GC REAIM Commissioner
Bruce Watson is Chief Advisor (Technology) at Canada’s National Security Centre of Excellence, AI Subject Matter Expert to the Government of Canada, and Co-Director of AI Research at the African Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence.
Bruce was the Founding Director of Computational Thinking for AI at the Centre for AI Research, as well as Full or Visiting Professor at various universities, such as TU Eindhoven, King’s College London, Stellenbosch, and Pretoria. Bruce is a self-described “AI optimist” and his research is at the intersection of explainable AI and national security, with elements of quantum computing and cryptography.
His AI research has found diverse applications in various fields, such as reactive cyber-defense, long COVID-19 diagnosis, fish farming, yeast growth in closed systems, success predictors for women in business, and winemaking – and was recently featured in CNN’s Inside Africa. Bruce’s book “The Correctness-by-Construction Approach to Programming” (with Derrick Kourie) is the leading work on provably correct techniques for life-critical systems.
Globally, almost all data will pass through something Bruce worked on — thanks to his decades of R&D work at Microsoft, Cisco, and ASML. He currently serves as an advisor to several companies in a variety of AI applications.
Bruce’s first PhD is in Algorithm Taxonomies from Eindhoven, after studying Combinatorics & Optimization and Computer Science in Waterloo. He later returned to Eindhoven as Chair of Software Construction. His second PhD is in Compact Graphs from Pretoria.
He is a frequent moderator and participant at various conferences, such as NATO’s flagship CyCon conference as well as the Munich Security Conference. Academically, he has more than 100 publications to his name, and he has supervised more than a dozen PhD students and 45 Master’s students, most of whom graduated Cum Laude.
