In celebration of Black History Month, U of T Engineering invited students and alumni who identify as Black (including African, African-Canadian, African-Caribbean ancestry) and women to reflect on their experiences in STEM, the barriers they’ve faced in their career journeys, their inspirations, and the advice that they have for young Black women students.
Digitization is changing how people pay for things, and raising questions about the future: how much longer will Canadians be willing and able to use physical cash? Could an alternative currency, a digital one such as Facebook’s Diem Coin or Bitcoin, prove so convenient as to make the Canadian dollar obsolete?
Long-term planners at the Bank of Canada (or “the Bank”) are tangling with these questions now, thinking ahead to how Canadians will use currency in the future. That’s why in February 2020, the Bank announced it was designing a contingency plan for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which sparked speculation of a brand-new loonie — a sibling to the banknote in digital form.
The Bank has no plans to issue a digital loonie at this time; regardless, the decision of “when” to introduce one is very different from “how.” As an active player in the research on digital money, the Bank is aware of the expertise in the university sector and thus launched the Model X Challenge in mid-spring of 2020: a competition for experts to propose a system architecture and business plan for a Canadian CBDC.
One of the three proposals selected by the Bank comes from a team of University of Toronto and York University researchers, including Professors Andreas Veneris (ECE, CompSci), Andreas Park (UTM, Rotman) and Fan Long (CompSci, ECE), as well as Professor Poonam Puri (York University, Osgoode Hall Law School).
The team says that it will take another two to three years to properly implement a CBDC, and there’s little time to waste.
“You cannot click a button and have a CBDC tomorrow morning. This is a long technological, economic, legislative and cultural shift behind digital currencies,” says Veneris.
Long adds, “China has been working on it for over five years.”
The team pulled together their diverse expertise to tackle the design components from the perspectives of technology, economy, legal and global geopolitics: Veneris is an expert in system design, formal verification, techno-legal questions and crypto-economics; Long is a distributed systems and programming languages pioneer; Park, in his own words, researches how the plumbing of financial markets shapes economic outcomes; and Puri is an expert in securities law and regulation.
Professor Deepa Kundur, Chair of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), sees this kind of collaboration as a key to unlock solutions in critical sectors.
“A complex area like monetary infrastructure has such wide-ranging impact that a comprehensive analysis demands thought leaders from different fields,” she says. “The Model X Challenge is a good example of why ECE has prioritized cross-disciplinary efforts.”
Veneris, Park and Long have observed that the financial sector may be lagging behind when it comes to digitization.
“Billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices have already made their way into our daily lives: our homes and cars, health care, manufacturing, supply chains and other infrastructure,” says Veneris. Park adds, “Yet payment, the backbone of all commerce, still operates on a legacy infrastructure that lacks the flexibility to adapt to this digitization of the economy.”
Park points out that you can buy things on Amazon and receive them the same day — but the seller only sees the payment on their account days later. This general delay costs businesses real money: the consulting firm Ernst & Young estimates that slow payments cost Canadian businesses $2.9 to $6.5 billion dollars a year.
New players are already emerging to exploit these shortcomings. In 2019, a Facebook-led consortium announced its intention to create a new financial payments infrastructure and with it a cryptocurrency known as Diem Coin (formerly Libra Coin), which is planned to launch in 2021.
“Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly users,” says Veneris. “Once Diem goes live, it will offer a wide range of functionality for retail payments and make it easier to conduct business. It’ll be as though Facebook became, overnight, the biggest central bank of them all.”
In addition to concerns about how Diem Coin would handle privacy issues, Park says that small economies like Canada could experience currency displacement: “People may stop using the native loonie, first for convenience and later out of necessity.”
Preventing displacement and protecting privacy were key questions that guided the team’s thinking.
In addition to data security, the team’s proposal considers a number of critical issues facing the launch of a new CBDL: it links the legacy infrastructure with the new, it has privacy-by-design to protect consumers and businesses, and it provides incentives for the private sector to innovate and excel in this new global digital economy while protecting Canada’s social values
The team suggests a two-stage launch. In the first, the Bank alone would set up a working infrastructure to give people the ability to make a cash-like e-payments with the new digital loonie. (A secondary payment CBDL cash-card system would cover Canadians who lack internet access.)
