Invited Keynote Speakers - Session 2

Dr. Helge Seetzen, General Partner and CEO at TandemLaunch
Talk Title: "From Invention to Mass Market - Tips for Technology Entrepreneurs"

Bio: Helge Seetzen is a successful multi-media technology entrepreneur with deep experience in the university tech transfer space. He currently serves as the CEO of TandemLaunch – a unique venture fund that scouts, accelerates, and commercializes early-stage technologies from the world's top universities in close partnership with major Consumer Electronic brands and world-class entrepreneurs. Prior to TandemLaunch, Helge co-founded Sunnybrook Technologies and later BrightSide Technologies to commercialize display technologies developed at the University of British Columbia. BrightSide was successfully sold to Dolby Laboratories at high return to shareholders after receiving accolades such as the Best Buzz Award at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show and a "Top 100 Technologies in 2006" rank by Popular Science Magazine. At Dolby he led all cross-functional development activities for Dolby's first two consumer video products. In this capacity he built research and engineering departments in Canada and the US, and was closely involved in licensing negotiations with many major consumer electronics manufacturers.

Helge's leadership in the technology transfer, innovation and entrepreneurial space has been widely recognized through awards such as Business in Vancouver's 40 under Forty award for business accomplishment, the NSERC Innovation Challenge Award for university technology transfer, and a Special Recognition Award from the Society for Information Display for the pioneering of LED TV technology. Helge is a Fellow of the McGill Dobson Center for Entrepreneurship, board member of the Parcours Entrepreneurial Rémi-Marcoux at HEC Montreal, and frequent supporter of many other organisations encouraging entrepreneurship. As a technical leader, he served as the General Chair for Display Week, the largest technical conference on displays, as well as currently on the Executive Board of the Society for Information Display and the Research Council of MITACS. He has published over 20 journal articles, writes a regular column on venture capital innovation in the Information Display Magazine, and holds over 80 patents with an additional 50 pending US applications. Helge received a B.Sc. in physics and a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary imaging technology (physics & computer science) from the University of British Columbia.

Mr. Francois Thibodeau, System Engineer, Centre de Gestion de la Mobilité Urbaine (CGMU), Ville de Montréal
Talk title: "Montreal Integrated Corridor Management : An useful Tool to Catalyst The Collaboration in Mobility"

Bio: Mr. Thibodeau is a graduated from Ecole de Technologie Supérieure in Montreal in 1997 in Electrical Engineering. He is now acting as a system engineer for the Innovation & Mobility section for the City of Montreal. Precisely, Mr. Thibodeau is developing the tools and architectures required to shift the traditional statistical traffic engineering into the real-time environment and enable better perturbation management on the mobility system of the Urban Mobility Management Center in Montreal called Centre de Gestion de la Mobilité Urbaine (CGMU). This center operates since the last 2 years. Mr. Thibodeau works in the transportation industry for the last 20 years. He developed expertise in several complimentary fields from product development to process management and finally, specializing into real-time management for integrated centralized control centers. He implemented most of the transit CAD/AVL in the Great Montreal area and was widely involved into the upgrade of the Montreal subway control center including safe systems. He is now specialized into real-time operation environment and working on structuring projects aligned with the next generation of mobility tools, including new sources of data and next generation vehicles.

Dr. Benoit Gosselin, Associate Professor at ECE Dept., Laval University
Talk Title: "Collaborative R&D in Biomedical Engineering: From University to Industry"

Bio: Benoit Gosselin obtained the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal in 2009, and he was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of ECE at Université Laval, where he is heading the Biomedical Microsystems Lab. His research interests include wireless microsystems for brain computer interfaces, analog/mixed-mode and RF integrated circuits for neural engineering, interface circuits of implantable sensors/actuators and point-of-care diagnostic microsystems for personalized healthcare. Dr. Gosselin is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and he is Chair and Founder of the Quebec IEEE CAS/EMB Chapter (2015 Best New Chapter Award). He served on the committees of several int’l conferences such as IEEE ISCAS, IEEE BIOCAS, IEEE NEWCAS and IEEE EMBC/NER, and he currently serves on the committees of the IEEE MWSCAS’17 and the IEEE NEWCAS’17. His research consists of developing innovative microelectronic platforms to collect and study brain activity through advanced multimodal bioinstrumentation and actuation technology. In addition to earn several awards, such as the 2015 Mitacs Award for Outstanding Innovation – Master’s and the IEEE BioCAS’15 Best paper award, his contributions led to the commercialization of the first wireless electronic implant to combine optogenetics and large-scale brain monitoring capabilities within a single device, with partner Doric Lenses Inc.

Invited Keynote Speakers - Session 4

Mr. Jacques Lapointe, Manager, Senior Manager, Director – Systems Engineering, CISCO
Talk Title: "Smart! Connecting your Community Securely"

Bio: Mr. Lapointe has lead teams in Telecommunications for more than 25 years. After getting his Bachelor degree from Laval University in Physics Engineering in 1989, he held various management position at Bell Canada. Within these ten years, he returned to school to get his Master degree in Telecommunications from INRS-Telecommunications. After a short stay at Lucent Technologies, he joined the Cisco team in 1999, where he now holds a Senior Systems Engineering Leadership role in Canada. 

Mr. Jeremy Barnes, Chief Architect at Element AI Inc.
Talk Title: "Building Applications AI-first"

Bio: Mr. Barnes is a Montreal-based researcher and entrepreneur in the domain of artificial intelligence. He has founded several companies in AI over the last 17 years, including Datacratic and mldb.ai. He's currently the Chief Architect at Element AI, where he is responsible for building out the core artificial intelligence platform.  

Dr. Kim Khoa Nguyen, Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, ETS
Talk Title: "Virtual Edge and Smart Community Management in a University-As-A-Hub Smart City Model"

Bio: Dr. Nguyen is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Quebec’s Ecole de technologie supérieure (ETS), Montreal, Canada. He has a Ph.D. from Concordia University in Electrical and Computer Engineering. In the past, he served as CTO of Inocybe Technologies, a leading company in software-defined networking (SDN) solutions. He was the architect of the Canarie’s GreenStar Network and also involved in publishing CSA/IEEE standards for green ICT. He has worked for Alcatel Systems (now Nokia) and a nationwide operator in Asia-Pacific. His expertise includes cloud computing, big data, data center, network optimization, IoT and green ICT. He is vice-director of the Synchromedia Laboratory.

Dr. Helge Seetzen, TandemLaunch; Mr. Francois Thibodeau, Ville de Montréal; Dr. Benoit Gosselin, Laval University

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Mr. Jacques Lapointe, CISCO; Mr. Jeremy Barnes, Element AI; Dr. Kim Khoa Nguyen, ETS

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