Keynote: Leading Innovation

Amy Radin is a trusted leader and adviser to executives and boards on how to accomplish growth through meaningful innovation. For over 25 years she has brought pragmatic vision and leadership to transformations in complex, highly regulated businesses including global Fortune 500 consumer financial services, payments, retail banking, investments, financial planning and insurance.

Amy wrote the award-winning book, The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company (City Point Press, Fall, 2018) to share expertise and a methodology that addresses the inevitable challenges any company will face in pursuit of an innovation agenda and offers real-world approaches to succeed.

She advises a select portfolio of early-stage companies on enterprise business development and go-to-market strategy and planning, and keynotes corporate, board, and women’s leadership events. Amy serves on the Board of the Association (AICPA), the global association serving 650,000 accounting and financial management professionals.

Amy has been honored by US Banker as a Most Powerful Woman in Banking; by NYU Stern Graduate School of Business as a recipient of the Nichols Award for Enterprise, Integrity and Service; and by BusinessWeek, who named her a Top 25 Global Champion of Innovation. Amy is a graduate of The Wharton School (MBA, Marketing) and Wesleyan University (BA, College of Letters and Spanish).

“Innovation is about making change with a purpose to solve the problems that real people have.”

Panel: The Opportunity of LEO – Solving the Canadian Connectivity Dilemma

Ariane Cornell is the director of Astronaut and Orbital Sales at Blue Origin. Cornell was formerly based in Vienna, Austria as the executive director of the Space Generation Advisory Council in Support of the United Nations Programme on Space Applications (SGAC). She headed SGAC’s delegations to international conferences and the United Nations, as well as ran the organization’s operations, business development, strategy, and policy output. She supports the international aerospace community in other capacities and organizations, is currently on the board of the Society of Satellite Professionals International (SSPI), and has served on the board of Women in Aerospace – Europe. Previously, Cornell worked in international management consulting, first with Accenture based in San Francisco as an analyst, and then with Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington, DC, as a senior consultant. She earned an MBA from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Science degree with honors from Stanford University.

“Transformative technology has the power to direct whole societies, hence inclusion in its development is imperative.”

Keynote: Harnessing Transformative Technology

Bruce Ross is responsible for the strategy and overall management of global technology and operations for RBC, which includes innovation, applications development, infrastructure and enterprise operations. Together with other members of the Group Executive, he is responsible for setting the overall strategic direction of the bank.

Since joining in 2014, Bruce has led the technology team in transforming RBC to a digitally-enabled relationship bank. He has spearheaded a technology strategy designed to deliver exceptional client experiences in today’s digital world, while also driving efficiency, maintaining security and growing talent. Under his leadership, the team is evolving traditional models to deliver efficiency as transaction volumes rise while continually innovating to create exceptional client experiences through data insights and leading digital capabilities. Bruce was named Canadian CIO of the Year in 2017 by the Information Technology Association of Canada.

A seasoned executive with more than 30 years of technology and business experience, Bruce was the General Manager, Global Technology Services, North America at IBM before joining RBC. He also held roles as the General Manager, Global Technology Services, Europe for IBM and General Manager and President, IBM Canada.

Bruce is a professional engineer and a graduate of the University of Western Ontario.

“Transformation in this age of digital acceleration is about empowering clients to live and conduct business the way they choose to.”

Cheryl Jensen was the eighth president of Algonquin College. She joined Algonquin from Mohawk College, where she held the title of Vice President, Academic for five years. Cheryl first joined Mohawk as a Chemical Engineering Technology professor in 1983 and served as Dean, Executive Dean, and Vice President of Engineering Technology, Apprenticeship and Corporate Training.

Cheryl served on the Boards of Ottawa Network for Education, Invest Ottawa, the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship, and the Ottawa Beechwood Cemetery and Beechwood Cemetery Foundation. She was also a Board member for Polytechnics Canada and a member of the Business/Higher Education Roundtable. She is the recipient of a Hamilton YWCA Woman of Distinction award and a national leadership award from the Association of Canadian Community Colleges.

Cheryl graduated from McMaster University with an Honours Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and a Certificate in the Metallurgy of Iron and Steel, and holds a Master of Education in Organizational and Administrative Studies from Brock University.

“Canada is a hub of innovation – because of exceptional thought leadership, and because we develop ground breaking technology, and share it with the world.”

