Wednesday, March 6th

But as you can see in this update, March has so much going for it… Even with Daylight Savings this coming Sunday, March 10th, which is also the 96th Academy Awards. Here’s a list of how Canada is showing up at the Oscars this year:

• Celine Song is the playwright and director of “Past Lives” (Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay)

• Ontario’s Ryan Gosling for his role as Ken in “Barbie” (Performance By An Actor In A Supporting Role)

• Recently deceased, musician Robbie Robertson, for his work on “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Original Score)

• Nova Scotia filmmaker Ben Proudfootor co-directed the “The Last Repair Shop” (Best Short Documentary)

• Toronto filmmaker and director Nisha Pahuja for The National Film Board of Canada film “To Kill a Tiger” (Best Documentary Feature)

• Quebec Director Vincent René-Lortie for his short film “Invincible” (Best Dramatic Short) 

Happy International Women’s Day (Friday, March 8), et Joyeux Mois de la Francophonie (en Mars).

xoxo The Digital Moose Lounge

Event details and links are below, along with other news

for the Bay Area Canadian community. 

* Digital Moose Lounge Events are listed in RED *

2024 MOOSE DATES TO SAVE

AI & Climate Change: A View From Quebec

Monday, March 25

6:00 PM to 8:30 PM

Fragomen Law Firm (San Jose)

APPETIZERS & REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED

Join Quebec Trade Office in Silicon Valley and The Digital Moose Lounge for a lively panel discussion and networking event to discuss current trends in AI and Climate Change.

Since the surprise launch of Open AI’s consumer-facing ChatGPT product one year ago, AI innovation and investment have exploded. Meanwhile, governments and researchers are urgently seeking ways to combat the accelerating challenge of global climate change.

With its focus on “harnessing AI for the benefit of all”, leading thinkers from Mila will engage with Silicon Valley practitioners to delve into the current challenges and opportunities for deploying AI to solve climate change.

In addition to a robust and timely discussion, this event will be an opportunity for the local Silicon Valley AI and Canadian / Québécois expat community to gather and network with other experts and colleagues. Finally, the event will shine a spotlight on Quebec’s world leading AI talent, research, and leadership.

Moderator

Samy Bengio, Sr Director, AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple

Bengio is an expert in deep architectures for sequences and other structured objects. He has is a leading researcher in identifying better modeling sequences (i.e. speech, text, etc.) using deep recurrent architectures in AI and machine learning. He was involved in the initial development of Torch , a machine learning library in lua/C++/GPL, including many building blocks for (deep) neural networks, mixture models, adaboost and bagging. This library is a successor of the well-known SVMTorch software for support vector machines. He is now involved in the team that developed TensorFlow, a modern and flexible library for deep architectures.

Panelists

David Rolnick, Assistant Professor & Canada CIFAR AI Chair in Computer Science at McGill University and the Mila–Quebec AI Institute

Rolnick focuses on innovations in machine learning driven by problems in climate change such as biodiversity monitoring, land use classification, climate model emulation, and materials discovery. Rolnick is also the co-founder and Chair of the global non-profit Climate Change AI; Scientific Co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age; and the Canada lead for the US-Canada NSF Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change.

Sergei Issaev, AI Researcher at Vooban

Issaev develops custom AI projects for clients in a variety of industries across all stages of software development. He has expertise working with data in a variety of forms, including image (CV), text (NLP), and time-series (financial). His articles on machine learning and AI have been published leading online publications, including Towards Data Science and Towards AI. Vooban is a leading AI software consultancy in Quebec City.

Lu Zhang, Founder & Managing Partner at Fusion Fund

Zhang is a renowned Silicon Valley-based investor and serial entrepreneur with extensive experience bringing a broad range of technologies to commercialization and has deep domain expertise in AI in healthcare, Enterprise AI/Networks, Edge Computing, and Data Privacy. Prior to starting Fusion Fund, Zhang was a serial entrepreneur and materials science researcher. As a first-generation immigrant originally from Inner Mongolia, at the age of 21, she built a medical device company for Type II Diabetes diagnosis based on her graduate research in Stanford University. Following the acquisition of her startup by a leading public medical device company, Lu began investing in and supporting early-stage entrepreneurs which led her to create Fusion Fund in 2015.

Canadian Women in Cleantech Networking Reception

Thursday, March 7, 2024

4:30 PM to 7 PM

Canadian Consulate (San Francisco)

Please mark your calendar and meet our Women in Cleantech in San Francisco, TOMORROW!

The Women in Cleantech Canadian Technology Accelerator enables 10 of Canada’s most promising women-led start-ups to discover and connect with the dynamic cleantech ecosystems located in New York and San Francisco. This 2-year program, dedicated to supporting a diverse group of women as they scale their clean technology companies, will culminate in a San Francisco in March 2024!

Hosted by the Canadian Consulate of San Francsico

Colloquium: Come from Away: Newfoundland & Labrador’s Food Security Dilemma

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

12:30 PM to 2 PM

223 Philosophy Hall, UC Berkeley

Agricultural economist Dr. Catherine Keske (UC Merced) will discuss her research on creating a secure, sustainable, and just food system in the boreal ecosystems of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Artmosphère: Francophone Arts Festival

Fri Mar 15 to Sun Mar 17, 2024

Various Bay Area locations

March est le mois de la Francophonie!

Artmosphère in San Francisco Bay is a multi-site festival celebrating Francophone cultures through visual art, music, theater, dance, and cinema, in collaboration with consulates, educational institutions, and cultural organizations. It aims to showcase Francophone diversity, entertain, educate, and foster connections, emphasizing art’s role in unity, dialogue, and understanding. The festival highlights Francophone talents, promoting exchange and showcasing art as a bridge across cultural differences, embodying the spirit of unity in diversity.

Atmosphère is organized by PIAFF, a Bay Area non-profit organization that has been promoting Francophone arts internationally for over a decade.

Events in collaboration with Alliance Française de San Francisco, Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley, Silicon Valley International School.

TechStars

Thursday, March 21, 2024
5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Ripple HQ (San Francisco)

The Digital Moose Lounge is happy to be a partner of this event. Join SVB, Techstars and Ripple for this upcoming panel discussion and reception on “Going Global in the Innovation Economy” presenting examples of US companies operating in the dynamic realm of nearshoring, focusing specifically on the opportunities in Canada & Latin America.

Michael Ondaatje – Writer/Poet

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

7 PM

Dominican University of California (San Rafael)

From Book Passage Website:

From one of the most influential writers of his generation, a gorgeously surprising poetry collection about memory, history, and the act of looking back.

Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.

Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Molière’s chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to the California coast and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges memory with the present, in the way memory as the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence everything that surrounds him.

@love.radha and @dybrkr

Canadian entrepreneur Radha Agrawal, is bringing her “Peace Tour” to Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St. SF, on March 9th at 7 PM

@theC100

Meet Michael Buhr, the new Executive Director of the C100!

@rcaf_arc / @arc_rcaf

Canadian Legion RCAF celebrating 100 years 

@The7Fingers

Established in Montreal, this creative collective is behind Club Fugazi’s, Dear San Francisco. Club Fugazi is a beloved social club among immigrants, the birthplace of a global financial institution, a theatre that holds the record for the “longest-running musical revue on the planet” and its storied history reminds us it will always be an innovator looking toward the future, and a great place to gather, just like the City it calls home.

Keep your antlers to the ground

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