Sharpening the Leading Edge

In 1934, Toronto celebrated the centennial of its incorporation as a city, but it was a downbeat time for buoyant moods. Like many major cities around the world, it was struggling under the crushing weight of the Great Depression. Canadian unemployment had ballooned to as high as 30%, and enthusiasm for investing in new ventures seemed to have cooled in many sectors.¹ In the face of such uncertain economic times, even more boldness and vision were required of entrepreneurs, but for those hardy souls willing to press forward with grit and determination, the opportunity to establish the roots of truly great enterprises lay within reach.

It was during this year that Toronto native Roy Thomson purchased his first newspaper, the Timmins Daily Press, launching what would ultimately become one of the world’s leading news and information organizations: Thomson Reuters.

Flip the calendar ahead 83 years, and Toronto is a crown jewel of North American commerce, cosmopolitanism and innovation. Among technology industry watchers, it has become known as the epicenter of “Maple Valley,” a moniker signifying its important role as the birthplace of neural networks, the foundational algorithms that make artificial intelligence possible.

In the same time span, Roy Thomson’s fledgling media company has grown by leaps and bounds to where it now reaches around the globe with 2,500 journalists and thousands of employees in nearly 200 locations. The name “Thomson Reuters” is synonymous with trusted, timely information served to a host of professional industries. But the name also denotes a forward-looking enterprise willing to invest significant time and resources into the future of business.

This was perhaps most dramatically represented in late 2017, when the company announced a $100 million commitment to a long-term location for the Toronto Technology Centre (TTC), which is poised to become home to up to 1,500 Thomson Reuters employees.

Opened in October 2016, the TTC became the company’s sixth major hub of software developers and was inaugurated with a special mission to focus on cloud computing, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. It draws talent from the greater Toronto area, known for its innovation and technology corridor stretching to Waterloo, Ontario (where a Thomson Reuters Labs™ innovation facility is housed at the Communitech campus). The goals of the Centre are simple: Use cutting-edge technology to create faster, more secure and more intuitive products for Thomson Reuters customers, and to improve upon existing solutions.

One year into operations, the TTC is home to an employee base of over 200 highly skilled professionals, approximately half of whom have postgraduate degrees, and 18 with PhDs. Additionally, in keeping with Thomson Reuters commitment to diversity and inclusion, we have an industry-leading percentage of female technologists, as roughly 30% of the TTC staff is female. The employee base is well-seasoned and proficient, with an average career tenure of 11 years; managers on average have 20 years of technological experience.

As part of the rapid ramp-up of talent in 2017, we were pleased to introduce Shawn Malhotra as the Vice President of the TTC; he joined us after an impressive career at Intel in Canada. Malhotra has been instrumental in helping Thomson Reuters secure some of the best and brightest talent in the Toronto area. In tandem with Malhotra’s efforts, Dr. Khalid Al-Kofahi, Vice President, Research & Development, Head of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing, has also been growing the talent pool at his centre, which doubled in size during the first part of the year. The TTC location is also home to a text metadata services team of experts in the platform space, as well as other strategically placed teams focused on technologies such as machine learning, big data and cloud computing.

These investments in human capital to tackle the challenges of deep data analysis and cognitive computing are well-timed, especially when considering the acceleration of new technologies and big data. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the year 2020 will bring with it worldwide big data revenues of more than US$150 billion. During this same year, the IDC anticipates that global data usage will reach 44 zettabytes.

The Toronto teams not only have their eyes on the future; they also have produced several noteworthy wins on behalf of Thomson Reuters customers by delivering significant enhancements to existing products. Thanks to their work in 2017, they were able to deliver a sizable reduction in computing resources required for Thomson Reuters Eikon®, allowing customers to access information faster from a wider variety of machines; and they were able to leverage artificial intelligence to automate data input and increase the efficiency and quality of our World-Check® product.

As 2017 drew to a close, the TTC enjoyed an auspicious freshman year as part of a long-term vision of Canadian-based innovation for Thomson Reuters global family of customers. And its reach is growing: Members of the TTC have joined leading-edge organizations such as the Vector Institute, which gathers leaders from the private sector and academia to further the development of artificial intelligence; and the Blockchain Research Institute, which is committed to expanding the progress of blockchain technologies.