GOOD Forum 23
Prioritizing our Challenges & Opportunities speakers
Moderator
TBC
Dr. Pamela Robinson
Professor, School of Urban and Regional Planning
Toronto Metropolitan University
Dr. Pamela Robinson MCIP RPP is a professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University and is Interim Academic Director at City Building TMU. Throughout her career as a planner her research and practice have focused on complex, emergent challenges that Canadian communities face. Pamela began with a focus on cities and climate change and now focuses more recently on how new technologies are impacting how we plan and design communities. Her current research asks: Who is planning the Canadian smart city? How do we meaningfully engage the public in conversations about artificial intelligence use? And who owns the map when it comes to data sovereignty in spatial data use in Canada? In 2020 Pamela received the inaugural Canadian Institute of Planners President’s Award: Academic. She is an Advisor on the Toronto Public Library’s Innovation Council and serves on the Board of Directors for the Metcalf Foundation. Pamela writes for Spacing Magazine and recently published a co-edited book “The Future of Open Data” (OttawaU Press, open access: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/43648).
April Towns
President. Municipal Information Systems Association
(MISA) Ontario
Kurtis McBride TBC
Chief Executive Officer
Miovision
Understanding traffic is fundamental to managing the evolution of our cities. But, when Kurtis McBride looked at how cities were measuring traffic, he saw methods that hadn’t changed in decades – people with clipboards counting cars. He co-founded Miovision in 2005, a fast-growing Kitchener-based company using computer vision, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to help cities modernize their approach to managing traffic to make roads more efficient and safer.
Kurtis is a graduate of the University of Waterloo, where he received his Bachelor of Engineering in Systems Design in 2004, and Master of Engineering in Systems Design in 2007.