Globe & Mail Feature
By STEVE BREARTON
Few artistic pursuits are as demanding as making an animated film--a minute-long cartoon requires something like 1,400 drawings. As Nestor Burtnyk (left), a National Research Council research engineer, listened to Disney animators describe the tedious process in 1969, he was struck by an idea: Rather than hand-draw every frame for, say, Mickey Mouse walking across a room, an artist would only have to draw the first and last pictures and the computer could generate the "in between" frames. Five years later, the National Film Board used the "key frame animation" program developed by Burtnyk and tested by his NRC colleague Marcelli Wein to produce the 11-minute short La Faim/Hunger, the first true computer-animated film. By the time Burtnyk and Wein received an Oscar in 1997, in recognition of their pioneering efforts, Mickey Mouse--as well as every other cartoon character--had leapt into the digital age. The payoff Global revenues for animated films: $70 billion (U.S.)
Canadians: drawers of water and pumpers of oil. At least that was the view 30 years ago, when business orthodoxy upheld the notion that Canada would thrive only by leveraging its natural advantages. At the time, Douglas Wright, a world-renowned engineer and future president of the University of Waterloo, had a different idea: drawers of water and developers of computer and information technologies. "Everyone was agog with megaprojects, but I realized natural resources alone wouldn't sustain our standard of living," recalls Wright, who dedicated his years at the helm of Waterloo to promoting the university's model for technological innovation. "We needed human resources--science and technology--to maintain our prosperity." Today, three decades after the founding of Microsoft, no one needs convincing. Canada's information and communication technologies sector employs more than 560,000 people, and last year contributed $57 billion to Canada's bottom line. And while Canadian institutions like the National Research Council have become synonymous with revolutionary technology, there is always a man or woman standing behind any pioneering innovation. In the following pages, you will meet those individuals. All are Canadians, all are innovators in computers and software, and all have changed the way the world shops, banks, works and communicates.
He made eBay possible
A decade ago, the internet was like a humongous, disorganized reference book--interesting to dip into, but practically impossible to find what you wanted there. In 1998, a computer language co-authored by Vancouver's Tim Bray helped create an index. Called Extensible Markup Language, or XML, it allowed programmers to attach "tags," or universal codes, distinguishing, say, a business name from a phone number.
It was a boon for e-commerce, because it meant that purchase orders or invoices could be universally read and routed to appropriate applications. Bray credits an "attention span of a gnat" for his tangential career: Besides XML, in the past decade and a half, he's helped put the Oxford English Dictionary on-line, co-founded the Waterloo, Ont., content management powerhouse Open Text and developed one of the web's first search engines.
The payoff: As a key language of web servers, XML facilitates the activities of the estimated one billion internet users, whether they're downloading songs or participating in eBay's $45-billion (U.S.) economy
He helps you pay your bills on-line
In 1971, University of Toronto mathematics professor Stephen Cook published an esoteric work titled The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures. Since dubbed Cook's Theorem, it identified a large class of computational search problems that would take even the largest computers millions of years to solve.
Consider how the theory has helped in the development of cryptography, the gatekeeper to billions of dollars of on-line transactions each year: After you input your Visa number when making a web purchase, the retailer's computer encrypts the information by using a complex algorithm. Cook's Theorem suggested that any e-thief would have to spend a lifetime searching for the answer to the equation before he unlocked the code--hence, your card number is safe.
