2023 Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute Annual Conference

8:30	Coffee & Breakfast
9:00	Welcome Address Charmaine Dean - Vice-President, Research and International, Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at UWaterloo
9:10	MasterCard - Keynote Speaker * Link to YouTube video of this presentation * Jennifer M. Sloan- Senior Vice President Public Policy and Stakeholder Engagement at Mastercard Canada
9:35	Special Guest - The Honourable Bardish Chagger - Member of Parliament - Waterloo
9:45	Award Ceremony - CPI - Mastercard Graduate Excellence Scholarship Jennifer M. Sloan- Senior Vice President Public Policy and Stakeholder Engagement at Mastercard Canada N. Asokan - Executive Director, CPI – Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo Mastercard Graduate Excellence Scholarship Recipient - Sajin Sasy
9:50	Break
10:15	State of CPI * Link to YouTube video of this presentation * N. Asokan - Executive Director, CPI – Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo cpi-annual-conference-state-of-cpi-n-asokan-slides.pdf
10:35	Health Panel * Link to YouTube video of this presentation * Moderator:  Bill Ohlson - Executive Security Advisor within AWS’ World Wide Public Sector for Latin America, Canada & Caribbean (LCC) Panelists: Helen Chen - PhD, MSc, BSc Director, Professional Practice Center in Health Systems Program Lead, Master of Health Informatics Program, Professor of Practice, School of Public Health Sciences, Cross-appointed in Cheriton School of Computer Science and Statistics and Actuarial Science, President and Founding Director, Canadian Personalized Healthcare Innovation Network Phil Vlach - Applied Technology Expert in Senior Living, Founder @ AgeTech Labs,  Head of IT @ Schlegel Villages, Startup Mentor @ Age-Well Dr. Kyle Wilson – CIO/CPO – Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health
11:40	AI Invited Talk * Link to YouTube video of this presentation * Sirisha Rambhatla - Assistant Professor at UWaterloo - Management Sciences Department & Systems Design Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science - CPI Member
12:15	Lunch
1:15	Award Ceremony - Undergraduate Awards N. Asokan - Executive Director, CPI – Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo Andrew Walenstein - Senior Director BlackBerry Labs, Lead in Academic Partnerships and Funded R&D Program
1:30	Digital Finance Invited Talk * Link to YouTube video of this presentation * Jeremy Clark - Associate Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering jeremy-clark-digital-finance-slides.pdf
2:15	Autonomous Platforms & Robotics Panel * Link to YouTube video of this presentation * Moderator: William Melek - Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at UWaterloo - Director of the Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Automation - Director of RoboHub Panelists: Sebastian Fischmeister - Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, and a licensed Professional Engineer Gennaro Notomista - Assistant Professor and the Varma Family Professor in Robotics in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo Oliver Schneider -  Associate Professor, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher, and haptician at the University of Waterloo (Department of Management Science and Engineering) Andrew Walenstein - Senior Director BlackBerry Labs, Lead in Academic Partnerships and Funded R&D Program
3:30	Break
3:45	State of the National Cybersecurity Consortium * Link to YouTube video of this presentation * Ken Barker - Scientific Director, National Cybersecurity Consortium - Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary ken-barker-state-of-ncc-slides.pdf
4:00	Keynote Address - Research & Development Update from the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC) Ali Ghorbani- Professor at UNB for Computer Science - CIC Director
4:30	Posters and Dinner List of Posters & Abstracts Judges: Andrew Walenstein - Senior Director BlackBerry Labs, Lead in Academic Partnerships and Funded R&D Program Jeremy Clark - Associate Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering Ali Ghorbani- Professor at UNB for Computer Science - CIC Director

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8:30     Coffee & Breakfast

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9:00     Welcome Address

Charmaine Dean - Vice-President, Research and International, Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at UWaterloo

Dr. Dean received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Waterloo in 1988. She was 2007 President of the Statistical Society of Canada, 2002 President of the International Biometrics Society, Western North American Region, and has served as President of the Biostatistics Section of the Statistical Society of Canada. She has given eleven years of service to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, including two as Chair of the Statistical Sciences Grant Selection Committee and one as Chair of the Discovery Accelerator Supplement Committee for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences. She has served as Chair of the NIH Biostatistics Grant Review Panel; on the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Advisory Council and on selection panels for that foundation; on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences; on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Banff International Research Station; and as a member of the College of Reviewers of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. She is a member of the Mitacs College of Reviewers and of College of Reviews of the Canada Research Chairs Program. She is Associate Editor of Biometrics, of Environmetrics, and of Statistics in Biosciences, and Senior Editor of Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology.

