Computing for All: Michael Binder on Canada's Digital Future

In this episode of Research Spotlight, we speak with Michael Binder, former President and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and a member of the Computing for Humanity board, about what Canada's early push to connect its schools and libraries to the internet can teach us about AI, research infrastructure, and equal access to computing today.

No human advancement should wait in line for computing time. That belief is why we do what we do at Computing for Humanity (CFH), and it is why we were glad to sit down with Michael Binder, a member of our board of directors, a physicist and a longtime Canadian public servant, to hear how he sees the road ahead for research computing in Canada.

Binder has seen Canada's digital story from the inside. He spent about 15 years at Industry Canada and the former Department of Communications, working on cell phones, the internet, broadband and satellite, and then 12 years as President and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. His path started with computing: his physics thesis needed so much processing on an early IBM machine, fed by punch cards, that he could not have finished without it.

A lesson from the first school computers

When Binder's team set out to connect Canadian schools to the internet, many principals pushed back and asked for teachers instead. The team started with a single computer in one school library. Two months later the librarian called to ask for more, because students were lining up. Demand grew school by school until, by his account, Canada became the first country to connect all its schools and libraries.

That story reflects how we work. We do not try to guess where the next breakthrough will come from. We make computing available and let demand show us where it is needed.

Computing power is still unevenly shared

Binder points out that AI can help with medical research, vaccines and climate problems, but only if researchers can analyze very large amounts of data. That takes hardware, and hardware is expensive. Most of it now belongs to private companies that use it for competitive advantage and are unlikely to open it to outside researchers. The national research network, CANARIE, connects major universities and research facilities, but he says its resources still fall short of demand and many medical and environmental schools are not connected.

This is the gap CFH exists to close. We began in 2015 as Cancer Computer, and today we take donated hardware, refurbish it into clusters, and put it to work for research. Some of those clusters power MyResearchCloud.ca (MRCA), which we run in partnership with ThinkOn to give students, citizen scientists, educators, non-profits and research teams secure Canadian cloud computing. Projects without funding can apply for free allocations, and sustained workloads are priced low.

Binder called this a smart approach for a charity and offered a simple measure of its value: demand. "Everything we can refurbish and acquire is in high demand," he noted, and as long as demand is higher than supply, the need is real. Researchers come to us because their work depends on it.

Equal access, no winners and losers

Binder's advice for organizations like ours is to know what a small charity can and cannot do; we should go where the demand is greatest and give as many research communities as possible access, including people in the far north and in small communities who want to take part in this fast-moving field.

He also believes governments do best when they set the broad direction, such as funding for AI, and let researchers, private companies and community groups decide where to apply it. Open research, with free thinking and access for everyone, is the way to go.

Trust and energy

Drawing on his years as a regulator, Binder stressed transparency: publishing regulations, reviewing them publicly and making sure every audit recommendation is acted on. He also noted that AI's growing appetite for electricity, which may bring small modular reactors back into the conversation, will require government, communities and the private sector to work together. Local communities need to see the benefit. Reusing existing computers, as we do, is one modest way to get more research out of hardware that already exists.

The next big idea could come from anywhere

Binder's story about the first computer in a school library stays with us. Nobody at the time could have predicted what that connection would lead to, and the same is true of research computing today. The discovery that matters may come from a student without lab access, a citizen scientist with no university affiliation, or a small team between grants, in a city or northern community far from the big research centres.

What these people need is a fair chance to test their idea. That is what we work toward every day at Computing for Humanity: computing that is open, trusted and shared, so that no human advancement has to wait in line. Our thanks go to Michael Binder for his time, and for reminding us that where an idea comes from matters far less than whether it gets the chance to grow.

Want to hear more from researchers and innovators like Michael Binder? Subscribe to the CFH YouTube channel for the full interview series, and follow us on social media for more stories at the intersection of science, technology, and human impact. To learn how your lab or nonprofit can access affordable research computing, visit MyResearchCloud.ca.