Vancouver AI Community Meetup: Data for Good!
This month moves from community service to public policy to live art.
Data for Good will bring real nonprofit data challenges into the room.
Taleeb Noormohamed will join us for a candid conversation about Canada’s AI direction.
And Misagh Azimi will perform a live audio-visual work using an AI instrument trained on his own music.
One night. Three very different encounters with AI. One question underneath it all:
Who is this technology actually for?
FEATURED CONVERSATION: TALEEB NOORMOHAMED
Member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville · Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Taleeb Noormohamed sits at an unusually relevant intersection of technology, public policy and community consequence.
Before entering Parliament, he built companies and held senior executive roles with global technology businesses. Today, he represents Vancouver Granville and serves as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, helping shape Canada’s response to one of the fastest-moving technological shifts in generations.
Taleeb joins us for a candid conversation about what responsible AI innovation should mean for Canada, for British Columbia, and for the people who will live with the choices being made now.
DATA FOR GOOD: AI FOR GOOD, FOR REAL
Data for Good connects skilled data volunteers with nonprofits that have valuable information, difficult problems, and rarely enough internal capacity to bring the two together.
Their work is practical: understand the organization, scope the right problem, build something useful, transfer the knowledge, and leave the nonprofit stronger than they found it.
Gordon Hamilton, Fraser Uitdenbosch, Amanda Calvo and Dhavide Aruliah will give us a rapid 15-minute tour through real projects, lessons, failures and opportunities. Then they will put their open questions to the room for a 10-minute working session.
Bring recommendations, collaborators and constructive troublemaking. This is not a panel about how AI might theoretically help somebody someday. These are live problems looking for useful people.
Gordon Hamilton: Chapter Lead, Data for Good · President, DAMA Vancouver
Gordon Hamilton is a data quality evangelist who has spent years building communities where data professionals donate their skills to nonprofits and public-interest organizations.
He leads Data for Good and serves as president of DAMA Vancouver, connecting the technical discipline of data management with the practical realities of organizations doing difficult work on limited budgets.
Gordon keeps returning to the unfashionable question beneath every shiny AI project: Can we trust the data underneath it?
He will frame the session, share what Data for Good has learned, and put the team’s most useful unresolved questions to the room.
Fraser Uitdenbosch: Data and Analytics Leader, National Bank of Canada · Chapter Lead, Data for Good
Fraser Uitdenbosch brings enterprise experience in analytics, data strategy, business transformation and performance to the decidedly less tidy world of community organizations.
As a chapter lead with Data for Good, he helps turn broad ambitions into projects that can actually be scoped, staffed, delivered and sustained.
His work connects two worlds that rarely meet often enough: the discipline of large-scale organizational data and the ingenuity required when the budget is smaller but the stakes are not.
Amanda Calvo: Technology Portfolio Specialist, TransLink · Project Lead, Data for Good
Amanda Calvo is a data and business analyst who works at TransLink and helps lead Data for Good's community of project leaders.
Originally from Brazil, Amanda has built a new professional life in Vancouver while becoming one of the people who makes volunteer data work actually move. She coordinates cross-functional teams, translates organizational needs into clear projects, and helps nonprofits turn analysis into decisions they can use.
Her recent work includes leading a Data for Good project with Special Olympics BC. She brings the human translation layer every technical project needs: between the data people, the organization, and the community the work is supposed to serve.
Dhavide Aruliah: Principal Scientist, MKDA Consulting · Project Lead, Data for Good
Dhavide Aruliah is a data scientist, educator and former professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science.
Across three decades in academia and industry, he has taught and mentored thousands of learners, led training programs supporting the scientific Python ecosystem at Anaconda and Quansight, and helped people move from mathematical ideas to computational work they can reproduce and trust.
Today, Dhavide runs MKDA Consulting and leads several Data for Good projects. He brings unusual technical depth, a teacher’s instinct, and a stubborn commitment to making complicated work understandable and useful.
