Tausi Insider

An oilsands mine facility seen from the air near Fort McMurray, on Sept. 19, 2011. Many communities across Canada, including Fort McMurray, are dealing with labour shortages that experts say are likely to get worse in the next few years due to this country's aging population. Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press When Dan Gallagher looks around his company, he sees a lot of retirement parties in his future. While it’s not something he formally tracks, the CEO of Mikisew Group – a Fort McMurray, Alta.-based company that specializes in oilsands site services, maintenance, logistics and construction – knows he’s got more employees approaching the end of their careers than just starting out. “I take a walk around our shop, and around our field services workforce, and I can clearly see that demographic. It’s aging,” Gallagher said. The implications of that make him nervous. Mikisew Group is already struggling with a shortage of labour, even recruiting as far away as Australia just to keep ...

A satellite, part of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, is shown in a handout. A piece of Canadian satellite radar technology will play a key role in a mission to observe 90 per cent of earth’s water. HO/The Canadian Press A spacecraft aided by Canadian technology has begun its mission to answer one of the most basic but challenging questions in climate science: Where is all the water? The Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, or SWOT, was launched from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base early Friday morning aboard a Space X Falcon 9 rocket. The Earth-orbiting satellite was developed by NASA in partnership with the French space agency, CNES, with additional involvement from Britain and Canada. SWOT’s aim is to measure the surface heights of rivers, lakes and coastal waters with about 90 per cent coverage of the globe and track how they change over time. While the task may sound straightforward, the results promise to unlock a bounty of new information about t...

Katrina Ingram, CEO of Ethically Aligned AI, at home in Edmonton on Dec. 19, 2022. Amber Bracken/Tausi Insider As Katrina Ingram watched the internet explode with AI-powered text and image generators in late 2022, her mind returned to questions she’d been asking the tech sector for years. What values are baked into these artificial-intelligence systems, the chief executive of Ethically Aligned AI wondered , that might give rise to ethical quandaries? All over the internet recently, people have been prompting OpenAI’s text generator ChatGPT to churn out passages and essays, and processing selfies and other photos with apps such as Prisma Labs’s Lensa to look like portraits done by professional artists. While the trend seemed to many as a fun, participatory technological advance, it’s also restoked long-standing fears in the ethical AI community and among creative professionals. Many hands have been wrung over how ChatGPT, for one, could upend the very concept of academic essays, since...

Toast, a women's collective and talent organization, was started by Canadian tech workers Marissa McNeelands, left and April Hicke, shown in this undated handout photo HO/The Canadian Press When Marissa McNeelands was hiring a senior artificial intelligence product manager last year, she asked recruiters to suggest an equal number of male and female candidates. They didn’t put forward any women, but she knew there had to be some who were more than qualified for the job. “Really it was going into my network, talking to people, pushing people to apply,” McNeelands, a Toronto artificial intelligence worker, recalled. “I find with so many women they just need that extra little push to be like ‘yeah, you are qualified, go for it, ask for more money.’” That experience and others like it are why McNeelands thinks Canada needs Toast, a women’s collective and talent organization, she and April Hicke, a digital product director in Calgary, dreamed up at Mont Tremblant’s spa in Quebec last ...