Monday, April 3, 2023

Inaugural Black Film Festival hailed as a resounding success

Left to right: Dr. Christopher Taylor (Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism), Nolan O'Cane (Princess Cinema), Ola Idris (Community Engagement Manager), John Tutt (owner, Princess Cinema), Jennisha Wilson (Director, Anti-Racism), Yasmin Wallace and Stephanie Steph (anti-racism project coordinators).

By Tracelyn Cornelius.

The Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism (EDI-RO) office teamed up with the Congress of Black Women (Waterloo Region chapter) and Princess Cinema to host the inaugural Black at Waterloo: Black Film Festival in March. The purpose of the festival is to expose the Waterloo Region to the diversity of Black cinematography and to highlight opportunities in the Black Canadian film industry to Black youth. In an effort to reduce barriers to youth participation in the film festival, organizers provided complimentary tickets to high school students in the region, who were desirous of attending and discounted tickets to university students.

“The Black Film Festival was an excellent opportunity for the University of Waterloo to demonstrate its commitment to community engagement and outreach, particularly with Black youth in the Waterloo Region,” said Dr. Christopher S. Taylor, associate vice-president, EDI-RO. “What started as a conversation between the Congress of Black Women and EDI-RO, grew to become the region's first Black Film Festival. I am proud to see that our office can support different ways of knowing and expose youth to Black-centred knowledge, culture and thought, that extends beyond our campuses.”  

Left to right: Deanna Calford (Member, Congress of Black Women), Dr. Christopher Taylor (Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism), Dorothy McCabe (Mayor, Waterloo), Ola Idris (Community Engagement Manager), Marcia Smellie (President, Congress of Black Women).

In addition to the students, youth and seniors attending the Black Film Festival, several leaders from the region, such as MP Mike Morrice, MPP Laura Mae Lindo and Mayor Dorothy McCabe supported the event. 

“It was a palpable experience,” said Marcia Smellie, president of the Congress of Black Women, Waterloo Chapter. “You could see it in the impact on the people who attended as they exited the theatre. They were excited and would share that the Film Festival should have been happening for years, adding that they can’t wait for the next one.”  

The festival opened on Wednesday, March 15, 2023 with two short documentaries: Reel Black: Our Film Stories, an exploration of Black Canadian filmmaking by emerging filmmakers Christian Anderson and Ajahnis Charley and a rare screening of Eyes of the Rainbow, a 1997 documentary that looks at the experiences of escaped political prisoner Assata Shakur in Cuba and unique Afro-Cuban practices.  

There were also screenings of the debut film of Black Canadian director Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, When Morning Comes, which tells the story of a young Jamal who must deal with leaving Jamaica to immigrate to Canada.  

As a palette cleanser between the Canadian features, organizers featured the Academy Award-winning documentary from director Questlove (from The Roots) Summer of Soul, a historical key feature of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival with never-before-seen footage of greats such as Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson and a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder. 

As an ode to Black Canadian cinema, organizers closed out the festival with screenings of Brother, a tribute to Black masculinity, family and growing up in Scarborough, by renowned Black Canadian director Clement Virgo.  

The Black Film Festival created and celebrated community, shared learning and a love for the cinematic arts. The Congress of Black Women are hopeful of future successful collaborations in 2024, and beyond. 

Waterloo Staff Conference: meet the 2023 Keynotes

A message from Organizational and Human Development (OHD).

The countdown is on! In just one week, the Waterloo Staff Conference (April 11 and 12, 2023) will kick off, ushering in two days of award-winning keynotes, engaging workshops, and opportunities to connect with campus colleagues. We invite you to explore the inspiring professional and personal development sessions that are still open for registration on Portal.  

Meet the 2023 Keynotes 

Neil Pasricha: The Science of Positive Growth Mindset  
 
A Harvard MBA, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning blogger, and one of the most popular TED speakers in the world, Neil Pasricha is “a pied piper of happiness” who dazzles audiences with ideas that skyrocket happiness into the stratosphere. With infectious enthusiasm, heartfelt authenticity, and a “what works” authority, Pasricha draws on the latest research in happiness to increase individual performance and create a more positive and productive workplace. 
 
Neil will open the conference at Hagey Hall on Tuesday, April 11, 2023, at 8:45 a.m. Register today! 