More Information

In his career at Newbridge, Alcatel-Lucent, and most recently in the last 9 years at Juniper Networks as CTO Canada and Director of Cloud Solutions, Chris has built significant expertise on our markets, technologies, solutions, and ecosystem. In his role as VP Product Management at CENGN, he applies his knowledge and experience to drive CENGN’s technology and services roadmap, develop the strategy for CENGN’s professional services, and drive the execution of key technology programs.

Panel: Open Source, Enabler or Threat

Senior Technical Architect at Bell Canada focused on research and development of disruptive technologies to increase service agility.

Everything is somewhere: Geography as the ultimate disruptive technology

Gordon Plunkett is the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Director at Esri Canada. Educated as an Electrical Engineer, he has more than 30 years of experience in GIS and Remote Sensing in both the public and private sectors. He currently sits as a member of the Community Map of Canada Steering Committee, GeoAlliance Canada Interim Board of Directors, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee, the Canadian General Standards Board (CGSB) Committee on Geomatics, and the Advisory Board to the Carleton University Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre. During his career, Gordon has worked on projects in more than 20 countries and has contributed to numerous scientific conferences and publications. At Esri Canada, he is responsible for developing and supporting the company’s SDI vision, initiatives and outreach, including producing content for the SDI blog.

“Organizations are rapidly deploying geospatial technologies in innovative ways across existing business processes to improve efficiency, productivity and customer experiences.”

Panel: Open Source, Enabler or Threat

Ian is Chief Technologist, Global Service Provider business for Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source technologies. Ian brings more than 35 years of engineering and telecommunications technology leadership to Red Hat. Acting as a catalyst and trusted advisor, Ian brings together a wealth of industry and open source community insight to help our customers flourish in the digital transformation era.

More recently, Ian was responsible for global service provider architecture at Cisco, leading their SDN/NFV vision and business transformation strategy. With his extensive background in system engineering, product management, and business, Ian has proven expertise in helping organizations navigate and succeed in today’s fast-paced competitive environment.

Ian grew up in Owen Sound, just a few hours north of Toronto in Canada, and spent the first half of his career designing and building communications networks for operators and governments around the world (e.g Petronas Towers, MCI/Verizon, SBC/ATT, Canada Post, Bell Canada, Telus, Rogers, Department of Defense, CSIS, Bank of Canada) and was the chief communications engineer for the Canadian global embassy network (Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

Ian is a very active and sought after speaker for engagements at many emerging technology, industry, and customer forums. Ian is a licensed Professional Engineer in Ontario, and holds a B.A.Sc (Honours) in Electrical Engineering from University of Waterloo.

   ” The key to digital transformation is not just about technology evolution – Innovation requires a wholesale change of mindset and a fundamental change in how we work”.

Panel: Open Source, Enabler or Threat

Software Architect and technology leader focused on Edge Cloud Native technologies. Ian is active in StarlingX as a member of the Technical Steering Committee, OpenStack and OPNFV – defining the future of technologies that will enable next-generation cloud solutions at the Edge. Ian works with global development, sales, and product management teams to create customer solutions for high-performance cloud technologies at the Edge. Ian has a deep background in Telecom and knowledge of Industrial use cases enables me to bring a solutions approach to accelerate the adoption of cloud-native in these markets.

“Open source enables collaboration and innovation across geographies.  Growing innovative ecosystems that transform the way we live and work.”

Secure IoT Registry

As an expert in developing innovative, leading-edge IT solutions, Jacques has established CIRA as a global leader among ccTLD registries. He has 25+ years of experience in the private and not-for-profit sectors and as CIRA’s CTO,is currently leading CIRA Labs, CIRA’s innovation hub and providing leadership and direction for the management and security of the .CA registry and its underlying DNS.

A visionary in the Internet community, Jacques led the development of CIRA’s Internet Performance Test, is an outspoken advocate for the adoption of IPv6 and represents the .CA registry internationally as a member of a variety of working groups and advisory groups, including being a member of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), TLDOPS standing committees and TechDay and DNSSEC Planning Program Committee.

Jacques is committed to the development of a new Canadian Internet architecture. He has served as the catalyst for the creation of a national Canadian IXP association, CA-IX, and is a member of the Manitoba Internet Exchange’s (MBIX) and the DNS-OARC Board of Directors.

