AI Adoption, Policy, and Governance

In partnership with the Centre for International Governance Innovation

One day

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In-person instructor-led seminarFairmont Château Laurier, Ottawa

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In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the global landscape, understanding its multifaceted impact is crucial for informed decision-making at the highest levels. Senior policymakers are at the forefront of guiding government and society through the opportunities and challenges that AI presents. This course will equip current and emerging policy leaders with the knowledge and insights necessary to navigate this evolving terrain confidently.

This one-day course, developed in partnership with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), is designed to provide an overview that covers what you need to know about AI to position your work and organization strategically in this rapidly emerging space. The course is divided into three parts:

The science and technology of AI
The ethics, policy, and governance of AI
The opportunities and challenges of AI

The course is designed for non-specialists and will seek to provide a basis for understanding complex aspects of AI without being overly technical. It will be taught by an interdisciplinary group of University of Waterloo faculty and Centre for International Governance senior fellows encompassing expertise across the fields of computer science, economics, business, and law.

This executive course is designed for:

Assistant Deputy Ministers and Directors General who wish to build their knowledge on how AI is reshaping business, government, and society.
Senior government leaders seeking opportunities to improve operational processes and service delivery.
Policy leaders across the public sector who wish to understand how best to regulate and govern AI technologies.
Government executives seeking to build pathways to address Canada’s innovation, productivity and growth gap.

Module 1: Introduction	Introduce AI: a disruptive general-purpose technology that will transform business, government and society. Understand Canada’s innovation, productivity and growth gap and how AI offers a chance to change the trajectory. Explore government’s three core AI challenges: leveraging AI to transform service delivery, promoting AI adoption to boost productivity, and regulating and governing the use of AI. Identify lessons from previous disruptive technologies and develop the 3R (replace, reimagine, recombine) framework for thinking about the coming AI transformation.
Module 2: Basics of AI and machine learning	Understand the basics of AI. Investigate the different related technologies that make up the universe of AI. Explore where the technology is today and where it is heading.
Module 3: Generative AI	Explore large language models: how they work, how to train them, and how to use them. Discover other forms of generative AI and multimodal approaches. Consider the costs and benefits of different forms of AI implementation.
Lunch and guest speaker: Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence	Explore the Artificial Intelligence Report.
Module 4: Ethical and governance issues	Identify ethical issues related to AI including trust, bias and fairness, data privacy, transparency, and accountability. Develop strategies for addressing these challenges.
Module 5: Regulatory and legal frameworks	Develop effective AI policies and regulations. Rethink copyright in an age of generative AI.
Module 6: AI disruption	Understand the business capabilities of current and emerging AI technology. Apply the 3R framework, using generative AI as a foundation for rethinking processes, service innovations, and business models. Understand how AI strategy and implementation intersect. Predict the likely impacts of AI on jobs and inequality. Synthesize and situate key learning points from the program in the context of your organization’s strategy and operations.

This executive course offers multiple modes of learning that will allow you to get up-to-speed quickly on how AI is set to radically transform business, government, and society. This includes:

45-minute modules comprised of short presentations by leading experts in the field and faculty-guided peer-led discussions.
Curated readings that will allow you to dig deeper into specific topics of interest.
Action learning thought-starters that will apply the 3R model to your organization or one with which you are familiar.

A headshot of Joel Blit

Dr. Joël Blit

Chair, Council on Innovation Policy | Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)

Dr. Joël Blit is a professor of economics, chair of the Council on Innovation Policy at the University of Waterloo, and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). His main research interests are in the economics of innovation and innovation policy. He studies, among other things, AI, economics and the future of work, the diffusion of disruptive technologies and their impact on productivity and jobs, as well as the effect of that intellectual property rights (patents) have on innovation. Dr. Blit’s most recent work, examining how COVID-19 has transformed the economy through automation and reallocation, has been featured in numerous media outlets including The Economist, The Globe and Mail, and CBC.

He has also received numerous research grants from agencies such as SSHRC, NBER, CIBER, INET, CIGI, the AI Institute at the University of Waterloo.

Prior to joining Waterloo, Dr. Blit was an assistant professor of economics and international affairs at the George Washington University. He has also been a business consultant to financial services firms in Asia, Australia, and North America, which has included formulating the strategy for a $100M USD startup. He holds a BASc Engineering Science (Toronto), MASc Computer Engineering (Waterloo), MBA (INSEAD), MA Economics (Western), and PhD Economics (Toronto).

Headshot of Dr. Jimmy Lin

Dr. Jimmy Lin

Cheriton Chair, Cheriton School of Computer Science | Co-Director, Waterloo.AI

Dr. Jimmy Lin is a professor and holds the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He also serves as the co-director of the Waterloo AI Institute, which has the mission to promote cross-disciplinary research at the frontiers of artificial intelligence and its applications across the entire campus.

Dr. Lin’s area of research lies at the intersection between natural language processing and information retrieval. In addition to being one of the most cited artificial intelligence scholars in the world, he has been frequently and deeply engaged with both the private and public sectors throughout his career, including an extended sabbatical at Twitter and visiting positions at the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

He presently serves as the chief technology officer of Primal, a Waterloo-based AI company focused on creating meaning that computers can understand. Dr. Lin holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and is a fellow of the ACM.

Headshot of Guiseppina D'Agostino

Giuseppina (Pina) D'Agostino

Law Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University | Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)

Giuseppina (Pina) D’Agostino is a CIGI senior fellow and a world-renowned authority on intellectual property (IP), innovation law, and policy. She is an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School; vice-director of Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy Just Society; inaugural co-director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Society at York University; founder and director of the IP Innovation Clinic and the IP Law and Technology Program at Osgoode Hall Law School; editor-in-chief of Intellectual Property Journal; and founding director of IP Osgoode.

Through CIGI and Intellectual Property Ontario, D'Agostino has scaled the operational capacity of her IP innovation clinic model, to provide IP law training for law students working directly with lawyers to help clients via pro bono work. The goal is to promote innovation and entrepreneurship across Canada and the clinic has already achieved numerous start-up success stories and has undercut over $2 million in fees.

Prior to joining Osgoode, D’Agostino was selected by the Recruitment of Policy Leaders Program for the Department of Canadian Heritage and worked at the Copyright Policy Branch. She also previously practised law at a large Toronto law firm. She is a Supreme Court of Canada–cited authority and is regularly called on by foreign governments and the federal and provincial Canadian governments for advice. In 2010, she testified before Parliament’s legislative committee on Canada’s ongoing copyright reform initiatives.

Professional headshot of Nestor Milaj

Nestor Maslej

Research Manager, Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University | Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)

Nestor Maslej is a research manager at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). In this position, he manages the AI Index and Global AI Vibrancy Tool. In developing tools that track the advancement of AI, Nestor hopes to make the AI space more accessible to policymakers, business leaders and the lay public.

Nestor’s work on AI, namely the AI Index, has been cited in newspapers across the globe including: The New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, Al Jazeera, Fortune, Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle, Politico, The Register, Der Spiegel, The Verge, IEEE Spectrum, VentureBeat, and more. Nestor’s publications have likewise informed AI policymaking worldwide, having been referenced by policymakers in countries such as the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, as well as Korea.

Nestor also speaks frequently about trends in AI, having briefed high-level US policymakers, testified in front of both the Canadian and Italian parliaments, and presented to CEOs from a plethora of industries. Nestor is also a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) where he regularly writes opinion pieces on developments in AI.