Transactions between parties would involve no credit and be immediate, limited in size to a typical purchase at a grocery store or other retail outlet.
“You would go to a shop and scan a QR code and that’s everything you need to make a payment,” says Long. “It’s a viable, convenient payment mechanism that will be much cheaper for merchants to use than the current system.”
In the second stage, the system expands to an open but controlled network: a “permissioned” blockchain. Here, private sector entities take the lead role and build on the Bank’s initial innovation. Customers could keep their transactions private while being able to monetize their personal data to get extra services from the private sector.
Veneris emphasizes that this blockchain is not like Bitcoin, and that a CBDC is not a volatile asset that’s prone to speculation like many cryptocurrencies today.
“Think of it as an intelligent open-source social operating system for programmable e-money,” Park says. “A company like Tim Hortons can plug into it to develop an enhanced reward program, or a firm can customize a service for smaller merchants. Entrepreneurs will ensure the payment mechanism keeps pace with incoming tech: Internet-of-Things micropayments, for example.”
And in an emergency, the system is set up to revert back to the Bank’s full control.
Veneris, Park and Long are adamant that the Bank should spearhead alone this ambitious first phase. “The current payment systems are the private banks’ golden goose,” says Park. “You can’t expect them to kill it.”
While setting up a digital currency is a massive undertaking, Veneris, Park and Long say that where the Bank of Canada leads, others – both locally and globally – will follow.
“The Bank has spent the better part of the last decade preparing for this moment,” says Park. “It has a head start over most other central banks in the world.” Veneris adds that “there are no excuses. This is Canada’s opportunity to be a global leader.”
Wattpad, the world’s most popular digital storytelling platform, is preparing to write a new chapter in its own story after being purchased by South Korean internet giant Naver for US$600 million.
Wattpad, which was founded by University of Toronto alumni Allen Lau (ElecE 9T1, ECE MASc 9T2) and Ivan Yuen in 2006, started out as a self-publishing platform, but has since spawned a film and TV production arm called Wattpad Studios; a book publishing division called Wattpad Books; and Wattpad Brand Partnerships, which helps brands reach Gen Z consumers.
Lau and Yuen will continue to lead Wattpad after the cash-and-stock transaction is completed later this year.
With some 90 million monthly users, 1,500 book, TV and film adaptations and over 90 TV shows and movies currently in development around the world, Wattpad – headquartered in Toronto – is revolutionizing how stories are told, shared and discovered on digital platforms.
In a recent conversation with U of T News, Lau said the opportunity to tap into Webtoon’s digital comics audience was a key driver behind the acquisition, which he said will enable Wattpad to take its business “to the next level.”
Lau also discussed what the deal could mean for Toronto’s burgeoning innovation ecosystem, the importance of thinking globally, and what the acquisition means for Wattpad’s presence and growth in Canada.
Why did Wattpad make this deal?
Naver is one of the largest internet companies in the world and they’re very strong in Asia, and Webtoon is the digital comics division that they started more than a decade ago.
Webtoon is similar to Wattpad, being a storytelling company – except that Wattpad focuses on fiction and they’ve been focusing on comics. But other than that, our respective DNAs and our combined visions are very similar. If you look at Wattpad, the vision has always been to entertain the world through stories.
In a single transaction overnight, we have almost doubled our user base. Wattpad alone has 90 million monthly users and we now have a combined user base of 160 million.
Equally important, as a combined entity we also now have expertise in comics and animation, which is something we did not have before. We’re a multi-platform entertainment company and the platforms in our entertainment ecosystem now also include comics and animation. That’s very, very powerful.
Why this acquisition makes so much sense is that it can continue to drive our growth and take the business to the next level – and, most importantly, do it in one stroke, nearly doubling the user base and our capability overnight.
It took us 15 years to build Wattpad into what it is today and Webtoon, too, is around 15 to 17 years old. For Wattpad to build Webtoon organically would be very, very hard to do. They’re already a global leader and we’re a global leader as well – so the combination makes a lot of sense
What was the relationship between Wattpad and Naver before the acquisition?
