What’s on the minds of today’s undergraduate students? You’d be surprised.

Sure, they’re interested in parties and music and girlfriends and boyfriends. But they also think, and talk, about intellectual property laws, nano-photonics and making Canada more competitive in world markets.

I was privileged to attend the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference (CUTC) in Toronto recently, as a seminar speaker and a mentor. I came away buzzing with enthusiasm.

The event was a sellout – 525 students from as far away as Vancouver turned up for three days of seminars, industry tours, and all-night interactive gaming.

A lot of them were partially subsidized by forward-looking universities such as Queens and Waterloo, but some, like the five from TechBC in Surrey, had to raise funds to pay for their trip.

It was well worth it. They heard from top experts including V. Michael Bove, Jr., of MIT’s famous media lab. He spoke on “Development of Technology from Unlikely Sources” and showed the students how we sometimes end up with technological results in ways we couldn’t imagine when we started.

They got to see the shape-shifting “rescue robots” that were used at the World Trade Center site to look for survivors in places where humans couldn’t go.

Another big hit was Bill Buxton, chief scientist of Alias Wavefront, who had nasty things to say about our lack of progress in the interface between humans and computers. He pointed out that a Rip Van Winkle Macintosh computer user, emerging from a 17-year sleep in 2002, would have no trouble operating a “modern” PC.

I got a terrific and enthusiastic turnout for my seminar on cyberterrorism, which tells me this topic is certainly on the minds of our students.

The best speakers for this audience were relatively young people who can explain how they accomplished something important.

Don Campbell, VP of information delivery products at Cognos, told a great story of inventing what eventually became Cognos Visualizer. This is a product that allows you to see patterns in masses of data.

He demonstrated it by putting up a slide of numbers with a three-second challenge . . . find the exceptional value. Of course, nobody could, until he displayed the data graphically.

This idea makes a lot of sense, but, according to Campbell, when he pitched the product, he was shown the door by Cognos president and CEO Ron Zambonini.

Campbell didn’t give up. He went to some of the bigger Cognos customers to show his prototype. “We’d buy that,” they said, and, when he took that information to Zambonini, it was a different story. The product went on to make Campbell a star, and he tried to impart some of that same spirit to the student audience.

Another eclectic character was Ken Nickerson, former general manager of the Microsoft MSN Network in Canada and now co-founder of wireless technology startup ibinary.com.

If you go to its website, which won’t take you very long, you’ll appreciate his sense of humour. He told a funny story about recommending to a senior person at Microsoft that they should buy the company that created Hotmail.

That very senior person just didn’t see the value of buying a service that gave away free e-mail accounts. Ken did see the potential, and, while that very, very senior somebody dithered on this, the price of the Hotmail share swap went from $20M to $400M.

Nickerson was also a hit because he brought toys, notably a robot constructed from the Lego Mindstorms kit.

Students crowded around at the end of this speech to watch it climb a fence, look around at the top, then go back down again. What’s remarkable about this robot is that it was built by an elementary school student.

There are “FIRST” groups in the U.S. and Canada that sponsor big robotics competitions for junior high and high school kids. But Nickerson feels there’s a lot of untapped creativity in even younger children, so he’s been sponsoring robotics contests for elementary school kids.

The kicker is that he’s awarding $10,000 scholarships to the winner in each school. That’s a pretty impressive prize to win when you’re seven or eight years old!

Concern for the well-being of Canada, and of its next generation, permeated the conference. By and large, these young people said they want to make a good living, and they want to do it in Canada.

In the think-tank sessions held on the last day, we had stimulating discussions about how this country can improve its performance in collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The organizers have also decided to go beyond just holding an annual conference. They’ve established the CUTC Foundation with a goal of improving science and technology education for Canada’s youth on a year-round basis.

CUTC co-founder Jonathan Kwan typifies the spirit of this group. A graduate of the Shad Valley Calgary program, then of the University of Waterloo’s co-op program, he’s gone on to work at Deloitte Consulting in Toronto. But he keeps his links with CUTC, and says the foundation will be the next step in giving back some of the benefits he’s had from a great Canadian technology education.

And, yes, they did talk about nano-photonics, which according to Professor Ted Sargent of the University of Toronto is “the engineering of the very small,” especially as it applies to fibre-optic communications.

He says Canadian researchers are leading the way in nanophotonics by making designer molecules that will have amazing new properties – and I got the distinct feeling that some of the people who will finish this job were sitting in the audience at the conference.

Web Watch:

www.cognos.com
www.ibinary.com
www.usfirst.org www.canadafirst.org