Canada’s AI Advantage: Why It Exists—and What It Will Take to Scale It

Vice President, Policy, Program Development & Government Relations, Mitacs

Elissa Strome is the Executive Director of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy at CIFAR. She works with leaders at Canada’s three National AI Institutes in Edmonton (Amii), Montreal (Mila), and Toronto (Vector Institute) and across the country to advance Canada’s leadership in AI research, training and innovation. She is a champion of equity, diversity and inclusion in science, and an ambassador for Canada’s position in AI research, innovation, and policy internationally. Elissa is a member of the federal government’s AI Advisory Council, a member of the OECD’s Network of Experts on AI and Expert Group on AI in Health, a member of the Health Canada Expert Advisory Committee for AI in Health, and sits on the Advisory Board of York University’s Centre for AI & Society.

Margo Seltzer is a core member of our AI@UBC working group and department co-Head, Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems, and the Cheriton Family chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly, including algorithms and systems for constructing optimal and interpretable machine learning models. One particularly novel stream of this work is the production of Rashomon Sets, the set of all good models, which give users the ability to select models that best reflect their domain expertise.

Dr. Seltzer was a co-founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, the recipient of the 2021 ACM Software Systems award and the 2020 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Youssef Helwa is the CEO and Co-founder of FluidAI Medical, the world leader in postoperative care, transforming how hospitals detect and prevent surgical complications through AI-powered patient monitoring. Built from his graduate research at the University of Waterloo, FluidAI has grown into a globally deployed medtech company with regulatory clearances across multiple jurisdictions and clinical partnerships with some of the world’s most respected institutions, including Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and UHN. The company’s Stream Platform combines nanosensor technology and artificial intelligence to detect complications up to 80% faster than the standard of care, backed by the world’s largest general surgery dataset spanning millions of patient records, a strong IP portfolio, and a suite of tools to optimize patient engagement, clinical documentation, and surgical billing. Youssef is on a mission to make surgical recovery smarter, safer, and more predictable for patients worldwide.

Cam Linke, is the CEO of Alberta Machine Learning Institute (Amii) is a longtime leader in Canada’s technology and startup community. Over the past 10 years, he has worked as a CEO, investor, community builder, product manager, software entrepreneur, academic, and developer.

Past roles include Co-founder of Startup Edmonton, Founder of Flightpath Ventures, CEO of Touch Metric, Product Manager at Nexopia.com, and Founder of DemoCamp Edmonton. Linke is a sought-after speaker and mentor and has been recognized as Avenue Magazine Top 40 Under 40.

He holds a Master’s degree which was supervised by Dr. Richard Sutton and Dr. Adam White. His research, which focused on AI adapting behaviours to improve their own self-learning, has been published at top conferences.

Cory Janssen is Co-Founder and CEO of AltaML, an applied AI company recognized for delivering agentic AI solutions that unlock measurable organizational value and elevate human potential. A seasoned technology entrepreneur, Cory previously co-founded Investopedia in 1999 and developed it into a leading global financial education site before its sale to Forbes Media in 2007.

Chad Cogar is the Vice President of AI at Creative Destruction Lab, where he leads AI initiatives and serves as a technical advisor to CDL’s enterprise AI adoption program “Putting AI to Work”. With over a decade of experience in AI strategy and implementation, Chad specializes in developing AI systems that drive measurable business impact. Prior to joining CDL, he led product management for the machine learning teams at Kindred AI and oversaw large-scale AI transformation initiatives for enterprise clients across multiple industries. Chad holds degrees in Law (JD), Business (MBA), and Computer Science (BSc) from the University of Toronto.