Vanessa Gonzales & Makaidea Gonzales: Squamish Nation
chiyakselut (Venessa Gonzales) opens the night with a Squamish West Coast welcome, song and blessing, alongside her daughter Makaidea.
Her lineage bridges three nations: Squamish, Musqueam, and Cree from Saskatchewan, the same territory beneath the Space Centre.
Venessa harvests traditional medicines, makes healing salves, and works in glass etching, wool weaving, and cedar weaving, and she teaches traditional games so the knowledge keeps moving to the next generation.
LIVE AUDIO-VISUAL PERFORMANCE
Misagh Azimi: Collective Consciousness
Interdisciplinary Artist · Creative AI Researcher · Creator of Fragmenta
Misagh Azimi joins us for a live audio-visual performance from his Collective Consciousness series.
Lines from Misagh’s own writing are used to prompt personalized diffusion models trained on his own music. The models return fragments of sound and projected imagery. Misagh cuts, orders, develops and answers those fragments inside a structure he has composed, then performs the result live using Ableton and Fragmenta, the open-source AI instrument he built himself.
The model does not write the piece. It supplies material. The artist decides what survives and what it becomes.
Misagh is an Iranian-German interdisciplinary artist and AI researcher completing his PhD in Creative AI. His compositions, installations and performances have appeared in Germany, Australia and New Zealand. His research examines authorship, artistic labour and the development of ethical, artist-centred technologies for music.
Fragmenta runs locally, keeps artists’ recordings on their own machines, and allows musicians to train generative models on work they actually own.
This is AI not as an autonomous author, but as a strange new instrument in human hands.
Kris Krüg: Executive Direcotry, BC + AI Ecosystem Assocation · Curator, Futureproof Festival of AI
Kris Krüg is the founder of Vancouver AI and executive director of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association, the nonprofit that grew out of these monthly gatherings.
A photographer and creative technologist by trade, he has spent two decades documenting culture and building rooms where people actually talk, and he now curates the Futureproof Festival of AI, October 28 to 30, also at the Space Centre.
He hosts these nights the way he wants the future built: curious, a little irreverent, and allergic to hype.
Event Details
Date: August 26, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM PDT
Venue: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9
Format: Community talks, demos, conversation, and open networking
Who This Is For
People building with AI and people trying to understand what it is changing.
Creatives, technologists, researchers, organizers, founders, students, educators, and public-sector teams.
Anyone who wants a local, grounded, human room for sorting through the hype, the useful parts, and the hard questions.
What To Bring
Bring your questions, demos, doubts, experiments, and projects in progress. The point is not to clap for every new model. The point is to learn in public, notice what is real, and build relationships with people who can help make the work better.
It Takes a Village To Raise a Meetup
Big thanks, and please support our sponsors and partners including Internet Archive Canada, HR Mac Millan Space Centre and Intellomx AI Drug Discovery CEO Simon Haworth.
Internet Archive Canada: Andrea Mills and her team are preserving 30+ years of the open web while everyone else locks knowledge behind paywalls, and they are co-building the AI Builders Fellowship with us. internetarchivecanada.org
Intellomx: Simon Haworth's AI-powered drug-discovery platform, reading transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data to cut pre-clinical costs, recently into J&J's JLABS. Backing the ecosystem from the deep-science end. intellomx.com
Want To Support The Mission?
Interested in partnering, sponsoring, volunteering, or helping shape a future meetup?
Reach out to the BC + AI team and we will find the right way to plug you in.
About BC + AI
BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association building public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia. Not a corporate lobby, not a think tank.
A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Vancouver was just the start; the ecosystem keeps growing across BC, from Surrey to Victoria to the Comox Valley and beyond. Join or support: bc-ai.ca/membership
About Futureproof Festival of AI
Futureproof Festival of AI is BC's homegrown festival of AI, October 28 to 30 at the HR MacMillan Space Centre.
Three days of keynotes, performances, and facilitated dialogue, built the way this community likes it: experiential, human, and honest about both the promise and the cost.
Think a homegrown Web Summit with a West Coast conscience, half the room from out of town, all of it grounded right here.
Tickets are open now. futureproof.website