Join the final Research Talks event this term, presented by the Office of Research. This cross-disciplinary panel on societal impacts of 21st century technology features Ian Goldberg, Kate Larson, Jennifer Whitson, and Alexander Wong. Waterloo staff, faculty, and students are welcome to attend.
Ian Goldberg is a Professor and University Research Chair with the Cheriton School of Computer Science. His research is in the area of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) — tools that keep people safe, secure, and private when they go online. While PETs are often misunderstood as simply the hiding of personal information, privacy is better seen as being instrumental in freedom, autonomy, self-determination, and human rights. Examples of Prof. Goldberg's work include secure and private instant messaging, privacy preserving networking, private information retrieval and storage, and systems for allowing people who live in countries where the Internet is censored to nonetheless access free and open communication online.
Kate Larson is a professor with the Cheriton School of Computer Science with research interests in Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems. She is particularly interested in preference modelling, group decision making and strategic issues arising in multiagent systems. Her research ranges from investigating issues arising in social choice and game-theoretic models when there is limited information and computational resources to using game theoretic concepts in applied domains. She has developed models for settings where agents’ interactions are constrained by an underlying network, designed robust mechanisms and algorithms for multiagent settings where agents deviate from classic rationality assumptions, and has investigated multiagent models where computational and information gathering abilities are limited.
Jennifer R. Whitson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Legal Studies. She studies the secret life of software, mostly at the nexus of digital games and surveillance studies and has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork with game developers since 2012. Past projects included work on digital media surveillance, social influences on software development processes, and gamification. She is involved with Waterloo’s Games Institute and the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and is an associate editor of Surveillance and Society. She has published in edited collections such as The Gameful World, published by MIT Press, as well as the journals First Monday, Economy & Society, FibreCulture and New Media and Society. For more information, visit IndieInterfaces.comand jenniferwhitson.com.
Alexander Wong is an Associate Professor in Systems Design Engineering and Canada Research Chair in Medical Imaging Systems. He has published over 400 refereed journal and conference papers, as well as patents, in various fields such as computational imaging, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. In the area of computational imaging, his focus is integrative computational imaging systems for biomedical imaging (inventor/co-inventor of Correlated Diffusion Imaging, Compensated Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Spectral Light-field Fusion Micro-tomography, Compensated Ultrasound Imaging, Coded Hemodynamic Imaging, High-throughput Computational Slits, Spectral Demultiplexing Imaging, and Parallel Epi-Spectropolarimetric Imaging). In the area of artificial intelligence, his focus is operational artificial intelligence (co-inventor/inventor of evolutionary deep intelligence, Discovery Radiomics, and random deep intelligence via deep-structured fully-connected graphical models).
Research Talks is supported by the Research Support Fund.