Jacques holds an Electronics Engineering Technologist diploma from Algonquin College in Ottawa, is ITIL v3 Foundation certified and is a certified Agile ScrumMaster.

“The CIRA Labs team recently joined L-SPARK Secure IoT Accelerator program to help solve a massive, industry-wide problem: securing 5G internet of things (IoT) devices.”

As President and CEO of CENGN, Jean-Charles (JC) Fahmy provides leadership and strategic direction to the company and drives the delivery of CENGN’s mission by working with the ICT ecosystem on the goal of the commercialization, growth, and global competitiveness of Canada’s innovation economy.

JC has over 25 years of global leadership experience in tech, creating value and accelerating business performance with large public companies as well as both Private Equity and Venture Capital backed businesses.  Prior to CENGN, JC held several senior leadership roles including Vice President of Product Management & Business Development at Coriant, and Operating Executive in the Telecom practice at Marlin Equity Partners, a leading Private Equity Firm.

JC holds an MBA from McGill University, and a BASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa.

“Next Generation Networks are the enablers of the digital transformation of our vertical industries, and to equality of opportunity for all Canadians.”

The Anthos – Application Modernization Platform

Technology Architect with speciality in high performance computing, complex systems design, big data and cloud solutions. Serving clients across a wide range of industries including Academic Research, Government, Financial Services, Digital Media, and Aerospace.

Extensive experience in technical pre-sales activities as well as post-sales implementation and customer support.

Panel: Open Source, Enabler or Threat

Natalie is the business lead of the Innovation Strategy business at Stratford Managers Corporation. She is a pragmatic achiever with extensive experience in the areas of strategic Intellectual Property (IP) and innovation management.

Throughout her career, she has combined deep technical knowledge with business insights and leadership skills to serve a variety of leading-edge start-up and large companies. She is passionate about making sure companies of any size continuously innovate and have a strong IP strategy by helping them foster an innovation minded culture and build a cost-efficient valuable IP portfolio combining patents, trademarks and trade secrets.

Prior to acting as the Chief Scientist and IP strategist for Gridpoint Systems, she was a partner at Skypoint Capital where she provided support to the portfolio companies in the implementation of effective intellectual property strategies and managed patent litigations.

From 1997 to 2001, Natalie held various senior management positions with Newbridge Networks and Alcatel, culminating in her role as AVP Architecture and Technology where she was responsible to create and lead three innovation labs.

During this period Natalie also managed the five-year Lucent vs Newbridge litigation while efficiently scaling the Newbridge’s patent portfolio.

“Awareness of a need to change and the desire to change by all stakeholders is crucial to the success of any transformative innovation”

Our 5G Journey and the Next Wireless Frontier

Dr. Peiying Zhu, Senior Vice President of Wireless Research, is a Huawei Fellow and IEEE Fellow. She is currently leading 5G wireless research and standardization in Huawei. The focus of her research is 5G new radio access technologies and beyond. She is actively involved in 3GPP and IEEE 802 standards development. She has been regularly giving talks and panel discussions on 5G vision and enabling technologies. Prior to joining Huawei in 2009, Peiying was a Nortel Fellow and Director of Advanced Wireless Access Technology in the Nortel Wireless Technology Lab. She led the team and pioneered research and prototyping on MIMO-OFDM and Multi-hop relay. Many of these technologies developed by the team have been adopted into LTE standards and 4G products. Dr. Zhu has more than 200 granted patents.

“Imagination transforms technology and innovation by visioning yet-to-be-invented applications and services.”

Cloud Native Networking with eBPF

Raymond is a full-time employee and a major contributor in our day-to-day operations here at CENGN. He began his journey configuring our initial IT infrastructure, which includes our Mitel Communications System, JIRA (a project management tool), Confluence (a content management tool), Salesforce (a CRM database) and synchronizing all of this enterprise software together, while providing ongoing IT support. Raymond has been integral in helping CENGN’s engineering team balance the numerous ongoing commercialization acceleration Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) that require both lab and technical expertise. He has done this by automating the process for reviewing code, so that when there are patches that need to be made, the code is inputted, revised and pushed through the production environment.

“We’ll be talking about Cilium, which is an open source project that empowers cloud native networking using eBPF to optimize network policy enforcement, benefiting the entire ICT community.”

