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Today marks the 5-year anniversary of the conclusion of my 2 year on-site contract for NRC which ran from November 3rd, 2008 to November 3rd, 2010. As I believe all the NDAs on the project we worked on have expired, I’ll be looking back at what that project was all about, what its challenges were, and (in a separate follow-on post) how we solved them.

National Research Council of Canada, Institute for Information Technology (NRC-IIT) in Fredericton, NB (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With over 20 research facilities in nearly as many different cities across the country, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) is our nation’s largest government-sponsored, citizen-operated science & technological research organization.

How I got there

Stephen MacKay (then Research Group Leader at NRC-IIT Fredericton) would become the first representative of NRC I would meet in-person during my early career. It was my final summer of freedom, towards the end of my “startup run” after Grad School in Japan, where I had spent a year in between the conclusion of my Sony internship (2007-10-12) up to my eventual hiring at NRC (2008-11-03). For that year, I had been a self-starter entrepreneur living on the thinnest of shoestring budgets. I had been trying my best to setup a business around online video that I was convinced would change the way we monetize content and behavior online more fairly in favor of content creators, and attempting to evangelize a model where site loyalty would be rewarded properly (as I still think it should be, although making a go of it I’ll admit requires not just initial funding but you must guarantee a certain scale which is the real trick, if that original revenue-share idea is to be sustainable). Think about that “not yet” failed business/technology as Blockchain but the rewards of a “BitCoin” don’t go out for solving a cryptographic hashing algorithm, rather for duration of video viewing and in particular ecosystem ad/partner economic interaction. Apologize for the digression, but it’s important to set the tone though, as I had just given it my all and built a product still in search of an audience (hah even to this day).

In any case, I met Stephen MacKay at the 2008 CNSR Conference which by chance took place in Halifax, NS allowing me to attend on my limited “wannabe entrepreneur” budget. I had already spent the last of my “petty cash” booking a June flight to Toronto, to speak at MobileMonday Toronto, an effort which I had hoped would expose me to some potential wealthy investors in the big city. Stephen was interested in my work and saw my potential, we exchanged cards and he said to look him up and that there might be some opportunities to work with NRC coming up in the near future. I continued my long 18-20 hour days working on “the dream” throughout that summer until my 25th birthday in October, by which time I had promised my parents and most importantly myself that I would have either secured funding, or, bitten the bullet and started looking for a full-time job.

So it was with great resignation that I finally desperately reached out to Stephen to follow-up on our meeting at CNSR to see what opportunities he mentioned might be available. I had at first just attempted to gain an audience to pitch the business idea and early prototype to NRC as a potential for their “new business incubation lab”. Stephen however urged me to look into some of the recent full and part-time contract postings and working with NRC that way, as it was unlikely that they could take on any funding relationship with such an early stage startup (to this day I don’t think they take enough risks on startups but prefer helping fairly established incumbents build out their products or research new ones, but that’s another story).  I found the Application Development position profile to be quite interesting and relevant to the work I had been doing. They wanted someone who knew multimedia/video-conferencing (had been in deep research on online & mobile video for over 2 years), who knew SOA and how to integrate web services (had been integrating YouTube, GoogleSearch, Flickr, PayPal and several other key APIs to my startup), and who could program in Java (focused on Java for 4 years in University and 1-2 years of practical on-the-job work afterwards).

In fact, when I really think back though it was actually one of my would-be interviewers Bruce Spencer, my eventual supervisor, whom was the first person at NRC that I corresponded with. I had briefly contacted him in 2006 while working on my thesis at the International University of Japan. That work focused on Semantic Web technologies and how they might benefit the growing MobileTV (now more commonly known as OTT) market. Bruce was a leading academic in Atlantic Canada for accomplishing intelligent content recommendations in the RACOFI project that lead to the InDiscover music recommendation service which got sold to Bell Labs in 2007. This was what led me to email him via my 4th year “CS Advanced Topics – Semantic Web” teacher at Acadia University (Dr. Andre Trudel) who was my first go-to for Semantic Web questions, as I worked through my thesis in Japan. So quite a long-winded explanation, but that’s how I wound up at NRC for 2 years of my life. The rest will tell the story of what happened while I was there.

NRC’s Goal

According to their own website, their purpose is to be:

“the Government of Canada’s premier research and technology organization (RTO).”

They intend to accomplish this by:

“Working with clients and partners, to provide innovation support, strategic research, scientific and technical services to develop and deploy solutions to meet Canada’s current and future industrial and societal needs”

In many ways in fact NRC really acts as the public-facing version of the Military-focused government research department known as the Defence Research and Development Canada which of course researches and develops technologies and solutions for our navy, military and airforce in cooperation with established military-industrial provider companies (Aerospace, Transport, Armour, Ballistics/Weapons, Threat Detection, etc).

Within that operating model there are a few other similar departments (check out the full list of Canadian government departments) but based on my understanding the different the two which stand out differ as follows:

• Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) – focuses on investments in domestic companies and research projects at a large-scale, particularly those at late-stages to assist with implementation and real-world roll-outs, to realize immediate benefits to Canadians (i.e. jobs-based investments, or practical short-term ROI projects needing a help to finalize projects already underway)
• International Development Research Centre (IDRC) – focuses on investing in projects beyond our borders with large-scale benefit potentials, particularly those within developing countries
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) – focuses on working with academics and students at at post-secondary education institutions (Universities, Colleges, etc) and helping find companies to encourage joint-investment from into academic research projects with potential to deliver innovations to Canadians.

See slides 22-29 for a nice summary of the NRC’s role in HSVO:
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