Sancho McCann

Welcome! I am a com­put­er sci­en­tist trained in law.PhD (Computer Science), 2014, University of British Columbia; JD, 2021, Peter A. Allard School of Law. I want to help de­mys­ti­fy the law and give us more confidence in the out­comes of the le­gal sys­tem and gov­ern­ment de­ci­sion-mak­ing. I am in­ter­est­ed in the many over­laps of law and tech­nol­o­gy, es­pe­cial­ly al­go­rith­mic de­ci­sion-mak­ing and copy­right.

In law school, I spent a term at the Indigenous Community Legal Clinic, was Senior Editor for the Canadian Journal of Family Law, and con­vened a read­ing group on al­go­rithms and the rule of law. After, I clerked at the Court of Appeal for British Columbia and the Supreme Court of Canada.

As a com­put­er sci­en­tist, I’ve fo­cused on vi­su­al ob­ject recog­ni­tion, ma­chine learn­ing, and ap­pli­ca­tions of deep neur­al net­works. I stay up to date with re­cent pub­li­ca­tions and have con­tin­ued to re­view for ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS.

All of my work is con­nect­ed to the re­la­tion­ships that I’ve been part of over the years: fam­i­ly, friends, in­struc­tors, su­per­vi­sors and men­tors, stu­dents, and the places that I’ve lived. I am a set­tler born in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory, tra­di­tion­al ter­ri­to­ry of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, and Dakota Peoples, and the home­land of the Métis Nation. I now live in Vancouver, which over­laps with the tra­di­tion­al, an­ces­tral, and un­ced­ed ter­ri­to­ries of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh.Learn more about the land where you live at native-land.ca.

Recent updates

• Development plans, zon­ing, and pub­lic hear­ings in Vancouver (up­dat­ed November 1, 2023)
• Consenting to re­verse un­der s. 70 of the Supreme Court Act (up­dat­ed October 3, 2023)
• Copyright Throughout a Creative AI Pipeline (up­dat­ed March 26, 2023)

If you’d like to get up­dates from me when­ev­er I write some­thing, sign up for my tinylet­ter here.

The views ex­pressed on this blog are my own and do not rep­re­sent those of the Department of Justice or the Government of Canada.

Here’s where you can find me else­where on­line:

Selected publications

Sancho McCann, “Discretion in the Automated Administrative State” (2023) 36:1 Can JL & Jur 171.

Sancho McCann, “Copyright Throughout a Creative AI Pipeline” (2021) 19 Can J Law & Tech 109.

Sancho McCann, “Finding Harmony: Law Society of British Columbia v Trinity Western University”, Case Comment, (2019) 28 Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies 95.

Sancho McCann, Object classification and lo­cal­iza­tion us­ing spa­tial­ly-lo­cal­ized fea­tures (PhD Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2014) [un­pub­lished].

Sancho McCann & David G Lowe, “Spatially-lo­cal cod­ing for ob­ject recog­ni­tion” in 11th Asian Conference on Computer Vision (Springer, 2012) 204.

Sancho McCann & David G Lowe, “Local naive Bayes near­est neigh­bor for im­age classification” in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (IEEE, 2012) 3650.

Sancho McCann, “Atmospheric Sounding Visualization” (course re­port, Information Visualization, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, 2006) [un­pub­lished].

A more com­plete list is at my Google Scholar profile.