Robert Ghiz is President and CEO of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA). He serves as an Advisor on numerous Boards including the Prince’s Trust Advisory Council, the True Patriot Love Foundation, the Librarian Archives of Canada Foundation, and he is also Chair of the Mobile Giving Foundation Canada. Twice elected Premier of Prince Edward Island, Robert’s many accomplishments include his successful stewardship of PEI’s economy through the 2008 global financial collapse and his contributions to its record-setting economic growth following the recession. While Premier, Robert also led successful trade missions in Europe, Asia, South America and the United States. Robert is proud to be the Canadian wireless industry’s champion in Ottawa, where he works to ensure the industry continues to enhance the personal lives and economic opportunities of Canadians across the country.

The Network for the Next Decade

Rob has over 25 years Industry experience in the Manufacturing, Logistics, Telco, Retail, and Healthcare verticals. Having started his career as Tier 1 helpdesk, and progressing through hands-on Support, Operations, and Consulting positions allows him to share a real-world perspective on Enterprise Network Architecture and Management.

Panel: The Opportunity of LEO – Solving the Canadian Connectivity Dilemma

Ryan is the founder and President of Satellite Canada Innovation Network, a not-for-profit industry association dedicated to driving the competitiveness of the Canadian space industry. Satcan provides strategic consulting services to small and medium enterprises and recently brought together a $15+M advanced optical satcom consortium, in collaboration with the National Research Council.

A professional engineer with over 13 years’ experience, Ryan has worked on dozens of satellite programs spanning design, development, procurement and operations. Most notably, as lead of Telesat’s innovation program, Ryan was instrumental in the early development of Telesat’s LEO constellation. Other highlights include work on COSPAS-SARSAT, PCW, Anik F2, Anik G1, Nimiq 6, and Urthecast’s OptiSAR constellation.

An active member of space and engineering communities, Ryan is also President of the Canadian Space Society, a national association of space professionals, students and enthusiasts. He has led the CSS to a contribution from Global Affairs Canada to support a Canada Pavilion at the International Astronautical Congress and in successful Canadian Space Summits in 2013, 2017, 2018.

Ryan serves on the Board of Advisors for the Students for Exploration and Development of Space and Launch Canada Rocketry Association. In the past, he has volunteered for the National Research Council’s Marsville and Engineering Challenge programs to encourage Canadian students to pursue careers in science and engineering and served as Lead Engineer on the 31^st Crew at the Mars Desert Research Station.

Panel: The Opportunity of LEO – Solving the Canadian Connectivity Dilemma

Stephen Hampton joined Telesat in the fall of 2018 where he is responsible for government affairs. Prior to joining Telesat, Stephen worked at TELUS on the government and regulatory affairs team where he focused on public policy issues aimed at delivering a more connected and innovative Canada.

Prior to joining TELUS, Stephen was a Consultant with Crestview Strategy where he worked with some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world, helping them to better understand and navigate the political and regulatory environment in Ottawa.

Stephen obtained an undergraduate degree from the University of Ottawa.

“Access to high-speed Internet is a necessity in today’s digital society and we need to embrace new and innovative approaches to connect everyone.”

Keynote: Accelerating 5G in Canada — Benefits for Cities and Rural Communities

Tejas has over twenty-five years of experience in mobile telecommunications, media and high technology industry, management consulting, digital platforms, next-generation mobile (5G) networks, IoT, mobile devices, wireless voice and data communication systems, telco cloud, and design and integration of complex business application systems. Executive-level management and technical experience include: practice and offering development, consulting, business development, account management, mobile device portfolio planning, wireless technology marketing, next-generation network evolution, connected home, connected car, big data, building a national services organization, design and deployment of enhanced wireless data services such as Push-to-Talk and location-based services, E-Business systems, business and operations support systems, large-scale systems integration projects, product management, and strategic planning.

Panel: The Opportunity of LEO – Solving the Canadian Connectivity Dilemma

Experienced Senior Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the government administration industry. Skilled in Public Sector policy analysis and programs, Nonprofit Organizations, Budgeting, Business Planning, Operations Management, and Coaching. Strong operations professional with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) focused in Canadian Studies/Philosophy from Trent University.

“Innovation is a way of life for Northerners. Better access to transformative technology is critical for the development of Nunavut.”