The Honourable Bruce Ralston, BC’s Minister of Jobs, Trade and Technology, paid a visit to the Radical I/O office this week to learn more about their products and services, including their new smart city software platform SimpliCity(TM), and discuss their active role in BC’s Digital Technology Supercluster initiative. 

The team at Radical I/O, led by President Dr. Christin Wiedemann, were pleased to welcome Minister Ralston to their downtown Vancouver office. 

Co-Founder and COO Briana Sim, who is Regional Co-Chair of Women in Communications & Technology, first shared Radical I/O’s vision and journey, highlighting their core values of diversity and belonging, and then gave an overview of the company’s holistic approach to building innovative technology solutions. 

The team showed Minister Ralston several of Radical I/O’s products and services, including their new CityAssistant service (built on SimpliCity). CityAssistant is available via Alexa, Google Home, or as a chatbot embedded within a city’s website, to help citizens find answers to common questions about city services, and to report issues. The team also presented their work on City of Richmond’s personalized citizen portal, MyRichmond. 

Co-Founder and CTO Ian Sim demonstrated their new application for protecting personal privacy through de-identification of images and video using machine learning, and spoke about Radical I/O’s immersive virtual reality and 360° video-ready media app, BeThere360. BeThere360 is currently being piloted by BCIT to support student achievement through innovative teaching and learning approaches.

Wiedemann, Ian Sim, and Minister Ralston discussed the positive impacts for cities and their communities that are achievable through smart technologies, data, and the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide valuable information and improve services. They also discussed the need for ongoing government and industry collaboration and participation in AI, open data, security, and privacy discussions. “As members of the AI Committee of the Standards Council of Canada and of The Open City Network, we have a real opportunity to help shape the future of technology use in government,” said Wiedemann. 

“We are honoured to have Minister Ralston here to show him what we’re doing in the growing smart city software space,” said Briana Sim. “BC has always been ahead of the curve in terms of sustainability and quality of life. It is exciting to think of all we can achieve together using data and technology for good.”

Minister Ralston commended Radical I/O on their achievements: "Your company demonstrates the passion and purpose that drives tech forward in the province. You promote great values, and Radical I/O is doing excellent work developing innovative technology solutions that have a positive impact on BC.” 

‍Radical I/O will be launching their smart city platform, SimpliCity(TM), and demonstrating its feature to support conversational government, CityAssistant, at the MISA BC 2019 Fall Conference, September 9-12, in Whistler, BC.

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