Earlier this week, I traveled to Paris to attend the Global Forum on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity (GFIAH). The by-invitation event featured one day of workshops addressing issues such as AI and culture, followed by a two days of panels on developing trustworthy AI, data governance, the future of work, delegating decisions to machines, bias and AI, and future challenges. The event was a part of the French government’s effort to take the lead…

Coming into the 2019 federal election, there were widespread concerns regarding disinformation campaigns, foreign interference, social media advertising and manipulation, and fake news. The federal government enacted legislation designed to foster greater transparency on political advertising, but on the heels of elections elsewhere, the prospect of online harms to the electoral process appeared very real. Taylor Owen of McGill University set out to find out what was actually taking place online. He joined me on …

In the closing months of the last Liberal majority government mandate, I spoke to a government official about the lessons learned from the prior four years. Their response?  If we knew then what we know now, we would have moved much faster on policy. The four years moves very quickly and if you don’t manage to lay the groundwork and introduce proposed legislation within the first 12 – 24 months, it becomes very difficult to…

This week is open access week, an opportunity to celebrate and raise awareness of the emergence and continued growth of open access. Countries have been taking increasingly strong steps toward making their research openly available, with mandates that require researchers who accept public grants to make their published research results freely available online within a reasonable time period. Leslie Chan, a professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and one of the earliest…

As the 2019 federal election winds toward voting day next week, copyright has unexpectedly arrived on the scene. Cultural groups have lamented for weeks that none of the national political parties have discussed copyright, placed it in their platforms, or otherwise committed to reforms. The likely reason – neatly articulated by OpenMedia’s Laura Tribe in this week’s Lawbytes podcast – is that there are no sharp divisions between the parties on copyright that might provide…

In recent years, there has been growing concern worldwide with the privacy risks associated with mass data collection online, the potential for rapid dissemination of hate speech and other harmful content on the Internet, and the competitive challenges posed by technology companies – often labelled “web giants” – that are enormously popular with the public but which do not fit neatly into conventional cultural and economic policies. My Globe and Mail op-ed argues the Internet…