When he was an executive with the Yukon government, Tim McTiernan represented the territory when, together with British Columbia and the U.S. Park Service in Alaska, it was trying to manage tourism traffic on the Tatshenshini River.A world-class whitewater rafting site, the river is also ecologically fragile.

"There were many interests to deal with and we realized we wouldn't come to a satisfactory conclusion until we could form a partnership and meet all those interests," says McTiernan.

McTiernan is applying the partnership principle to his new role as executive director of the University of Toronto's research commercialization operation.

"The primary mandate of our office is to help U of T faculty to get their research into the marketplace and into applications in services in the public and private sector.We are not the commercialization police,although that's how university tech transfer offices are too often perceived.And the only way for us not to become a choke point in the process is to build partnerships between the faculty and the commercialization community."

In 2005, U of T's Vice-President,Research and Associate Provost, John Challis, acted on recommendations in a report by former federal cabinet minister John Manley and reinvented U of T's commercialization operation.The goal was to streamline what many had come to feel was an overly complex process of moving research conducted by faculty into the marketplace.

The new organization combines the former Innovations Foundation – a not-forprofit organization with a dotted line relationship to the university – and the university's internal technology transfer office into one U of T department. While the new structure is important,Challis feels engaging McTiernan as executive director is the key to making the enterprise work."When we began to search for this position,we knew we needed someone who could bring together all the various groups related to the commercialization process.Tim has such a diverse background in government, as a negotiator and as an academic that we knew he would be perfect for the job."

McTiernan,a native of Kilkenny, Ireland,earned his PhD in psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1982.He and his wife then moved to the Yukon, where she had a job opportunity.Fifteen years in the Yukon government culminated with positions as Chief Government Negotiator for Land Claims and Self Government, as well as Deputy Minister of the Executive Council and Cabinet Secretary.

He then spent five years as president of Canadore College of Arts and Technology in North Bay,Ontario, strengthening his experience in partnership building as co-chair of the College-University Consortium Council of the Ontario Ministry of Training,Colleges and Universities.

Joining the Ontario government in 2002,he worked for four successive ministries as the assistant deputy minister responsible for the province's core set of research and commercialization funding programs. "When the opportunity arose to work on the university side of research commercialization,I jumped at it.This is a very hot area right now and it will get hotter. One of the key ways to show relevance in research is through commercial application. Insulin and biodiesel fuel are perfect examples.That's our job – to make sure we create a process that is user-friendly,that supports the research effort and that adds value to the university by deepening connections with public service and business and industry partners. It's all about partnership."

For more on research commercialization at U of T visit: www.innnovations.utoronto.ca

– Paul Fraumeni

There is an audible buzz in Ron Deibert's basement laboratory in the Munk Centre for International Studies. Researchers are pounding away at banks of humming computers and a large fan is working overtime to cool the technology-laden subterranean space.There's an oversized globe in one corner, which, as it sits in this high-tech room,is a perfect metaphor for the work that goes on here. Deibert is a political science professor who's been called everything from the "Hacker Prof" to the "Net Ninja."He's making a name for himself as a scholar-activist who marries a deep humanitarian commitment with a technological acumen that you'd expect to find on an episode of the X-Files.

Deibert and his group of programmers, artists and social scientists are focused on exposing and circumventing Internet censorship and surveillance worldwide. Much of the group's work is conducted on behalf of the Open Net Initiative, a collaborative project of U of T and Harvard,Oxford and Cambridge Universities.The group has attracted funding from financier George Soros and the MacArthur Foundation.

"We tend to think of the Internet as one seamless environment through which we surf," says Deibert,explaining that most of us take freedom of information for granted.

"But depending on from where you access it,you get a completely different picture.

"Most people don't think much about what happens on the Internet after the information leaves their computer. They send an e-mail and it's gone. They search for information and they get it. But if you follow the connection down the fibre optic cable and through the Internet exchanges and so on, you can see that all along the way there are opportunities to monitor, filter and intercept."

The group borrows its methodology from state intelligence organizations, using a combination of intelligence gathered inside countries that practice censoring,and technical testing,both in the field and remotely from the lab. Like scholarly 007s, Deibert's team has even surreptitiously installed black boxes containing computers inside censorious regimes,which they can then access remotely. "It's very much like being a forensic scientist, tracking down and exposing what governments are doing online," says Diebert.

The group's latest research effort culminated in the release of psiphon, open source software that operates using social networks of trust.Users in uncensored locations install psiphon on their computers and give the connection information to family or friends in censored locations, allowing them to surf the Internet through the computer in the uncensored location.

"psiphon overcomes one of the biggest problems with other types of circumvention technology,"says Deibert,explaining that most attempts rely on large proxy servers which are eventually discovered and shut down by governments.

"psiphon is below the radar because there isn't one singe node or point of access.

There are literally thousands of them operating on networks of trust with maybe four or five people on each node.So while a government could conceivably shut down one psiphon node, it can't shut down the entire network."

Developing software is all in a day's work for Deibert, who sees everything he does as part of the same mission."Some people do pure research,some people do policy work,some people do advocacy.Here at the Citizen Lab we do all three.Everything that is done in the Citizen Lab is done with an orientation toward human rights.

"Our view is that by default,people should be able to choose for themselves what information they want to access."

Check out psiphon at http://psiphon.civisec.org

– Jenny Hall