AI: Beyond the Hype - Shaping the Future Together

Daniel Barcay is a technologist who is passionate about the immense power and promise of technology. A builder at heart, Daniel’s career has focused on creating global-scale technologies while driving wise and responsible practices around the rollout of new tech. Daniel was a Product Vice President at Planet Labs, where he led teams building a planetary-scale platform enabling users to extract actionable insights from a deep stack of global-daily satellite images. Prior to that, the Chief Technology Officer of Thiel Macro, where he focused on building predictive models of global-scale market phenomena.

Daniel started his career as a software engineer at Google, helping build several prominent projects including Google Earth and Latitude, as well as conducting machine learning research. He has studied leadership development, team dynamics, and adult-developmental psychology. In his leadership development practice, he teaches fellow leaders the cognitive tools to embrace complexity and thrive amidst uncertainty. Daniel was recently a research fellow in the Antikythera Program at the Berggruen Institute - a think tank reorienting planetary computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force. In his spare time, he loves to fly various forms of powered and unpowered aircraft.

Stephanie Dick is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She has a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. Her work focuses on the history of mathematics, computing, and the mind. Her projects explore attempts to automate mathematical intelligence and theorem-proving in the 20th century; the introduction of centralized computer databases to American policing in the 1960s; and in her most recent work, she is exploring debates about the character of the human mind at the intersection of logic, philosophy, and the occult.

She is co-editor with Janet Abbate of Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society, she co-edits the “Mining the Past” column at the Harvard Data Science Review; she is co-editor of the most recent issue of the British Journal for the History of Science “Themes”: Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power. Before returning home to Canada to join the faculty at SFU, Stephanie was an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Dr. Aftab Erfan (she/her) is Executive Director of SFU Centre for Dialogue and Associate Member at SFU School of Public Policy. Previously, she served as the City of Vancouver’s inaugural Chief Equity Officer, and Director of Dialogue and Conflict Engagement at UBC. She holds a PhD in planning from UBC, a Masters in planning from McGill University, and a BSc in environmental sciences from UBC. Aftab has extensive experience as a process designer and facilitator, specializing in hosting dialogues on contentious issues with warmth and creativity. Her experience spans 15 years and five continents. She holds numerous honours, including BC500 most influential business leaders in BC (Business in Vancouver), Research for a Better Life: The Storytellers Challenge (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), and Best Published Paper Award Shortlist (Association of European Schools of Planning).