Jury announced for Smart Cities Challenge

The 12 jury members, including one engineer, and the Chair of the jury who will advise on the selection of finalists and winners of the Smart Cities Challenge have been named.

The group will be led by by chairperson Mark Romoff, the president and CEO of the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, and the former founding president and CEO of the Ontario Centre of Excellence.

The jury members, are:

• Brent Bellamy: an architect and creative director at Number TEN Architectural Group in Winnipeg.
• Leanne Bellegarde: from Treaty 4 territory and a member of the Peepeekisis First Nation, she is currently the director of diversity and inclusion at Nutrien (formerly PotashCorp),
  Saskatoon.
• Matthew Claudel: a designer, researcher and writer focused on the opportunities and challenges of urban innovation, and co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s DesignX program where he serves as the Head of Civic Innovation, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Andrea Feunekes: co-founder and CEO of Remsoft, a Fredericton-based software company that provides strategic and operational planning services to businesses.
• Carol Anne Hilton: a First Nations business leader focused on the building and development of local Indigenous economies. She is the founder and CEO of The Indigenomics Institute and the CEO of Transformation International, Victoria, B.C.
• Lisa Holmes: the former Mayor of Morinville, Alberta, has served as president of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association, and was a member of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities National Board of Directors. She is presently the vice-president of corporate development at Northlands, a non-profit organization in Edmonton.
• Maxime Johnson: a freelance journalist who specializes in new technology observation and analysis. He writes a column for L’actualité magazine and the Métro newspaper, Montreal.
• Kaviq Kaluraq: an instructor at the Nunavut Arctic College’s Teacher Education Program and a graduate student in the Master of Educational Studies Program at Trent University.
• Kourosh Rad: an urban planner with an interest in public spaces, technology and real estate. He is currently the vice-president of research and development at Compass Commercial Realty in Halifax.
• Stéphane Roche: an engineer and geographer who teaches geospatial sciences at Laval University in Québec City. He is the vice-dean for research at the University’s Faculty of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics.
• Gabe Sawhney: a designer, creative technologist and innovation strategist..
• Maayan Ziv: an activist, a photographer and an entrepreneur. Living with Muscular Dystrophy, Ziv is an advocate for creating a more accessible world. In 2015 she founded AccessNow, a mobile app that maps the accessibility of places worldwide. She also sits on the boards of the Toronto Arts Council and the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto.

Over the next few weeks, the Smart Cities Challenge jury will review applications that have been submitted to the competition from communities across Canada. They will assess the applications and recommend 20 finalists to the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities.

These finalists will be announced in the coming weeks, and the winners will be announced in spring 2019.