"I didn't anticipate it at the time," says Cook humbly of his discovery's real-world applications, "but it gratifies me." The payoff: Sixteen million Canadians visited e-tailers in the past year; 12 million Canadians bank over the net
They make your car run better
They sweat the small stuff--the really small stuff. The National Research Council's Visual Information Technology (VIT) Group is a world leader in emerging scanning technologies, which measure and, in some cases, reproduce items in microscopic detail. The technology has allowed car companies to engineer motors to the exactness of a micron--10 to 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair. It is also used to inspect the outer skin of space shuttles. When the VIT Group was launched in 1982, it focused on industrial applications for 3-D scanning. "There were a lot of people who recognized the potential," says group leader Jacques Domey. "The question was which applications to select." Since then, the VIT scientists have created pioneering 3-D systems that allow museums to reproduce objects such as sculptures in order to monitor any structural changes that might occur over time. The technology has even made the big screen--the Ottawa-based firm XYZ RGB used it to produce models for sets of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
The payoff: By licensing this and other technologies, the NRC's VIT Group has helped Canadian companies generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue--a figure that's rising fast
He made your laptop possible
In the late 1960s, as the computer industry obsessed over developing ever-larger, ever-faster machines, Winnipeg-born mathematician and businessman Mers Kutt had a revelation: Smaller is better. With that in mind, he founded Toronto-based Micro Computer Machines. In 1973--two years before Bill Gates started Microsoft--Kutt introduced the MCM/70, the world's first personal computer. To modern eyes, the MCM looks like nothing more than a souped-up typewriter: Weighing nine kilograms, it has tape drives to store data, up to eight kilobytes of memory (an average PC today has about 30,000 times as much) and a thin plasma display capable of holding only a few dozen characters.
Price tag: $4,950. "No one else was trying to do as much as we were," says Kutt. "We had the operating system, the language, the memory. It was the whole package." Hundreds were sold, but the MCM/70 was still a financial flop. Once people saw how much you could do with a small chip, however, Kutt's computer opened the door to today's PC.
The payoff: In Canada, second-quarter personal computer sales surpassed the one-million mark this year, while globally more than 50 million PCs were shipped in the first quarter of 2005 alone
He made television Janet Jackson-proof
If you're anxious about what your children will see on TV tonight, don't worry: Tim Collings is watching over them. With the V-chip, which blocks unwanted TV programs, the South Surrey, B.C., engineer developed the technological equivalent of mother's intuition. The idea for the chip--it's embedded in the TV's circuitry--came to Collings when he learned that the killer who gunned down 14 women at the Université de Montréal in 1989 was hooked on violent movies. But, says Collings, "There wasn't anything that existed to make watching television more intelligent." By intercepting the ratings code that broadcasters transmit along with each of their programs, the V-chip jams shows that exceed a viewer's comfort level. The technology that began with a tragedy has most recently been propelled by a farce. In the wake of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl, American politicians pushed the major networks to develop and air public-service announcements promoting use of the V-chip.
The payoff - Number of televisions worldwide that contain the V-chip: 100 million.
He'll make your computer obsolete
"In the '50s, when computers were made with vacuum tubes, there was a limit to how big these beasts could be--they would blow up otherwise," says Université de Montréal computer-science professor Gilles Brassard. "Then along came the transistor." Brassard can speak first-hand about technological paradigm shifts because he has been the author of a couple himself. He and research partner Charles Bennett released a paper in 1984 that detailed how quantum physics could be used to create unbreakable codes: quantum cryptography uses subatomic particles--transmitted as individual pulses of light--as the key to unlocking succeeding messages. Brassard's other area of study, in the field of quantum computing, holds the promise of one day making the microchip obsolete. The process takes advantage of the properties of atomic particles, rather than silicon, to store data. A full-scale prototype of a quantum computer is still years away, but if and when developed, it will increase the speed your PC processes information by a million-fold or more.
The payoff: Estimated global market in e-security, including commercial applications of quantum cryptography: $15 billion (U.S.)
He made it easier for you to surf the Web
James Gosling has been called a "software wizard" and "the world's greatest programmer," plaudits earned for his groundbreaking work in the early '90s. At the time, surfing the web was akin to visiting an art gallery: Because there was no means for computers to interact, you could look at the text or pictures on a web page, but you couldn't touch--no clicking on graphics, no playing video games. Gosling, a native of Calgary, headed a team at Sun Microsystems that developed a programming language that would change the one-dimensional nature of the web. When it was introduced in 1994, Java (the name was reportedly coined in a coffee shop near the team's Palo Alto, Calif., offices) allowed software on any operating system--whether Microsoft Windows, Unix or Macintosh--to communicate by streaming bits of universally translatable information. What followed was nothing short of a revolution--the web is now an interactive, user-friendly environment, where surfers can leave messages, download songs or order books.
The payoff: By allowing other software developers to use the language for free, Sun made Java a global phenomenon. It's embedded in 2.5 billion devices, from desktops to cellphones.
[url=\"http://www.globetechnology.com\"]source: Globe Technology[/url]
Go Canada!
