Prof. Sylvie Albert The University of Winnipeg, Canada

Dr. Sylvie Albert is a Professor of Leadership and Strategy, the past Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics and Continuing Education at the University of Winnipeg and the past Associate Dean of the Faculty of Management at Laurentian University. Previous to academia, she presided over a management consulting firm, Planned Approach Inc., a company that leveraged investments to assist municipalities to develop fibre optic and wireless networks as well as elearning, ehealth, and other online applications. She also spent time as Executive Director of community economic development corporations, and as a provincial Human Resource Consultant. Dr. Albert is publishing her 5th books on the development of Smart/Intelligent/Networked/Sustainable Communities. She has covered in her books a range of topics from collaboration, innovation, measurement, and implementation with many examples from cities internationally. Among opportunities to inform her research she counts her role as a special advisor to the Canadian Federal Government on its Smart Cities Challenge, the Canadian Information and Communication Technologies Smart Cities Labour Taskforce, as chief jurist for the Intelligent Community Forum Award in New York, and as a scientific advisor of the Global Forum on Digitalization and Chair of its Cities Cluster. Dr. Albert has and continues to be an active member of business and government boards at the provincial, national and international level including corporate boards, professional standards boards, and funding boards.