We’ve known the Naver and Webtoon teams for a very long time. Webtoon was the sponsor of the Watty Award, our annual global writing contest which typically has hundreds of thousands of submissions.
As we became more and more familiar with each other, the [potential for the] transaction became very apparent because it’s a match made in heaven. The alignment is that both are leading storytelling companies. It makes perfect sense.
Wattpad is headquartered in Toronto and you have an office in Halifax. How will the deal affect Wattpad’s presence in Canada?
Nothing will change from that perspective. Our growth trajectory will continue and our headquarters will remain in Canada.
This is actually good for Canada because our success here is much more guaranteed in a way because we now have the backing of one of the largest internet companies in the world. From that perspective, the growth trajectory here is even more certain now.
What can others learn from Wattpad’s success?
One thing that Canada is perhaps not as good at is commercialization. We have amazing scientists, amazing engineers, amazing technologists, many amazing people – but when it comes to turning those ideas into a big global business, the good examples are few and far between. I truly hope that Wattpad is a validation and a good example that we can set for other people.
I’m an engineer myself, so, of course, I appreciate the technology that we built, the machine learning, the AI that’s behind our platform. But one of the main reasons we’ve seen this amazing outcome is because we’re also very good at turning an idea into something people can use. With over 90 million people on our platform on a monthly basis – that commercialization cannot be downplayed.
So we need both: the core technology and core intellectual property, but also a great way to commercialize this into an application.
What does Wattpad’s growth say about the importance of having a global perspective?
That’s a very good question. Even before the acquisition, Wattpad has been very global. We support over 50 different languages. We have users on pretty much every single continent in the world.
We’ve taken some of the top stories on our platform and turned them into TV shows, movies and print books through our partners. For example, we have a few shows in Singapore and Indonesia with some of the top media companies there that were just released on streaming platforms in the last couple of weeks. We have over 90 TV and film projects that we’re actively working on with our partners in five continents.
So we’ve always been doing that. And now with Webtoon, in terms of demographics and geographic reach, we can help them and vice-versa – so it’s very complimentary. Some of the gaps in terms of capability and geographic gaps we have in the respective companies are now mostly filled.
If we were a global company before, we’re now a much stronger global company. I think this is an accelerator for us, an amplifier.
How might the Toronto and Canadian innovation ecosystems benefit from this deal?
Some of the advantages I can talk about would be the recycling of capital and recycling of knowledge.
The Canadian ecosystem has been thriving in the past decade, with so many new companies and startup companies becoming scale-ups. But not a lot of companies achieve this type of scale, so that experience is still lacking.
Going through a transaction of this magnitude is quite rare and now, all of a sudden, we have 200 people in Wattpad who have the experience – and some of that experience can carry over to the next generation of companies. Now we have, including Wattpad, a few companies at that level and that experience can really help raise the bar of the Canadian innovation ecosystem.
Beyond the transaction itself, Naver as a 20,000-person company is very, very large, so there’s a lot we can learn from them.
What is it about Toronto that makes it such a good breeding ground for startups?
I don’t believe I can pinpoint a single thing. From the multiculturalism to the godfather of AI [University Professor Emeritus] Geoffrey Hinton being part of U of T to the huge number of engineering students coming out of our schools, the availability of capital that didn’t exist 10, 15 or 20 years ago – all of that.
All those ingredients are here and it provides a very interesting ground for companies to flourish. So, I think we’re in a very interesting moment in time in Toronto where we pretty much have all the elements for success.
Did you ever imagine you would be where you are today?
The answer is yes and no. When we first started, we always wanted to turn this into a global giant. That has always been the ambition since day one. Having said that, to experience this first-hand in real time at this moment is a very surreal experience that words cannot describe.
This weekend, 300 high school and university students will have 24 hours to code, design, build, network and learn from mentors at NSBEHacks 2021 — an event that aims to equalize the footing of Black and other minority students within science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.
