Two Toronto IT academics are in good, if rare, company as of this week.
Hossein Rahnama of Ryerson University and Universityof Toronto’s JoycePoon have been named one of the world’s top 35 innovators under 35 bythe Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Reviewmagazine– an honour that has previously gone to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey,Google founder Sergey Brin and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.
U of T professor Joyce Poon hasbeen named one of the world’s top 35 IT innovators under 35 for thisyear.
This year’s winners were selected from over 250 nominees worldwide.
Rahnama, 32, is the associate director of Ryerson’s Digital Media Zoneincubator, research director of Ryerson’s Ubiquitous Computing Group,and founder and CEO of Flybits. He’s being honoured forhis work in theareas of mobile technology, cloud computing and privacy. Flybits usestechnology to generate geographically relevant content based on auser’s needs and preferences as their location changes.
Poon, also 32, is an assistant professor of electrical and computerengineering at U of T and also holds the Canada Research Chair inintegrated photonic devices at the university. She is working on usingoptics or light-based signals to transmit data more quickly and energyefficiently.
Both Poon and Rahnama will be featured in the September/October issueof Technology Review online.
ChristineWong is a Staff Writer at ITBusiness.ca and CDN. E-mail her at [email protected],connect on Google+,follow her on Twitter,and join in the conversation on the IT BusinessFacebook Page. 
