Peter MacKinnon

My research, research management, and teaching careers span a number of fields from geomagnetism (e.g., seafloor spreading) through glaciology (e.g., ice cores) and climate change (e.g., Nuclear Winter) to artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), with some stops along the way in science and technology policy development both domestically (e.g., Canadian Federal Government) and internationally (e.g., OECD). I also facilitated the establishment of a number of Canadian national technical assets such as Canarie (broadband networking), Compute Canada (high performance computing resources), and Internet management (e.g., through business planning for the establishment of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority).

In the geomagnetism realm, I was involved in decoding some of the first evidence of spreading of the floor of the North Atlantic Ocean. My experience in respect to climate change research was as a glaciologist with activities that ranged from the lab to the Polar Regions and included deep ice core drilling and radar-sounding of ice caps and ice sheets. I went on to becoming a ‘diplomat for glaciology’ working at the World Data Center for Glaciology, now part of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. In that capacity, I travelled the world to leading glaciology laboratories and convinced scientists and their institutions in the value of sharing raw field and lab data (e.g., ice core records). I then compiled their contributions into reports, research papers and staged related workshops. This work led me to collaborate with climate modelers, especially at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), also in Boulder.

The collaboration noted above took me in two directions, the first as a participant in the development of the concept of Nuclear Winter – humanities worst case scenario for rapidly transforming the climate of the planet; and the second, down a road more attuned to engineering, that being the forecasting of scientific and technical needs, ten years into the future, in areas of high performance computing and inter-computer networking to address modelling and data processing requirements for emerging challenges in scientific and technical research. In this capacity, I served for two years on a U.S. National Scientific Computing Panel sponsored by Cray Research and hosted by NCAR.

I returned to Canada and established a company specialising in Artificial Intelligence (AI); and in the process I became one of the main players in the first wave of commercial AI in the mid-1980s. I served as founding President and CEO and in so doing became an advisor to Wall Street, to companies large and small in various countries, and to media outlets throughout the world.

The AI company put me on the radar of the Canadian Government, wherein I was recruited as a Special Advisor for Advanced Information Technologies within a central agency of the Government. This afforded the opportunity to play a facilitating role in establishing the Internet in Canada, initially as a research network and later as the public network as we know it today.

During this secondment, I also participated in a wide-range of activities including assisting in creating the National Network of Centres of Excellence, a major Canadian research collaboration involving multiple research networks among universities, governments and the private sector; establishing the need for Canarie, a national broadband advanced research network; and, the creation of a research receptor organisation, known as PRECARN, which had a mission to assist industry in addressing long-term research needs related to AI and robotics. During this period, I also provided advice to the Canadian space program on the use of robotics for the International Space Station. Also at this time, I commenced a 5-year term representing Canada on the Information, Computer, and Communications Policy Committee of the OECD in Paris.

Following my two-year federal secondment in the late 1980s, I joined Cognos, a major Canadian software products company, where I had responsibility for Corporate Development. In that capacity, I helped transform the company into offering Business Intelligence (BI) products. This transformation led IBM to acquire the company for 5 billion USD in late 2007.

However, prior to that date, I departed Cognos to establish a management consultancy (a.k.a. Synergy Technology Management (STM)) with a global practice in both technical and governance matters for businesses, governments and universities in respect to advanced information technologies associated with the development and use of high performance computing, broadband networking, distributed computing, and policy work related to the emergence of big data and the Internet. This period included preparation of the business plans to create Canarie, as well as the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the internationally authorised organisation that manages the .ca domain name. Additional work was carried out in developing the business plans and governance structures for the creation of what became known as Compute Canada, a public/private partnership that brought high performance computing into the mainstream of Canadian academic and industrial research.

In 1992, I was seconded again to the Canadian Government on a two- year assignment, this time as a Diplomat and Special Advisor posted to London, England with a staff responsible for science, technology, strategic alliances and direct foreign investment between Canada and the United Kingdom. This posting afforded many opportunities to interact with senior scientists and science policy makers in both Britain and Canada. Part of this activity involved liaising with British scientists and bureaucrats on establishing joint Arctic and Antarctic polar research collaborations. To this day, I am a member of Science Salon, a UK sponsored interest group at the British High Commission in Ottawa. Climate change is a frequent topic of discussion.