“Black-facilitated events like these are important because limited opportunities are often afforded specifically to Black students in STEM, as there aren’t many of us,” says Alana Bailey (Year 3 CivMin), president of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) U of T Chapter, and one of the lead organizers.
Launched in 2019 and founded by U of T computer science alumni Kyra Stephen and Temisan Iwere, as well as alumna Ayan Gedleh (IndE 1T9), NSBEHacks is the first Black student-run hackathon within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
Alana Bailey
(Photo: Daria Perevezentsev)
“It was very important to me to make sure that things are easier for incoming Black students in tech,” says Iwere, who has stayed involved with NSBEHacks since graduating. “The technical industry can be very intimidating, especially when you get into certain spaces and realize that you’re the only one who looks like you. It can be an alienating experience.”
This year, NSBEHacks goes beyond city limits. For the first time, the hackathon is fully virtual, allowing participants to join in from across North America, the Caribbean, and Asia.
In addition to sponsors RBC, Accenture, Google, NVIDIA, TD, Bloomberg, Ecobee, Shopify, FDM and EA, the event has also partnered with Major League Hacking (MLH) this year. MLH is the official student hackathon league in North America and is providing free access to software to participants during and after the hackathon.
Temisan Iwere
(Photo courtesy Temisan Iwere)
Keeping students engaged in coding and designing, even after they’ve virtually walked away from this weekend, is how the NSBEHacks team will be measuring the event’s success.
“We want to see students feeling confident and a sense of belonging. We want to inspire them to get involved with NSBE after, applying to STEM programs at U of T, and staying in touch with companies from our career fair,” says Bailey. “NSBEHacks is one of the ways to ensure that going forward, we are building strength in numbers.”
Signalling that science is firmly back on the U.S. agenda, President Joe Biden has named high-profile scientist Eric Lander as his nominee to be both science advisor and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). If confirmed by Congress, Lander will be the first biologist in either of these roles.
Lander is the geneticist, molecular biologist and mathematician most well-known as the co-lead of the international Human Genome Project. He is currently the president and founding director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard. Professor Molly Shoichet (ChemE, BME, Donnelly) — Ontario’s Chief Scientist 2017-18 — shared her reflections on Lander’s nomination with Linda Quattrin of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.
Scientists everywhere must be encouraged to see that Biden not only named a science advisor prior to inauguration but he also elevated the position to Cabinet for the first time in history. Given that political boost, what are you hoping to see from this administration on science?
President Biden built his campaign on facts and science. I was elated to see that the science advisor was elevated to a Cabinet role as it gives the role and the person holding that role greater access to the President. I am hopeful that decisions will be rooted in evidence.
Could this have a ripple effect on Canadian science?
Science is not political. It would be fantastic to see Canada’s Chief Science Advisor role (currently held by Mona Nemer) expanded such that there is greater and more consistent access to the Prime Minister. Of course, the position has always had a dotted line to the Prime Minister. In Quebec, the Chief Scientist’s position has become law and the Chief Scientist has survived multiple changes in government. This is key in Canada (and the U.S.).
Dr. Lander was roundly criticized for his 2016 overview of CRISPR technology that downplayed the role of two women, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who just last year won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work. Was he the right choice for an administration trying to represent a greater diversity of voices in its leadership roles?
There are several things that need to be celebrated:
- President Biden chose a science advisor (President Trump left the position vacant for 18 months);
- He made the science advisor role part of his Cabinet;
- He has chosen a biologist who can provide cogent advice about the global pandemic;
- Alondra Nelson was named OSTP deputy director for science and society. Nelson is an accomplished social science leader, who has studied the societal impacts of emerging technology, as well as racism in science and medicine.
- There are several scientists who have been brought together with the science advisor, including Frances Arnold, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, who will co-chair President Biden’s Science and Technology Advisory Council.
It is disappointing that Dr. Lander overlooked the very people who invented the CRISPR technology and disturbing that this appears to be sexist. With strong women on his team, I’m hopeful that Dr. Lander will not repeat these regrettable omissions. There are certainly exceptional women who could take his place if he does.