From 2011 to 2017, Charmaine Dean served as Dean of Science at Western University.  In her role as Dean, she provided leadership and oversight for all faculty, staff, students and operations for the Faculty of Science as well as in University matters and key relationships outside the University. Prior to her service at Western, she played a major role in establishing the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in her capacity of Associate Dean of that Faculty. Previously, she was the founding Chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University.

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9:10    MasterCard - Keynote Speaker

Jennifer M. Sloan - Senior Vice President Public Policy and Stakeholder Engagement at Mastercard Canada

Jennifer Sloan has extensive experience across all aspects of government, media and public relations, communications, and external affairs. She has worked with some of Canada’s leading government and political figures including the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister as his director of communications. As the senior vice president of public policy and stakeholder engagement at Mastercard Canada, Jennifer leads the development, management, and advocacy of the company’s public affairs while also building programs and leading initiatives to grow stakeholder partnerships. This includes managing and championing Mastercard Canada’s social impact program, Mastercard Changeworks™.  Jennifer is a member of Canada’s business leadership team (CLT). She is also the North America Region Lead for Mastercard’s Women’s Leadership Network (WLN).

Jennifer is the chair of the Canadian American Business Council (CABC) Board of Directors. The current and first independent chair of Music Canada’s Board of Directors; and is a director and the past chair of the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Board of Trust (BOT). She was recently appointed to the Advisory Board of Pow Wow Pitch. Jennifer is a Vital Voices Global Ambassador.

Jennifer was awarded the 2023 North America Partnership Award (Create Value). In 2019 Jennifer was recognized with Mastercard’s North America President’s Award. She was also honoured with a 2019 Mastercard CEO Force for Good Award. She was inducted into the Grady Fellowship at the University of Georgia in November 2013; bestowed the Henry W. Grady Alumni Award at the University of Georgia and the Sigma Kappa National Colby Award in 2007; and a Minister’s Citation for Foreign Policy Excellence in 1996.

Jennifer has a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

9:50    Break

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10:15 State of CPI

N. Asokan - Executive Director, CPI – Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo

Professor N. Asokan joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in September 2019 as a Professor and a David R. Cheriton Chair in Software Systems. He is the Executive Director of CPI.

A PDF of this presentation may be found here:

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10:35 Health Panel

Moderator:

Bill Ohlson - Executive Security Advisor within AWS’ World Wide Public Sector for Latin America, Canada & Caribbean (LCC).

Prior to AWS, Bill has held a number of CISO and senior information security roles at organizations both large and small. Bill holds both a CCSP (Certified Cloud Security Professional) and a CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional).

Panelists:

Helen Chen - PhD, MSc, BSc Director, Professional Practice Center in Health Systems Program Lead, Master of Health Informatics Program, Professor of Practice, School of Public Health Sciences, Cross-appointed in Cheriton School of Computer Science and Statistics and Actuarial Science, President and Founding Director, Canadian Personalized Healthcare Innovation Network

Dr. Chen specializes in health data analytics, health systems interoperability, and digital health. Her research focuses on developing interpretable machine learning models and generative AI algorithms to accelerate access to real-world data and evidence generation for learning health systems. Her research team works closely with clinicians to improve machine learning models in natural language processing and understanding medical records.  She leads the Master of Health Informatics Program and the Professional Practice Centre for Health Systems at the University of Waterloo.

Phil Vlach - Applied Technology Expert in Senior Living, Founder @ AgeTech Labs,  Head of IT @ Schlegel Villages, Startup Mentor @ Age-Well

Phil believes in creating better life experiences supported by technology. With 30 years of experience, Phil draws on his expertise in senior living, software, and telecom to guide companies in delivering user-centric, secure IT experiences. As a member of the Schlegel Villages IT Team, Phil strives to elevate the role of technology with a focus on resident experience and best practice across traditional IT domains.

Phil is also the founder of AgeTech Labs, a product test and review initiative benefiting both operators and innovators.

Previously, Phil led the technology portfolio at AdaptEco UK, a disruptor company in smart home automation and assisted living technologies, and served as Vice President IT at Amica Senior Lifestyles, where he helped transform the company’s applications, infrastructure, and operations, cybersecurity, and analytics programs. Other roles included consulting for Myplanet, an e-commerce studio, and network design and operations for Telus and Fido.

Phil has a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from McGill University and is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Fun Fact: Phil invented the Fun Guide App which was endorsed by Toronto Mayor John Tory and has been featured on CTV, CityNews, and in the Toronto Star.

Dr. Kyle Wilson – CIO/CPO – Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health

With a PhD, MSc, and MBA, Dr. Wilson has built an impressive career at the nexus of cybersecurity, privacy, and education. An esteemed educator, he has taught at notable colleges and universities, molding future professionals in the field.

In the K-12 educational landscape, Dr. Wilson adeptly managed both privacy and IT, emphasizing the protection of sensitive student and staff data. His efforts not only achieved regulatory compliance but also nurtured a culture of digital responsibility.

