Inaugural Wes Graham Research Symposium & Computer Science Awards

Morning Refreshments (DC 1302)

Welcome and Opening Remarks (DC 1302)
Mark Giesbrecht
Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo

Greeting from the Faculty (DC 1302)
Raouf Boutaba
Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo

A Word from the Trustees (DC 1302)
Don Cowan
Co-Founder, J. Wes Graham Trust

Building Assistive Technologies with Computational Emotional Intelligence (DC 1302)
Jesse Hoey, Inaugural Graham Research Fellow, 2017–2019
University of Waterloo

Artificially intelligent assistive technologies promise to alleviate some of the increasing burden of care for persons with age-related cognitive disabilities, such as Alzheimer’s disease. However, despite tremendous progress, many attempts to develop and implement real-world applications have failed to become widely adopted. In this talk, I will argue that a key barrier to the adoption of these technologies is a lack of alignment, on a social and emotional level, between the technology and its users. I will then introduce a possible solution to this problem based in a social-psychological theory of culturally shared affective meanings as consistency heuristics that guide human action. These affective heuristics can be used to predict human reactions in practice, and therefore to produce more emotionally aligned artificially intelligent systems. I will give an introduction to this theory, and will discuss how affective reasoning could be used to create truly adaptive assistive technologies. 

Impatience in Humans’ Timing Decisions: The Trade-off between Duration Perception and Recall (DC 1302)
Moojan Ghafurian, Inaugural Graham Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo

Decisions about when to act are critical in many real-life situations. Examples include healthcare, safety and security situations, where acting early or late can result in substantial costs or losses. These types of decisions are dynamic and are mostly made under uncertainty. I propose impatience induced by delays as a bias affecting timing decisions and show that it can be successfully manipulated and moderated. I will discuss how impatience affects timing decisions, suggest a simple approach to manipulate and moderate it, and show that there are trade-offs between delay perception and delay recall. I will then discuss the implications of these findings for user-interface design.

Decode Cancer and Immunity-related Proteins through Computation and Mass Spectrometry (DC 1302)
Professor Bin Ma, Inaugural Graham Research Fellow, 2017–2020
University of Waterloo

Our immune systems produce a special class of proteins called antibodies. Antibodies play a key role in the body’s defences to fight infection and diseases including cancer. The abnormality of the immune system may lead to autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Engineered antibodies have also been used as drugs to provide targeted therapy for cancers. A critical need in the study of antibodies is to read out the order of amino acids of the protein (a.k.a protein sequencing). This used to be a labour-intensive task and not always successful. Recently, we developed a new method that combines computation with mass spectrometry to sequence the antibody proteins. Our method for the first time enabled high-throughput routine antibody protein sequencing. Equipped with this method, we are also exploring the application of the method in the detection of a specific blood cancer.

2018 CS Awards Presentation and Reception (DC 1301 • Fishbowl)
Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science & George Labahn, Professor, Cheriton School of Computer Science

CS award recipients (PDF)