Christine Robinson & Kris MacQueen: Interactive Keynote with Juice Inc   

For over a decade, Christine Robinson has led organizational development and HR leadership teams committed to transforming and humanizing workplace culture. She believes that humanity in workplace design is our most important pursuit.  

Kris MacQueen is a seasoned facilitator and experienced people leader. He has extensive experience building and managing diverse teams in both brick-and-mortar establishments and nationwide remote teams.  
 
With Juice Inc, Christine and Kris will host an interactive keynote, that looks at innovation and how your ideas can shape the future at Waterloo!  

Register here for this interactive session on Tuesday, April 11, 2023, at 10:30 a.m 

President Vivek Goel: President's Forum - Waterloo at 100 Vision  
 
We are excited to include a special feature session of the President’s Forum: Waterloo at 100 Vision. Join President Goel as he shares Waterloo’s vision and guiding principles, discusses the differentiators enabling success into the future, reviews the Global Futures, and shares forecasted areas of focus for our University’s 100^th anniversary. 
 
President Vivek Goel will take the stage on Tuesday, April 11, 2023, at 1:15 p.m. Register for his session here. 

Cassie Holmes: Happier Hour  
 
Based on her wildly popular MBA class at UCLA, Professor Cassie Holmes will share how to immediately improve your life by changing how you perceive and invest your time. Through her groundbreaking research, Cassie will teach you how small changes can have an enormous impact—helping you feel less overwhelmed, more present, and happier in your life overall—things that money can’t buy. It all starts by transforming just one hour into a happier hour. 
 
Cassie will close this year’s conference on Wednesday, April 12, 2023, at 2:30 p.m. Register today! 

For more information, check out the Waterloo Staff Conference agenda and the know before you go page.  

AI in health care challenges us to define what better, people-centred care looks like

By Catherine Burns. This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

From faster and more accurate disease diagnosis to models of using health care resources more efficiently, AI promises a new frontier of effective and efficient health care. If it’s done right, AI may allow for more people-centred care and for clinicians to spend more time with people, doing the work they enjoy most. But to achieve these aspirations, foundational work must occur in how we operate today and in defining what health care looks like in the future.

AI technologies are only as reliable as the data that drives them. To unlock the power of AI, it requires us to become better at sharing health data between primary care providers, specialists, hospitals, research universities, health companies and patients to develop reliable and accurate models. Without this data, AI technologies may make mistakes, generate inappropriate solutions and encourage inappropriate trust in their answers.

Our health data will also need to be better quality. Issues with noisy sensors, incomplete documentation and different data types must be solved. Health data will have to travel across individual health journeys through multiple providers to avoid reaching solutions that are limited in time and context. In some cases, AI solutions are being developed from clinical trial data. Clinical trial data sets are well known to exclude participants of certain ages, demographics or with multiple morbidities.

Our community and small hospitals can be a solution to this, and they need a louder voice in the health care conversation. More Canadians visit community hospitals than academic hospitals, so their data and experience must be part of the solution. Our small hospitals provide many services to our remote and often underserved communities. For this reason, the voices of those working in our remote communities are critically important at this time, where they are overworked and under-resourced. AI must be designed with a goal of promoting greater access and equity in health care. This means AI must be designed to support equity, be broadly inclusive and be designed to partner with our communities.

We need to understand what it means to have successful health care. Without understanding what a high-performance health-care system looks like, technologies will not be developed to align for effective solutions. We must define the right metrics to get the right results. Do we want to reduce the cost of surgery? Or do we want to reduce the likelihood of follow-up surgery years later? Those goals may have different solutions.

Similarly, do we believe strongly in growing towards a coordinated and shared health care vision? If we do, and I hope we do, AI must be people-centred and designed from an interprofessional lens. It means we must learn and teach each other more about practices of care, outcomes, technology, decision-making and quality of life.

AI learns from our data, so we must provide the proper foundation. Our next generation of AI designers will design their technologies for the problems we tell them are important. We need to define what those problems are and what success would mean.

IST's winter 2023 newsletter now available

A message from Information Systems & Technology (IST)

The Winter 2023 issue of the IST Newsletter is now available. There are several new, exciting projects underway that we’re excited to share with you. We're actioning the IT Review recommendations, sharing an update on our LMS Review consultation findings, discussing Vice Society ransomware attacks, and introducing new work including our asset management initiative, the JSM usability project, the IT services for researchers’ initiative, and an intranet project.

Jump over to Sway to learn more about what we've been up to.