting to companies like Uber and Airbnb, which look to disrupt regulated industries like taxis and tourism. Cook said when it comes to regulation, the city has to strike a balance between innovation and inclusivity.

“As we're thinking about innovation, we're thinking about enabling people mobility,” she said. “We have to ensure we're addressing things such as our values, our employment insecurity and what we do with all these different factors we're facing with technology and its impact.”

City partnerships with tech giants like Alphabet, Google’s parent company, also raise concerns about data ownership.

“Everywhere is being turned on and everywhere is getting smarter, I'm just not sure we're getting more wise in the use of it,” said Sloly.

The question is how we ensure the data collected is being used in an ethical and appropriate way, said Spicer.

“Making it known and making people aware is the first step,” he said. “We don't educate people along those lines.”

Canada should prepare for new technology spurring job loss, says U of T innovation expert

ullahnor — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 17:26:50 +0000

Canada should prepare for new technology spurring job loss, says U of T innovation expert

ullahnor Fri, 03/17/2017 - 13:26

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Robots building cars in a car factory. Being proactive can help Canadians prepare and adapt as the advent of artificial intelligence, information technology and robotics eliminate jobs, says David Ticoll (photo by spencer cooper via Flickr)

Daviel Lazure Vieira

Author legacy

Daviel Lazure Vieira

Topic

City & Culture

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Innovation Policy Lab

Automation

Labour

Economy

Subheadline

“If we do things right we will adapt faster than anyone”

The economic impact of an automated workforce will be much bigger than many observers expect, says Dave Ticoll, of the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

But Canada is uniquely placed to manage structural change, says Ticoll, who recently wrote an article detailing his views on labour obsolescence for Policy Options.

“If we do things right we will adapt faster than anyone.”

With the advent of artificial intelligence, information technology and robotics, we’re experiencing a significant shift in today’s economy, says the entrepreneur. And although experts have talked about labour substitution, where machines take over human work, little is said about labour obsolescence, Ticoll says. This is when technology change produces a new business model that no longer needs or supports some jobs. The work associated with these jobs doesn’t get automated – it simply becomes unnecessary.

The changing car industry is a good example, he says. Ticoll expects many people to forego car ownership in favour of on-demand, automated transportation services. Reduced car sales mean less need for car dealers and insurance brokers. Their jobs won’t get automated, Ticoll says – they will simply go away.

The shift is occurring in many industries, he says. As more consumers bypass malls in favour of online buying, for instance, retail clerks are replaced by technology. However, the demand decreases for shopping mall employees like maintenance personnel and facility planners.

Ticoll believes we’re underestimating the scale of structural changes to come.

“Traditional jobs automation research focuses on one question: can a computer do this work?” Ticoll says. “But to forecast labour obsolescence we must assess both technology and business innovation as they play out in a specific sector.”

For the auto industry, Ticoll predicts, connected and automated vehicles will be the norm by the 2030s. According to his analysis, this change will affect jobs that currently employ 1.1 million Canadians. Of these, up to half (like truck drivers) will face direct competition from automation, while the remainder are at risk of functional obsolescence.

“We need to change the way we operate for the 21st century economy”

Many other industries will be affected by such technology and business model shifts.

“We need to change the way we operate for the 21st century economy,” he says. “For example, more people need STEM skills – science, technology, engineering, mathematics.”

Increasingly, he says, governments at all levels are taking action on this front.

Ticoll cautions that fostering STEM skills won’t be enough. Income inequality and precarious jobs are on the rise and Canada must ensure that those affected aren’t left behind. Possible solutions range from the adoption of a universal basic income, which the Ontario government is slated to pilot, to a proposal from Bill Gates to tax robots.

Despite labour challenges, Ticoll believes that Canada is uniquely placed to succeed in navigating structural change.

“Canada is a relatively small country compared with the United States, China or Europe. Our labour force is only about 18 million people. So we could potentially achieve a higher density of people with technological skills. It’s easier to train and keep occupied 18 million people than 10 or 20 times that number. If we do things right we will adapt faster than anyone.”