Helen Kontozopoulos may not be an artificial intelligence researcher, but she knows more than most about the technology – not to mention what it takes to put it to practical use. 

That’s among the reasons the co-director of the University of Toronto’s ������Ƶ of Computer Science Innovation Lab (DCSIL) was recently tapped to represent Canada on an AI mission to the United Kingdom organized by the U.K. Science and Innovation Network. 

The three-day mission, with stops in London, Oxford and Cambridge, explored opportunities for international collaboration in AI-related research and business initiatives – with the latter falling directly within Kontozopoulos’s wheelhouse.

“Just because you’re making great technology doesn’t mean someone is going to buy it,” Kontozopoulos says, citing Google Glass as a classic example of an impressive technological hammer in desperate search of a nail.

“We need to be solving real problems for real customers and users.”

Kontozopoulos's rare mix of technological know-how and real-world experience is woven into the very fabric of DCSIL, which she co-founded in 2015 with Adjunct Professor Mario Grech and Associate Professor, Teaching Stream Paul Gries, both in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science. The accelerator, one of several entrepreneurship hubs on campus, is housed in an open-concept workspace on the second floor of U of T’s Gerstein Science Information Centre and offers software-focused entrepreneurs and their startups a road to the commercial realm.

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