About Me
Jonathan was born in Toronto in 1957. In 1961 the family moved to Thornhill, Ontario. At age 12, Jonathan became fascinated with chess and spent most of his recreational time studying the game and watching Star Trek. Jonathan attended Thornhill High School (1970-1975). During those years, he became a competitive chess player, including playing in the invitational Canadian Junior Championship. A decade later, he was invited to play in the 1985 Canadian Championship but had to decline because of other commitments. He achieved a Master-level rating of 2300.
Education
In 1977, Jonathan chanced across the book Computer Chess at the University of Toronto bookstore. Although a strong chess player, Jonathan was realistic enough to realize he would never be World Chess Champion. But… perhaps he could become World Computer Chess Champion. Thus began his lifelong interest in artificial intelligence. As it turned out, the second World Computer Chess Championship was played in Toronto in August 1977 and Jonathan was in the audience for some of the games (when they did not conflict with his university classes). In 1978 he attempted to write a chess program but failed due to a lack of free time. This led him to decide to pursue a Masters degree, with the specific goal of doing his thesis on developing a chess program.Jonathan completed his MMath degree at the University of Waterloo in 1980. The thesis was titled Long-Range Planning in Computer Chess. He was fortunate to benefit from the source code for the chess program Ribbit (later TreeFrog), generously provided by computer chess pioneer Ron Hansen, whose time at the University overlapped with Jonathan’s for a few months.
Jonathan continued on to do a PhD at the University of Waterloo. He was advised not to work on artificial intelligence research that involved games. For the first two years he worked on developing operating systems software for multi-processor computers. That did not lead to the desired academic results, so he wandered around for a while in search of a topic. One day a new faculty member, Randy Goebel, gave him good advice (paraphrased): “Get the PhD. Once you have one, no one cares what topic you researched to get the degree.” So, he switched back to AI using chess as his experimental testbed. He completed his thesis, Experiments in Search and Knowledge, in late 1985 and defended his thesis in 1986.
Academic Career
Despite not yet having finished his PhD, Jonathan began working as a Lecturer in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta in January 1984. In September 1985 he became an Assistant Professor, in July 1989 an Associate Professor, and in July 1994 a Full Professor. As of November 1, 2024, Jonathan is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the University of Alberta.
At the University of Alberta, he has served as Chair of the Department of Computing Science (2004-2008), Vice Provost and Associate Vice President for Information Technology (2008-2012), and Dean of the Faculty of Science (2012-2018).
Research
Here are some notable highlights:
In addition to almost 200 research papers, Jonathan has written several books:
In 2001, Jonathan was one of four co-applicants that made the case for the Alberta government to fund a research initiative on machine learning. The centre, initially called the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning, is still around today, albeit with a new name, Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute). It is one of the three national AI research centres in Canada. Funding comes from the Canadian government, the Alberta government, and industry contracts.
High Performance Computing
For its day, the Chinook project required massive computing resources. The project benefitted greatly from access to resources in the United States and Switzerland. Nothing comparable was available to researchers in Canada. This prompted Jonathan to work on providing state-of-the-art computing resources (often called supercomputing or high-performance computing) to Canadian researchers.
Jonathan (University of Alberta) and Brian Unger (University of Calgary) joined forces to create an Alberta supercomputing initiative, named MACI (Multimedia Advanced Computing Infrastructure). From the Canadian government, Alberta government, and industry, this project built $20 million of infrastructure for Alberta researchers in the late 1990s.
A few years later, MACI expanded its reach to include the research universities in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. The new project was called WestGrid and it provided roughly $50 million of infrastructure in the early 2000s. Jonathan was one of the seven principal investigators.
Around this time, Jonathan was part of a team of seven researchers that wrote the Long-Range Plan for High-Performance Computing (HPC) in Canada in 2004. The plan prompted the government to create a special fund for supporting a national HPC initiative.
The national requirement meant that WestGrid had to join forces with HPC initiatives in Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces. The resulting organization, Compute Canada, acquired over $150 million in funding in 2005. Jonathan was one of the seven principal investigators.
Jonathan helped manage Compute Canada for a few years before moving on to other projects. Today, Compute Canada has been succeeded by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.
Service
Jonathan has made important contributions to computing science service. A few highlights include:
Entrepreneur
Jonathan was one of four co-founders of BioTools (1995). The company’s major products, PepTool (protein analysis) and GeneTool (DNA analysis), were used by research labs throughout the world, including those trying to decipher the human genome. The company eventually commercialized the CRPG’s poker-playing software under the name Poki. The company was sold in 2010.
In 2014 Jonathan was one of four co-founders (including Jennifer Griffin Schaeffer) of Onlea (ONline LEArning), a company that produced high-quality online learning experiences. From 2014-2020, the company was a not-for-profit. In 2020 the founders bought its assets to become a for-profit company for-profit under the name Onlea Enterprises (onlea.org). The company is still going strong, with major clients in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Today, Jonathan and Jennifer are co-owners of a diversified holding and consulting company, Illumileap Information Services, Inc.
In October 2025, Onlea decided to spin-out their AI R&D and Jonathan is now the founder of a Newco (name TBD) that provides AI software for consumers with integrity, clarity, and privacy at its core. Newco will soon launch its first product, an AI application for the desktop. Stay tuned!
Awards and Honours
Jonathan has been fortunate to receive recognition for his career. Some of the highlights include:
Non academic recognition includes two Guinness Book of World Records (checkers and poker) and awards for BioTools.
Personal
Jonathan is married to Jennifer Griffin Schaeffer. They live in North Saanich on Vancouver Island, along with their dog Strudel (the Labradoodle) and their Siberian Forest Cats Matzoball and Bagel.
Jonathan’s daughter, Rebecca, is a successful author. Her Market of Monsters trilogy and City of Nightmares duology are entertaining reads!
Jennifer’s son, Joss, is pursuing his Bachelors of Commerce in Management & Entrepreneurship at MacEwan University in Edmonton.
Since age 10, Jonathan has been fascinated with the history of exploration of the Polar regions, primarily the Arctic. Today he manifests his hobby by collecting books and ephemera on Arctic history, traveling to the north (he recently completed his second trip through the Northwest Passage), and writing (see his book of historical fiction Towards No Earthly Pole).
