Erin Peterson is an AI engineer, founder, and law student seeking a four-month legal placement in Ontario. She is a Juris Doctor candidate (class of 2027) at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University, and holds a BASc in Computer Engineering (Artificial Intelligence stream) from Queen's University. She founded and built a distributed machine-learning inferencing engine, understood well enough what it would do to people, and went to law school to learn how to bind it. Her work runs from reinforcement learning and autonomous-vehicle perception to law review editorial leadership, AI legislation advisory, AI governance, and access-to-justice technology.
Erin trained at Queen's Engineering, which taught her how to think: break a problem down, find the part you don't yet understand, and work through the uncertainty. Her curriculum wouldn't teach AI until fourth year, so she taught herself. At QMIND, which she joined at its inception, she built a reinforcement-learning cart-pole controller, a stock-prediction model, and a smart thermostat as PM. Queen's had no AutoDrive team, so she helped create one as a founding member, working perception — lane detection, sign detection, and SLAM; the papers placed first at PEO and second at IEEE. Unable to find an AI role, she attended seven job fairs and pitched Bell at its recruiting event, which created a position that did not exist for her; she identified adoption rather than model performance as the bottleneck and raised adoption 40% and accuracy 10%. At Distributive, as Founder and AI Ethicist, she founded DIANA — a distributed machine-learning inferencing engine — and led five engineers building it from the ground up: Kubernetes infrastructure that lets JavaScript applications execute Python machine-learning models, enabling forest-fire detection with UFMG in Brazil. She also served on the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Future of AI Council, advising on the proposed AIDA legislation.
Erin is Executive Editor of the TMU Law Review, having joined as Operations Manager: she rebuilt its operations, redesigned its site, modernized its publication process, launched the Amicus Forum blog, and manages six editors. No student organization for technology, AI, and innovation law existed at TMU, so she founded the Technology & Innovation Law Society and serves as its President, running an AI Policy Hackathon workshop, Careers in Technology & Law panels, and mentorship. Through Living Transcript she redesigned virtual Immigration and Refugee Board hearings via a Microsoft Teams plugin, rethinking how testimony and transcripts are captured in digital proceedings. She has mooted at Harold G. Fox (intellectual property — the patentability of computer-implemented inventions), reached by way of the McCarthy Cup; the Khalra Cup (constitutional); and Baby Jessup (international), where she was a quarter-finalist. She served on the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Future of AI Council advising on the proposed AIDA legislation, and has proposed amendments to PIPEDA for AI governance.
Erin founded Integrity AI, which advises the City of Kingston on AI governance, on the conviction that responsible AI begins long before deployment. In 2018 she was Kingston's summer traffic co-op student, resolving more than 300 resident complaints through data studies, field assessments, and direct de-escalation, with her findings adopted by Council; in 2024 Kingston named her one of its Young Professionals 40 Under 40, and seven years after the co-op she advises the same city government from the other side of the table. Her publications include Preventing Racism in Law: The Implementation of AI in Canadian Law using Critical Race Theory; Dependent by Design: Compute, Sovereignty, and AI Governance in Canada; and Technoethics: Ethical Decisions in the Technology Pipeline. She has keynoted UofT Hacks to roughly 500 people and spoken at the NGEN Canada Summit and on Women in AI panels. Her thesis: access to justice does not stop at the door of the courtroom, but extends to all citizens being owed a just experience with laws and technologies imposed on them.
Away from the desk: yoga, tea blends of her own making, houseplants, crystals, long walks outdoors — especially on the water at her cottage — and Kali, a nine-year-old Morkie. Both are new to Toronto and still finding the dog-friendly places.