Now, as the CIO/CPO of a leading public health unit, Dr. Wilson combines advanced technology with top-tier privacy standards. He ensures health data security while promoting digital innovation. As a speaker, Dr. Wilson offers invaluable insights, drawing from a breadth of experiences and knowledge in the cybersecurity and privacy sectors.

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11:40   AI Invited Talk

Sirisha Rambhatla - Assistant Professor at UWaterloo - Management Sciences Department & Systems Design Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science - CPI Member

Sirisha Rambhatla is an Assistant Professor in the Management Sciences Department, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo (UW) where she leads the Critical ML Lab. Her research focusses on developing reliable machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models for critical real-world decision making in surgery, transplantation and healthcare, misinformation, and intelligent manufacturing using time-series and spatiotemporal modeling, representation learning, and explainable AI. Her inter-disciplinary work spanning both theory and practice of ML, has been published at top ML venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI, and clinical venues such as AMIA, Urology Clinics North America, Surgery, and American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. Recipient of the 2021 Merit Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research at the University of Southern California across Science and Engineering, Dr. Rambhatla received her Ph.D. and Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota -- Twin Cities in 2019 and 2012, respectively, where she was the recipient of the E. Bruce Lee Memorial Fellowship.

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12:15   Lunch

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1:15     Award Ceremony - Undergraduate Awards

N. Asokan - Executive Director, CPI – Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo

Andrew Walenstein - Senior Director BlackBerry Labs, Lead in Academic Partnerships and Funded R&D Program

BlackBerry’s Advanced Research Lab is an R&D-focused arm of BlackBerry whose main mission is accelerating technical innovation across BlackBerry’s extensive portfolio of products and services. Andrew Walenstein is the Senior Director of BlackBerry Labs, and leads the Advanced Research team within the lab, and runs both the funded R&D program and academic partnerships program. Before joining BlackBerry ten years ago he was formerly an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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1:30    Digital Finance Invited Talk

Jeremy Clark - Associate Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering

At Concordia, he holds the NSERC/Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton/Catallaxy Industrial Research Chair in Blockchain Technologies. He obtained his PhD from the University of Waterloo, where his gold medal dissertation was on designing and deploying secure voting systems including Scantegrity—the first cryptographically verifiable system used in a public sector election. He wrote one of the earliest academic papers on Bitcoin, completed several research projects in the area, and contributed to the first textbook. Beyond research, he has worked with several municipalities on voting technology and testified to both the Canadian Senate and House finance committees on Bitcoin.

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2:15     Autonomous Platforms & Robotics Panel

William Melek - Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at UWaterloo - Director of the Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Automation - Director of RoboHub

Dr. William Melek is the former Director of Mechatronics Engineering and the current director of RoboHub at the University of Waterloo. He is a University Research Chair and an expert on robotics, artificial intelligence, sensing, and state estimation. He earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Toronto in 2002, and then led the Artificial Intelligence Division of Alpha Laboratories Inc. He founded the University of Waterloo Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Automation in 2004 and was awarded the Young Engineer Medal of Professional Engineers Ontario in 2006. He is the past President of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS), and a senior member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Dr. Melek developed Canada’s first industry-ready modular reconfigurable robot (MMR); the state-of-the-art open architecture system is now used in the automotive sector. He has also led the way in designing practical, intelligent, and adaptive control architectures for MMRs based on machine learning. He has raised more than $15M in research funding and formed partnerships with a large collection of industry partners from various sectors in the last ten years. He holds thirteen Canadian and U.S. patents and his contributions to the robotics and autonomous systems industry have been featured in the New York Times, National Post, Globe and Mail, Discovery Channel and CBC television.

Sebastian Fischmeister - Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a licensed Professional Engineer.

Sebastian received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He subsequently worked at the University of Pennsylvania as a Post Graduate Research Associate before joining the University of Waterloo in 2008.

His current research interest concentrates on the safety and security of critical systems: evidence-based supply chain cyber security and physics-based cyber monitoring. His group works with leading industry partners in the automotive, energy, defence, and general embedded system sectors. He has received several honours and awards for his research and industry work, including best paper awards, the Ontario Early Researcher Award; and his spin-off, Palitronica, received the SVB/In-q-tel "Most Innovative Security-Focused Company of 2022".

Gennaro Notomista - Assistant Professor and the Varma Family Professor in Robotics in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo

Prior to joining University of Waterloo, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the CNRS/Inria/IRISA, Rennes, France. He received the Ph.D. degree in robotics from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA, USA) in 2020. Dr. Notomista is a Fulbright Scholar and was the recipient of the Alumni Small Grant (2020) and the IEEE ARSO Best Paper Award (2022). His main research interests lie at the intersection of design and control of robotic systems for long-duration autonomy with applications to environmental monitoring.

