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\t<\/a><\/p>\nNone of their findings have been verified, and there\u2019s no evidence of any wrongdoing. Alberta Innovation Minister Nate Glubish, who travelled to Ottawa to oversee the event, said the idea wasn\u2019t to uncover federal scandals but to show what the technology can do.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing cheeky about it,\u201d Glubish told The Logic. His deputy minister, Janak Alford, plans to present findings from the hackathon at a Thursday meeting of federal and provincial officials involved in digital trust, cybersecurity and AI in a bid to foster more AI adoption. \u201cOur goal is to create a culture of innovation,\u201d Glubish said.<\/p>\n
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\tAlberta Innovation Minister Nate Glubish encouraged governments to experiment with AI, even though many attempts might not work. Photo: Laura Osman for The Logic\t<\/p>\n
Despite his earnest intention, more than one participant laughed at the implicit jab at Ottawa\u2014a familiar dynamic in Canadian politics. \u201cIt is funny that this is being done by Alberta on Ottawa soil,\u201d said Hanley, whose team joined the hackathon to show off some of their business\u2019 capabilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Alberta government has been vocal about its ambitions to be a vanguard of AI adoption for its own operations, and Glubish said he wants to encourage other jurisdictions to take the leap.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019ve decided to do in Alberta is to lead by example,\u201d said Glubish, a former venture capitalist who said he prefers to take a portfolio-based approach to AI. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be afraid to try 10 things and have eight things not work. If those two things completely transform how we accomplish things for the benefit of Albertans and of Canadians, then we should recognise that as a big win.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say Alberta takes a Wild-West approach to AI adoption; the province has guardrails to protect privacy and critical data, Glubish said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
His approach runs counter to traditional thinking in risk-averse Ottawa, where decisions face harsh scrutiny from the public and the opposition.<\/p>\n
For the hackers crowded into the cafeteria of the old Shopify building, the Ottawa instinct looks less like prudence and more like paralysis given how quickly AI is evolving, and they relished the idea of shaking things up.<\/p>\n
Nilufer Erdebil, CEO of an Ottawa consultancy firm called Spring2Innovation, teamed up with her son Ethan, who has just finished the second year of his software engineering degree at Carleton University. They tracked housing money that flows from the federal government to provinces, cities and non-profits.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
She said having so many people tackling problems in a new way helps demonstrate what\u2019s possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even a few years ago, Mohan Madhuv, a freelance user-experience designer, said he wouldn\u2019t have been able to do what Alberta asked of the hackers. Now, digging up misspent money is \u201ctable stakes\u201d at an event like this, said Will Coffey, the CEO of U.S. AI governance firm Pythagorithm, who travelled from Washington, D.C., for the event.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNow you\u2019ve found that there are funding loops, now you\u2019ve found that there\u2019s vendor concentration, now what?\u201d he said, half hidden behind his laptop, with three extra screens perched on top. \u201cWhat do you do to either improve your processes or improve your governance to ensure that those things don\u2019t happen?\u201d<\/p>\n
Alberta has started to answer that question by deploying AI instead of costly consultants, said Glubish. The government recently set out to update two Ministry of Infrastructure databases that track government properties and construction budgets. The leading bidder on the contract proposed a $54-million, four-year project, he said. Instead, the government did the work internally using AI for $2.6 million in a fraction of the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery government department in Alberta and, I would argue, every government department and every government in this country, has use cases like that,\u201d Glubish said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OTTAWA \u2014 The Alberta government turned 1,100 tech enthusiasts loose on a massive set of public federal data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26323,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[164,439,235,143,290,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-26322","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ottawa","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-federal-government","12":"tag-national","13":"tag-ottawa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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