Returning to Canada in 1994, I was retained by the Government to assist in developing a number of modules for the Canadian Foreign Service Institute, the in-house school for practicing diplomats. Following the diplomatic secondment, I continued to undertake, through STM, a wide range of projects on Internet-related initiatives for groups such as Canarie, Health Canada and the G7 First Ministers. More generally, these activities focused on creating policies and programs in e-commerce, e-health and e-learning for governments, universities and companies in a number of countries. I was also retained by a London-based firm to provide executive training in Australia and several European countries on practices associated with direct foreign investment from both a government’s and a corporation’s perspective.

In 1999, I was invited to Shanghai, China to teach mid and senior level Chinese executives Western business practices around the role of the Chief Information Officer and the benefits of e-commerce and knowledge management to Chinese organisations. As part of these activities, I co-authored a book with several Chinese academics on The Role of the Chief Information Officer in the Modern Enterprise. Additional activities included providing technical advice to the Chinese National Formulary and facilitating introductions between Chinese and Western companies as well as between Chinese companies in the greater Shanghai area. This work led to being given an official Chinese name by my business colleagues. My various engagements in Shanghai lasted until mid-2004.

During the above-mentioned period, I made several trips to Australia to assist the Commonwealth Government in creating a Canarie-like organisation for their national research community.

In July 2004, I moved to Nassau, the Bahamas, where I spent two years assisting in transforming the healthcare system from an analog world into a digital platform.

In January 2008, I was awarded a three-year appointed as an Adjunct Research Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa. There I worked on sensor networks with a focus on applications to critical infrastructure and 1st responder needs. While still an Adjunct Professor at Carleton, I was hired in October 2008 on a 3-day a week basis for six and a half years by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa (uOttawa). My position was as a Research Associate and Executive Director of WiSense, a heterogeneous wireless sensor networking research project involving professors and students at four universities and some dozen companies in Canada and the U.S. This project lasted for this entire period and produced over 1,000 research papers. WiSense was a large-scale engineering research project focused on the Internet-of-Things (IoT).

In 2009, Nortel Networks, the largest technical company in Canada, declared bankruptcy. During the period the company was in bankruptcy protection, I was a member of a group that raised $15 billion to buy Nortel. My task on the team was to get the Canadian Government to halt the asset striping of the company and to allow bids for the entire firm. However, I failed to convince the government of the day.

I was miffed. So I decided that there must be fundamental lessons to be learned from the collapse of such a storied company. Consequently, I raised private funds and established a multi-faculty research team at uOttawa involving faculty members from business, law and engineering with a shared view of wanting to glean lessons from Nortel’s failure. This 6-year project was guided by an international executive steering committee chaired by the Vice Chairman of a major European telecommunications company. By 2015 the research team had completed and published, via the University’s website, our major findings. The project continues to this day (2017) by drawing on our initial findings to produce interdisciplinary research papers for academic journals.

For a year, up until mid-2015, I was part of an eclectic team of academics and public and private sector experts that developed an interdisciplinary graduate course in the Theory of Cybersecurity for the Technology Innovation Management Program in the Faculty of Engineering at Carleton University. This was one of the first courses of its kind in the world.

To this day, I lecture at uOttawa in both engineering and business schools as well as in public and private settings on disruptive technologies and disruptive business models. In addition, I continue to publish both invited opinion pieces and research papers related to these topics. Moreover, with the second wave of AI now ramping up, this time globally, I am a regularly invited advocate by a group at MIT to express my views on ethical issues associated with artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons and climate change.

I am also associated with several social networks that are concerned with critical issues at the interface between the future of science, technology and society. These organisations include the Bacon and Eggheads Breakfast Club within the Canadian Parliamentary Precinct, the Foresight Synergy Network hosted by uOttawa, and the Canadian Chapter of the Club of Rome. All three organisations are primarily concerned with Wicked Problems facing society.