Mike Sparling has spent over 30 years as an academic, researcher, and business leader, with a career that has spanned countries, platforms, companies, and minds. Mike has been a leader in 3 start-up ventures, through 5 investment rounds and participated in 2 successful exits. These ventures have been in the fields of expert systems and consumer behaviour prediction / modification. Mr. Sparling taught for five years in the MBA program at the Telfer School of Management (University of Ottawa) and two years in the management faculty at Durham College. Mike was the Dean of the Faculty of Business at Seneca College for 4 years, where he led 233 tenured faculty and 350 adjunct faculty delivering graduate and undergraduate education to 11,000 full-time business students from 137 countries.

Mike is a co-founder of the Durham College AI Hub, an applied research center committed to simplifying and accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence techniques by small and medium enterprises. Mike has been the lead author in a series of research grants focused on AI adoption and implementation of AI-based business solutions, successfully raising over $4 million in research funding. He has been the principal investigator and supervisor of a dozen AI projects. Mike’s research interest is in the field of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents in business management systems. Mike recently assumed the dual Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer role for Multi-Health Systems Ltd., where he leads strategy, business operations, technology adoption, and research into neuroscience applications of artificial intelligence, blockchain, trusted computing, and homomorphic encryption.