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IT at the Metropolis Winter Festival

The City of Edmonton’s Information Technology Branch was invited to host a full weekend of programming at Edmonton’s inaugural Metropolis winter festival. Staged in Churchill Square and the surrounding streets, the festival included four free-standing structural forms lit with LED lighting that transformed Sir Winston Churchill Square into a futuristic wintertime city.  Each free-standing structure, or pavilion, hosted a variety of activities including winter food, music, live entertainment and interactive exhibits and presentations.

From January 13-15, 2012 in the Community Centre Pavilion, the Information Technology Branch showcased the increasingly important role that technology plays in Edmonton and other great Northern Cities.

Dynamic presentations included:

• "Building a Nation - From Railroads to Cyber Infrastructure," by Robin Winsor from Cybera.
• "Nanotechnology and the Community," by Nils Peterson and Kevin E. Jones from the National Institute of Nanotechnology.
• "Systems Modeling of Global Water Resources to 2100," by Evan Davies from the University of Alberta.
• "Edmonton Pipelines: Narrating Digital Urbanism," by Russell Cobb, Mo Engel, Danie Laforest and Heather Zwicker from the University of Alberta Pipelines Initiative.  
• "The IBM Smarter Cities Challenge," by David Robitaille from IBM Canada.    
• "Open Government," by Ashley Casovan from the City of Edmonton.
• "Architecting Open Government," by Dwayne Budzak from the City of Edmonton.

A variety of interactive booths and displays were also available throughout the weekend, including a buckyballs play area for children courtesy of NanoAlberta.

For further details on the Metropolis festival, please visit http://www.metropolisedmonton.ca.

For more information:

Ashley Casovan