I am Erin Peterson, an AI engineer, founder, and law student seeking a four-month legal placement in Ontario. I am a Juris Doctor candidate (class of 2027) at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University, and I hold a BASc in Computer Engineering (Artificial Intelligence stream) from Queen's University. I 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. My work runs from reinforcement learning and autonomous-vehicle perception to law review editorial leadership, AI legislation advisory, AI governance, and access-to-justice technology.
I trained at Queen's Engineering, which taught me how to think: break a problem down, find the part you don't yet understand, and work through the uncertainty. My curriculum wouldn't teach AI until fourth year, so I taught myself. At QMIND, which I joined at its inception, I built a reinforcement-learning cart-pole controller, a stock-prediction model, and a smart thermostat as PM. Queen's had no AutoDrive team, so I helped create one as a founding member, working perception (lane detection, sign detection, and SLAM); our papers placed first at PEO and second at IEEE. Unable to find an AI role, I attended seven job fairs and pitched Bell at its recruiting event, which created a position that did not exist for me; I identified adoption rather than model performance as the bottleneck and raised adoption 40% and accuracy 10%. At Distributive, as Founder and AI Ethicist, I 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. I also served on the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Future of AI Council, advising on the proposed AIDA legislation.
I am Executive Editor of the TMU Law Review, having joined as Operations Manager: I rebuilt its operations, redesigned its site, modernized its publication process, launched the Amicus Forum blog, and manage six editors. No student organization for technology, AI, and innovation law existed at TMU, so I founded the Technology & Innovation Law Society and serve as its President, running an AI Policy Hackathon workshop, Careers in Technology & Law panels, and mentorship. Through Living Transcript I redesigned virtual Immigration and Refugee Board hearings via a Microsoft Teams plugin, rethinking how testimony and transcripts are captured in digital proceedings. I have 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 I was a quarter-finalist. I served on the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Future of AI Council advising on the proposed AIDA legislation, and I have proposed amendments to PIPEDA for AI governance.
I founded Integrity AI, which advises the City of Kingston on AI governance, on the conviction that responsible AI begins long before deployment. In 2018 I was Kingston's summer traffic co-op student, resolving more than 300 resident complaints through data studies, field assessments, and direct de-escalation, with my findings adopted by Council; in 2024 Kingston named me one of its Young Professionals 40 Under 40, and seven years after the co-op I advise the same city government from the other side of the table. My 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. I have keynoted UofT Hacks to roughly 500 people and spoken at the NGEN Canada Summit and on Women in AI panels. My 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 my own making, houseplants, crystals, long walks outdoors (especially on the water at my cottage), and Kali, my nine-year-old Morkie. We are both new to Toronto and still finding the dog-friendly places.