Oliver Schneider -  Associate Professor, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher, and haptician at the University of Waterloo (Department of Management Science and Engineering)

His work focuses on HX research: understanding haptic experience design and evaluation, and enabling anyone, anywhere to be able work with haptic technology. Oliver's background is in Computer Science, with a PhD (2016) and MSc (2012) from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a Postdoc at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. Oliver has also collaborated with Disney Research on novel haptic interactions as an intern and then consultant. Oliver publishes in venues including ACM CHI and UIST; IEEE Haptics Symposium, EuroHaptics, and World Haptics; and the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS), and is spearheading a cross-Canada effort to create a new interdisciplinary training program for HX research and design (http://canhaptics.ca).

Andrew Walenstein - Senior Director BlackBerry Labs, Lead in Academic Partnerships and Funded R&D Program

BlackBerry’s Advanced Research Lab is an R&D-focused arm of BlackBerry whose main mission is accelerating technical innovation across BlackBerry’s extensive portfolio of products and services. Andrew Walenstein is the Senior Director of BlackBerry Labs, and leads the Advanced Research team within the lab, and runs both the funded R&D program and academic partnerships program. Before joining BlackBerry ten years ago he was formerly an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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3:30     Break

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3:45 State of the National Cybersecurity Consortium

Ken Barker - Scientific Director, National Cybersecurity Consortium - Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary

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Ken Barker Ph.D., FCIPS, I.S.P., ITCP is a professor of computer science at the University of Calgary. He holds a PhD in computing science from the University of Alberta (1990) and has many years of experience working with industrial computer systems. He has interest in system integration, distributed systems, database systems, and the privacy and security of data repositories. He has served as the dean of the faculty of science and as head of computer science at the University of Calgary. He is the director of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance and the president of the Alberta body of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS Alberta). He is one of the founding directors of the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) and is its Scientific Director. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a Fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Life-time Member of the ACM. He is the President of CIPS Alberta and is a past president of the Canadian Association of Computer Science (CACS/AIC) in addition to having served on the Computer Science Accreditation Council. As the director of research laboratories at the University of Calgary and University of Manitoba he has supervised over 70 graduate students, in addition to several post-doctorates and research assistants. Dr. Barker has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications.

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4:00    Keynote Address - Research & Development Update from the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC)

Ali Ghorbani - Professor at UNB for Computer Science - CIC Director

Dr. Ghorbani is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and founding director of the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity he established in 2016. In addition, he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick from 2008 to 2017.  He is the co-inventor of four awarded and one filed patent in Cybersecurity and Web Intelligence. He has published over three hundred peer-reviewed articles during his career. In addition, he has supervised over 250 research associates, postdoctoral fellows, and students. Dr. Ghorbani developed several technologies adopted by high-tech companies and co-founded three startups: Sentrant Security, EyesOver Technologies, and Cydarien Security, in 2013, 2015, and 2019.  He co-founded the UNB-NRC Cybersecurity Collaboration Consortium and the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) in 2019 and 2020, respectively. He co-founded the Privacy, Security, Trust (PST) Network in Canada and its annual international conference. Dr. Ghorbani served as the co-Editor-in-Chief of "Computational Intelligence: An International Journal" from 2007 to 2017. Dr. Ghorbani is the recipient of the 2017 Startup Canada Senior Entrepreneur Award and one of Canada's top 25 Canadian immigrants of 2019. In addition, he was named one of the 40 inspiring Canadians in the book ‘Forty Brilliant Canadians and Their Vision for the Nation’, by Mark Bulgutch (2022).

Abstract: Research & Development Update from the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC)

The Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC) is involved in research and development in several areas, including network security (intrusion detection and prevention, Dark Web, and malware analysis), systems security (mobile, software, and IoT), security analysis and risk management, security visualization, IoT-Big data security and privacy, critical infrastructure protection, and human-centric cybersecurity. Dr. Ghorbani will be discussing the datasets developed by him and his team at CIC over the last 15 years, which are used to train and test cybersecurity solutions. The presentation will also include updates on CIC's latest R&D projects, project details, and research findings. Dr. Ghorbani will explain how these findings can be applied in the market. Lastly, he will share his vision for how the Canadian cybersecurity ecosystem can foster world-class research collaboration, innovation, training, talent development, and entrepreneurship to drive meaningful change and advance cybersecurity across all sectors and regions of Canada. NCC has opened a new chapter of collaborative innovation in cybersecurity in Canada.

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4:30     Posters and Dinner

Judges:

Andrew Walenstein - Senior Director BlackBerry Labs, Lead in Academic Partnerships and Funded R&D Program

Jeremy Clark - Associate Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering

Ali Ghorbani - Professor at UNB for Computer Science - CIC Director

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