The Ontario Centres of Excellence is turning Toronto into tech central. Microsoft is releasing its latest Windows update on Monday. And Facebook kicks off its ninth F8 developer conference on Tuesday.
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On Monday April 30 and Tuesday May 1, the Ontario Centres of Excellence will be hosting its annual Discovery conference, a gathering of Canadian tech’s best and brightest, including experts and executives from the Vector Institute, University of Waterloo, MaRS Discovery District, Ericsson North America, and Thomson Reuters. Featured speakers include former U.S. CTO Megan Smith; Hanson Robotics founder, CEO, and chief designer David Hanson; and Hanson’s crowning achievement, Sophia the Robot, the first non-human citizen of Saudi Arabia.
Next, trending on Reddit: Microsoft is releasing its next Windows 10 update for manual download today. Formerly scheduled for April 10 and referred to as the “Spring Creators Update,” the newly-renamed April 2018 update includes a timeline feature that lets users access documents based on when they were using them; Focus Assist, which lets users turn off social media or email notifications; improved dictation capabilities; and a variety of Chrome-like features for Microsoft’s Edge internet browser, including mutable tabs, full-screen reading, grammar tools, and automatically filled web forms.
Finally, Tuesday marks day one of Facebook’s ninth F8 developer conference, the social media giant’s sort-of annual gathering of developers and business partners to discuss the company’s future and showcase some of its moonshot technology. Previous conferences have been used to reveal Messenger chatbots; a 360-degree video camera Facebook had no interest in selling; and a solar-powered, internet-beaming plane. A glance at this year’s schedule indicates a focus on virtual and augmented reality, along with a variety of panels on marketing, content creation, and – surprise surprise – transparency.
