Affiliated Workshops

The Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA) -  a partner of Waterloo.AI, organized a roundtable workshop on “Artificial Intelligence, Global Governance and International Public Policy”. The Institutes Co-Director, Fakhri Karray and members, Jatin Nathwani, Jesse Hoey, Joel Blit, Kate Larson, and Jason Lajoie participated in the workshop.

The workshop attendees included leading scholars, senior policy makers, and industry leaders. The workshop enabled the leaders with an opportunity to discuss AI Global Governance, with two main objectives: (1) To discuss policy and ethical challenges with Artificial Intelligence driven technical developments; (2) To develop a broader research program to support multi-disciplinary, transnational, cutting-edge research, thought-leadership, and knowledge-mobilization in the growing field of study and practice. This discussion on Artificial Intelligence will help guide the future of research and publications.

On October 25, 2019, Waterloo.AI hosted a "2019 Manulife Day" event. The event consisted of presentations by Manulife representatives and Waterloo.AI Faculty Members/Researchers, as well as a panel on applications of AI in Finance.

Waterloo.AI Faculty Members/Researchers & Topics: 

• Yaoliang Yu - Multivariate Triangular Quantiles for Novelty Detection
• Olga Vechtomova - Disentangled Representation Learning for Text Style Transfer

Manulife Representatives & Topics:

• Cindy Forbes - Manulife's AI & Advanced Analytics Journey
• Dave Keirstead - Examples of Advanced Analytics with Manulife
• Lin Gao - Graph Analytics in Manulife

Panel on AI and Finance - Panelists:

• Dave Keirstead, Manulife
• Eugene Wen, Manulife
• Yuying Li, University of Waterloo
• Tony Wirjanto, University of Waterloo

From April 8-10, 2019, Waterloo.AI Faculty Members participated in a roundtable workshop organized by the University of Bordeaux. The University of Bordeaux and the University of Waterloo wanted to deepen their ongoing research partnership by organizing a workshop in the Area of AI and Public Health. The intent was to bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with expertise in areas including AI, machine learning, public health, biostatistics, epidemiology, mobile health technology, population health, surveillance, incentivizing healthy behaviour, and health informatics.

The partnership between the University of Waterloo and the University of Bordeaux began in 2009 – 2010 with a program to facilitate graduate students in nanotechnology visiting the University of Bordeaux. The relationship was strengthened in 2014 – 2015 with significant financial commitments by the Vice President Academic and the Dean of Science at Waterloo for collaborative research projects at the University of Bordeaux. The result was a flourishing partnership with significant research collaborations in topics with a strong impact on society, including projects in energy, aging, and water resource management. 

On March 19, 2019, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce brought together experts from across multiple industries and academia to discuss how the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) raises many public policy questions about how to respond to the technology from a legal/regulatory perspective. Starting with the premise that AI will generate regulatory activity to address privacy, security and safety. In this workshop, the following challenges were addressed:

• Separating the myths from the reality of the state of the technology and what we might see on a five-year time horizon.
• Identifying barriers to adoption (technology, network, data gaps, regulatory hurdles) and explore policy options to overcome the barriers.
• Exploring the state of the industry and where government can (and should) play a role in enabling adoption and growth, such as incentives, tax measures, trade agreements, services or policies.