Conference & Meetings World Supplements Canada AI Supplement | Page 12

Canada
Calgary
overlaying its innovation
C
algary sits in the
foothills of the Rocky
Mountains and
is fast becoming one of the
country's hotspots for business
events, building on its Olympic
heritage and infrastructure.
Calgary's energy, agriculture
and banking strong suits have
spawned a strong technology
sector overlay and the city now
claims more tech start-ups than
any other Canadian city.
The nation’s fi rst, purpose-built
convention centre, the Calgary
Telus Convention Center
(CTCC), offers 11,334sqm of
convention space downtown
and is connected to 1,200
hotel rooms in a two-block
convention district.
In April the CTCC attracted
leading experts from Amazon,
Apple and Facebook among
other bright minds for the IEEE
International Conference on
Acoustics, Speech and Signal
Processing (ICASSP).
The conference featured 50
sessions on technology trends,
from AI to Cyber Security.
The Signal Processing
Society has more than 16,000
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CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD
members worldwide. The
Calgary event drew 2,300
attendees for what is now
the world’s largest technical
conference focused on signal
processing and its applications.
The speaker line up included:
• Yann LeCun, director of AI
Research at Facebook.
• Alex Acero, senior director at
Apple in charge of speech
recognition and machine
translation for Siri.
CTCC Clark Grue, who is also
vice-chair of Meetings Mean
Business Canada, told CMW
the ICASSP conference had
made for “a great week”.
“The fact that numbers went
up quite dramatically shows
the effect of bringing business
events to Canada,” he said.
Grue said ICASSP was
“fantastic exposure” both for
the IEEE in the Calgary market
and for local companies.
The conference drew a large
Asian contingent including DiDi,
the Chinese version of Uber.
Grue said Calgary's fast
developing technology
expertise presented “a good
collision with IEEE”.
Grue's team has also won
the Rotary International
Conference for 2025 –
thanks in part to 'academic
champions', whom Grue says
"have the connections, while
we (the bureau and venues)
can do the heavy lifting.”
The city’s innovation and
technology push continues in
June, with a delegation from
Calgary attending London
Tech Week.
The head of Calgary
Economic Development Mary
Moran describes the whole
opportunity with Calgary as
being around the industrial
Internet of Things and creating
a centre of excellence for it.
“If you think about our core
industries — energy, agriculture,
logistics — and the need to
overlay the internet on top of
those to be more productive,
to manage assets, to get to
end-to-end automation, it really
is a huge opportunity,” she said.
Organisers wishing to tap
into that innovative stream
in Calgary should form an
orderly queue, before the rush
becomes a stampede.