Procedure and House Affairs committee  We have over 3,200 employees in Canada with very strong development capabilities in Vancouver. And Microsoft Research in Montreal is doing leading edge research in AI and AI use in languages. We're quite proud of that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely. Based upon our enterprise heritage, we leverage those credentials, that identification that you harness for your day-to-day work within Parliament. Being able to recognize that throughout the voting process, I think, is critically important.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There are a number of cryptographic measures that can be put in place to protect the integrity of the voting materials so they don't get tampered with along the way or after they've been cast.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Do you mean in the context of a virtual Parliament?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Microsoft is a very strong partner-driven organization. We have over 1,200 partners in Canada that help deliver solutions on top of our Teams platform. We do have partners that support virtual voting for communities, so we do believe that it's possible on our platform.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We commit to storing information in our data centres in Toronto and Quebec City, and those data centres are connected with fibre optic cable that runs within the country. We feel that is the differentiator for our services.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We recognize that the Constitution upholds the ability to work in both official languages. We also recognize that the Translation Bureau is a unique Canadian institution that was formed to do translation in both official languages and has extended that to support 60-plus indigeno

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Within the team's platform you have the capability also to raise your hand to get the attention of the Speaker. Much like the House of Commons has provided guidance around how to best leverage video conferencing, we also recommend that the chat stream form part of that interactio

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Well, we see access to connectivity as being a challenge across Canada, and it's one of the things that's critically important for us as a company. We have our Airband project that is looking to reach out and provide connectivity options where there is no access. We're quite prou

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I am pleased to be here today. My name is John Weigelt. I'm the national technology officer for Microsoft in Canada. I've had the privilege of working with the federal government for my over 30-year career in trustworthy computing, starting in uniform

Information & Ethics committee  One area is the use of artificial intelligence in medical diagnosis. We look at three criteria: Can it approve or deny consequential services? Is there infringement on human rights or human dignity? Are there health and safety issues at hand? In one case, researchers were train

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. I think your point is well made around the unintended creep of bias into AI decision-making solutions, so we do need to guard against that. It's one of those engineering principles that we're working hard on to come out with guidance and direction to our teams. There

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. Clearly, we need to do more about advising and alerting the community about all the great work that's under way. We've published guidance around bots and how to make sure that bots are behaving properly, because we've had our own negative experience around a foul-mout

Information & Ethics committee  I think that as you look at our longevity since the seventies, we've seen ebbs and flows. We used to have a phone. We have a great browser, but it has undergone a number of revisions. The vision of having a PC on every desktop has now changed to a phone in every pocket. We see th