Photo: Daniel Ehrenworth
If you weren’t paying close attention, you might think 2019 was a year of subtraction. Doug Ford continued his cuts to public service, hollowing out many of the things that set Toronto apart. But while Ford was doing his best Mike Harris impersonation, a crazy thing happened: the city rallied in spite of him. Take Aliénor Rougeot, the 20-year-old U of T student who was so incensed by Ford’s stance on the environment that she and some friends organized a protest that drew thousands to the streets. Other magical things occurred, too: an obscure racquet-wielding Thornhiller defeated Serena Williams, twice; Scarborough’s Lilly Singh went from YouTube to late-late night; Schitt’s Creek blew up (in a good way); Margaret Atwood somehow topped her 2018, which somehow topped her 2017; and Sidewalk Labs finally got the go-ahead, for the moment anyway, on its funky-futuristic lakeside neighbourhood, causing euphoria in some corners and migraines in others (it’s probably a good thing that pot is legal). Of course, most magically of all, the Raptors, led by Masai Ujiri, came along and stirred up emotions we almost forgot we had, taking every tot, teen, mom, dad and grandparent on a spellbinding journey to the heart of the playoffs and emerging with the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen: the Larry O’B, as it shall forever be known. Ford tried to cut us down. Ujiri lifted us up. For that reason, he’s our person of the year.
GEOFFREY HINTON
Earlier this year, HSBC opened an AI lab in Toronto, joining companies like Uber, LG and Google. Credit Geoffrey Hinton, whose mere presence has transformed Toronto into a magnet for the AI techies who deify him. In March, along with two other AI pioneers, he was presented with the $1-million Turing Award (a.k.a. the Nobel Prize for computing). Inspired by Hinton’s research, Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz donated $100 million to U of T to create a new facility focused on AI research. Friends in high places: His former students include Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Facebook; Zoubin Ghahramani, chief scientist at Uber; and Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI.