Society

As the CEO of Partnership on AI, Rebecca Finlay, BA’88, works with a diverse array of organizations and businesses – everyone from OpenAI to UNICEF to the BBC – to encourage the development of artificial intelligence in a way that is transparent and focused on the public good.

As “51st state” rhetoric drove Canadian patriotism to a fever pitch this year, Brian Naish, BSc’93, unexpectedly found himself playing a pivotal role at an historic moment – as the country’s biggest flag maker.

When Peter Oliver, BCom’71, co-founded Oliver & Bonacini Hospitality, he helped elevate Toronto’s dining scene. Now his son Andrew Oliver, BCom’06, is taking O&B to new heights (literally and figuratively), but first he had to contend with a disastrous pandemic.

Yalmaz Siddiqui, BCom’92, the vice-president of environmental sustainability for the Walt Disney Company, reflects on almost 30 years of promoting sustainability in senior corporate roles, and on facing skepticism from business colleagues (in the early going) and environmental activists (more recently).

The rise of space tourism, an increase in potentially dangerous space debris, the possibility of asteroid mining – as the technologies associated with space exploration continue to advance, an award-winning book by legal scholar Michael Byers asks if international law is keeping pace.

Yale historian Ned Blackhawk, BA’92, believes that too many accounts of U.S. history pay little attention to the pivotal role that the country’s Native Americans played in that history. His recent book, The Rediscovery of America, winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction, serves as a corrective.