We know that climate change is high on the President’s agenda, as is the pandemic, of course. If he takes a moonshot approach for large-scale investment in science, what domains do you see the U.S. taking on in a big way?
I imagine that President Biden will continue the moonshots that he started when he was Vice-President with President Obama — these include providing access to healthcare, conquering cancer, overcoming the pandemic, advancing clean energy alternatives and returning the American economy to great strength.
Prof. Shoichet, you were named Ontario’s first Chief Scientist in late 2017. While it was less than a year before Premier Doug Ford shut that down, what did the role look like for you and were there areas you were able to bring insights from science into public policymaking?
It was a great honour for me to serve as Chief Scientist for Ontario and I’m sorry that my position was politicized. I had the opportunity to work on policy to enhance science, on scientific methods to enhance policy making, and restoring public confidence in science. These are all enormously complex files, and I had a small but mighty staff who worked tirelessly with me to make advances.
Finally, I’ve often thought about the role that scientists could play in influencing public policy. Does seeing science move up on the political agenda tempt you to take a step into the political arena yourself?
I think that we need more scientists in government. There is both enormous opportunity and great responsibility to make a difference when one is elected. It would be a great honour to serve the public; however, I have been more focused on advancing knowledge with my research team, communicating that to the public through research2reality.com and commercializing our inventions through start-up ventures, like AmacaThera.
For more than 70 years, the Unit Ops Lab has been a cornerstone for undergraduate training in chemical engineering. Now, Professor Ariel Chan (ChemE) is using virtual reality and 3D simulations to make it accessible to students who are studying from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Unit Ops is like medical school for our students,” says Chan, who coordinates several lab-based courses built around the facility’s capabilities. “It’s such a major lab, providing students the practical experiences of a practiced engineer. Only a handful of universities in Canada have a facility like this.”
A gigantic, two-storey laboratory space located in the Wallberg Building, the Unit Ops features towering industry-scale equipment and provides third-year students with hands-on experience. This is where they design and experiment with processes used in a wide range of chemical engineering industries, from bioethanol production to pharmaceutical drug manufacturing.
“Sadly, this term students are missing the opportunity to experience it, to go up and down those stairs — but we can do our best to get it as close as we can, and bridge that curriculum gap.”
Chan and her teaching assistants are mimicking the Unit Ops experience using virtual reality (VR), high-resolution virtual tours, at-home experiments, and 3D simulation/design software. Together, these tools give students a chance to virtually step into the Unit Ops Lab and test their skills in an industry environment.
Using the VR program Labster, students experience a first-person point of view as they replicate an industry-style lab experiment — right down to putting on a lab coat and gloves.
Students then refer to the Unit Ops website Chan and her team created exclusively for students, in order to connect the dots between what they handled in VR, and what those same pieces of equipment look like within the Unit Ops lab space.
“The team mapped out every inch of the lab to create a fully immersive and comprehensive virtual experience of Unit Ops,” says Chan.
From there, students are given pre-collected data that they can compare to similar systems within their household. For example, a regular household drainage pipe can serve as a scaled-down example for studying the upstream and downstream processes of bioethanol production.
“The guiding philosophy for our approach is that engineering is all around us,” explains Chan. “If they were in industry, they would have to inspect piping systems to figure out the cause of a blockage. That’s not too different from inspecting your sink pipes.”
The home lab component turns the online instruction into practical learning — whether it’s investigating a pipe blockage, or experimenting with yeast fermentation to learn bioethanol production, or studying a kitchen stove to assess heat-transfer effectiveness.
“Sure, you can learn the chemistry, the measurements, but when you turn a valve, how does it feel? The sensory portion is so important,” says Chan. To ensure students approach each assignment like a practicing engineer, they must then design a 3D simulation of the system they’re studying and perform the experiment as if they were in industry.
The approach seems to be connecting with students. During the fall term, Chan’s students posted many of their home experiments and video presentations in the course’s message boards, and even on TikTok.
“When you do more, and for the greater good, it’s rewarding,” she says. “Other universities might just give students data and an assignment, but for our students, the extra work — this whole process — enables them to be better prepared to be engineers.”