Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to speak about IBM and the Canadian response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
My name is Eric Johnson, and I am speaking to you today from Vancouver, British Columbia. I am a partner with IBM Canada, supporting public sector clients for over 30 years. For the last 10 of those years, I have focused primarily on public health and disease surveillance. I am also part of the IBM global COVID-19 task force.
IBM is a global leader in business transformation, serving clients in more than 170 countries around the world. Here in Canada, we are headquartered in Markham, Ontario. Our history of a hundred-plus years in Canada and our unique approach to collaboration provide small and large businesses, start-ups and developers with the business strategies and computing tools they need to innovate and keep the Canadian economy competitive. We are guided by principles of trust and transparency in technology to create a more inclusive society.
During the pandemic, our priority has been, and will continue to be, protecting the health and safety of IBM employees and our clients. At present, we have about 90% of our global workforce working from home, without any interruption in our ability to support clients worldwide. Now we are thinking and planning carefully for a phased return to the workplace, taking into account local health and government directives and conditions, employee roles, the availability of testing and tracing, employee sentiment and more. We have developed a data-driven, evidence-based global return-to-workplace guidance, which lays out a set of principles being used to serve IBM and our clients.
Since the start of the pandemic, we've been working closely with governments around the world to find all available options to put our technology and expertise to work to help organizations be resilient and adapt to the consequences of the pandemic, and to accelerate the process of discovery and enable the scientific and medical community to develop treatments and ultimately a cure.
In addition to the many efforts that IBM and IBMers are leading across the country to support our communities, today I want to stress three key areas in which we're exploring the use of our technology and our expertise to drive meaningful progress in this global fight.
The first is putting technology in the hands of first responders. Annually, IBM puts out a call to developers around the world to build solutions that address some of the most pressing issues of our time. This year, we encouraged developers around the world to put forth solutions that would fight against COVID-19 and climate change. This is perhaps the largest software developer effort in history, and we have dozens of IBM technical experts donating open source code and access to Watson on the IBM cloud.
The second is solutions focused on business resiliency and trusted data. Our cloud-based resiliency and business continuity solutions have supported businesses to implement digital capabilities by providing mobility tools and infrastructure that resulted in seamless transitions of our clients' workforce towards working from home.
IBM and the Weather Company created a new and precise incident map, driving unprecedented hyperlocal understanding of the outbreak with health data from trusted sources, and it's updated every 15 minutes on the IBM cloud.
IBM Watson Assistant for citizens was created for local and regional governments and health agencies, and it brings together years of investments in AI and speech recognition to create chatbots that can help guide citizens in a dynamic situation and free up important resources. This tool is currently being used by a number of organizations around the world, including the City of Markham in Ontario.
The IBM solution for disease surveillance is implemented in seven Canadian provinces and one territory. It provides a unified data model managing immunization data, vaccine inventory data and, for some provinces, outbreak management. We're currently focused on the provincial health requirements, with the goal to help integrate the multiple data sources coming from contact tracing and lab results into the existing provincial public health databases so that the data may be used by our clients as a single source of truth for analysis, reporting and predictive modelling. In addition, we are already helping provinces prepare for the upcoming mass immunization events that will need to take place once a vaccine is developed.
Finally, we're leading the way to a cure with supercomputers. In collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Energy, IBM helped launch the COVID-19 high-performance computing consortium. These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modelling. These experiments would take years to complete if worked by traditional computing platforms. Since the consortium was announced, on March 22, we have received 55 research proposals from the U.S., Germany, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Spain and Croatia.
Those are just a few of the initiatives we have launched. IBM is also supporting Canada’s faculty, students and families across academia by offering tools and resources to meet this new reality in real time. IBM has extended its online education resources to all for free, including IBM Skills, Open P-TECH, and the IBM AI Education series for teachers.
Now the focus is towards rebuilding and relaunching. There is emphasis on cybersecurity, expanded emergency operations management, social programs and technology that will support the focus on the mental well-being of Canadians.
There is no question that this pandemic is a powerful force of disruption and an unprecedented tragedy, but it is also a critical turning point. It’s an opportunity to see what we’re all capable of and how we emerge stronger.
Thank you.