Meet the Team: Charles Crosbie, Senior Product Manager DHDP

Charles Crosbie is our Senior Product Manager, balancing the needs of our future data science users with the tech required to power safe and secure data sharing through the Platform. In other words, he’s the translator of user workflow needs into requests for technical code from our engineers that will show up on the Platform as vital features and functions.

As part of his role, Crosbie keeps an eye on tech development in data sharing and federated learning, the privacy-by-design part of the DHDP. Recently this meant a visit to London, UK for the Flower AI Summit, where he joined the growing international Flower.ai digital community to hear about latest developments in this federated AI learning framework and the issues that similar projects are facing.

TL;DR – we’re not alone! All good learning points for DHDP development!

A little background on Flower ai and Platform development; security is a priority for the DHDP, and federated learning is a key strategy for achieving this. Designed to boost this, Flower brings flexibility and scalability to the Platform. The Flower AI ‘layer’ will help users work with diverse data sets that can be tricky simply because they’re a challenge to centralize. Flower will also help a wider range of users — from expert AI and machine learning data scientists to clinical researchers with basic programming skills — access to explore data.

As Crosbie notes, “At an architectural level, the [Flower.ai] framework lets us orchestrate distributed training across heterogeneous environments without moving data, while enforcing privacy‑by‑design and consistent deployment patterns across sites. From an operational perspective, it supports the full model lifecycle (experimentation, versioning, rollout, and iteration) in environments with very different governance, scale, and technical maturity.”

In translation, he describes Flower’s technology and vision for federated learning aligning perfectly with the mandate of the DHDP as we move from MVP (minimum viable platform) to onboarding our first users across Canada.

DHDP is also not only creating community with its members, but it’s joining community. “Flower’s team and developer community (which we experienced firsthand at the London summit) give us confidence that we’re building platforms alongside others who are solving the same hard problems. Flower will help shift federated AI from concept into real‑world impact for precision medicine research.” 

As a Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI)-led initiative, the DHDP is one of many next steps in the mission to fight cancer. The Platform will enable safe and secure data sharing to accelerate precision medicine across Canada.

As Crosbie acknowledges, “[Federated AI for cancer research] is actually the mission that we've been given to address. We know that this is a hard endeavor, and we call it "Terry Fox Hard. We know that we each have to run a marathon every day to make this happen and to stay competitive, which is why we'll cross the pond to come here [to Flower AI Summit] and see what's happening and be at the leading edge of things.” 

Terry Fox started a marathon against cancer. Through collaborations like the DHDP, TFRI is helping us get one step closer to finishing Terry’s marathon against cancer.

Catch up with more thoughts on federated learning and Platform development from the London Flower AI Summit, here in an interview with William Lindskog-Munzing, Solutions Engineer with Flower Labs.