Cybera is looking for the movers and shakers of Alberta; the ones who are using emerging technologies to innovate their fields and raise the profile of Albertan research and development. Once a month, we will sit down with one of these tech gurus to get a perspective on where they, and their industry, are heading.

Imagine the state our economy would be in if it cost a hundred times more to drive down a Canadian highway than an American one. Or a hundred times more to ship freight on a Canadian railway than on its US counterpart.

Now consider the freight of the modern digital economy: Internet traffic. In Alberta today, rates paid by not-for-profit institutions are around one hundred times higher than US wholesale rates. This is an issue Cybera is hoping to make people more aware of, and also one that — in our own way — we are trying to address.

In the spirit of the holidays, the Cybera Communications Team staged a hypothetical Secret Santa gift exchange. Names were drawn and each Cybera staff member was tasked with "buying" a gift for one of their colleagues. Everyone had an unlimited budget, access to any resources needed, and guaranteed overnight delivery. It was both green and cost-effective as no actual gifts were purchased or exchanged. Really, it’s the thought that counts, right? Here are the gifts we'd love to give...

Cybera is running a series of blog posts that showcase Alberta’s innovative technology and research community. Over the course of 11 months, we are asking 11 people 11 questions related to technology and research in Alberta. This month’s 11 Questions interview is with Leslie Warren, the Economic Development Officer at the Vulcan Business Development Society. Warren has helped spearhead the Vulcan Innovation Project, which aims to turn Vulcan into a rural digital community.

On November 27, hurricane force winds caused mayhem right across Southern Alberta. My daughter in Calgary called to tell me a huge tree had blown down right across her front yard (see image, right). Should she call 911? Clearly the answer was no. As far as we could tell, no one was under it.  Next my son called from Lethbridge. A huge grassfire was racing towards his house on the west edge of the city (image below).

One of the biggest concerns about the use of “open data” revolves around the quality of data being shared. How, goes the argument, can any organization trust a source of information, when any Tom, Dick or Harry had been allowed to contribute to it? After all, there has to be some accountability in the data we use to make important, potentially life-altering decisions.

However, I would argue that this line of thinking could be holding us back from making some amazing discoveries. Having access to an abundance of data - no matter its quality – can provide a comprehensive and unique view of a topic.

The Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Sensing (GeoCENS) team recently travelled to the CANARIE Showcase in Ottawa, ON, during Nov 16-18. Every CANARIE Network-Enabled Platform (NEP) project was given a booth to demonstrate its innovations to attendees of the 3rd Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC). (This annual event draws together key science policy stakeholders to debate and create advice on future Canadian innovation policies.)

Cybera is running a series of blog posts that showcase Alberta’s innovative technology and research community. Over the course of 11 months, we are asking 11 people 11 questions related to technology and research in Alberta. This month’s 11 Questions interview is with Matthew Dance, who has worked as a Senior Project Manager with the Clean Air Strategic Alliance and as an independent environmental policy consultant, prior to beginning his Master of Arts degree at the University of Alberta.

Ed Parsons (pictured at right), Google’s Geospatial Technologist, visited Calgary this week. In my opinion, Ed has one of the coolest job in the world: being the public face of Google’s geospatial technologies, and responsible for evangelizing Google’s mission to organize the world’s information geographically. He gets to travel around the world presenting the latest geospatial technologies from Google, while exploring new innovations from other organizations and countries. I have known Ed for a few years, and we meet regularly in various international geographic information systems-related meetings and conferences.

The use of technology to deliver health care in Alberta seems... stalled. So I was pleased to be able to attend a conference in Edmonton with the theme of ‘Accelerating Technology Adoption in Health Care’. The conference was well-structured, looking first at the international perspective, then narrowing the focus to the national perspective, the provincial perspective, and finally the perspective of the local care-giver.