EDITOR’S NOTE
THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE MANAGING EDITOR Popi Bowman pbowman@jesmar.com CONTRIBUTORS
Jana Manolakos Keren Stephenson David Suzuki
EDITORIAL INTERN
Gabrielle Cole
ART DIRECTOR Katrina Teimo kteimo@dvtail.com SECRETARY/TREASURER Susan A. Browne MARKETING Stephanie Wilson MANAGER swilson@jesmar.com VP OF PRODUCTION Roberta Dick robertad@jesmar.com PRODUCTION Crystal Himes MANAGER chimes@jesmar.com
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BY POPI BOWMAN
This is my second issue as editor of BioLab Business, and you’ll probably notice some big changes. First, we’ve done away with the “flip” format and combined the two names into one – I’m a huge advocate for streamlining! And with the biotechnology and lab fields working so closely – often overlapping – it makes sense to merge the magazines. Another exciting change is the addition of Canadian Food Business in each issue; we’ll still include a larger 16-page section twice yearly, but our audience shows a hunger for this topic (forgive my pun!), so we didn’t want to make you wait months between issues. The most exciting news of all is our redesigned website: BioLabmag.com. Knowing that our readers are tech-savvy and likely want to read articles on-the-go, we embarked on the mission to create a more user-friendly platform to reach a wider audience. As anyone who has relaunched a website knows, this is not a small job – so you can expect to see added content and features as the year unfolds. Be sure to visit often! With this first issue of 2019, the topic we are focusing on is artificial intelligence. AI is becoming as essential to the business and science worlds as oxygen is to our bodies. While we accumulate unimaginable quantities of data thanks to our connected/computing world, AI is the key to making sense of what might be otherwise hidden quantities. In January, when Toronto’s SickKids hospital announced the first-of-itskind “chair in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence” – Dr. Anna Goldenberg, a senior scientist in genetics and genome biology – the hospital cited the fact that its intensive-care research has collected two trillion data points since 2013. Considering that none of us can count that high, it’s clearly the task of a computer to analyze and distill the pertinent findings. As we explored the many dimensions of this topic, a constant theme cropped up: Canada is a leader in the field. Not only can we claim rights to the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, but our country continues to forge the AI pathway in many directions, from research and healthcare to self-driving technology and big data analytics. This year, Montreal’s Element AI was the only Canadian company to land on the annual “AI 100,” published by CB Insights; however, in an industry that’s moving at the speed of light, I think there’s a good chance that “the tortoise and the hare” might come into play. The race isn’t over, and Canada has a strong foothold. Do I believe AI is the next frontier in science? Absolutely. Do I believe it can solve as many problems as promised? That remains to be seen – but it can certainly make a lot of our jobs easier, and it is already creating a more insightful vision of the world in which we live. How we use Popi Bowman that information is beyond the “mind” of a MANAGING EDITOR computer, and in our hands.
W W W. B I O L A B M AG.C O M
PUBLISHER & CEO Christopher J. Forbes cforbes@jesmar.com
Publisher of BioLab Business Magazine Printed in Canada
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