We invite you to join us on Wednesday April 3, 2024 for our annual Desmarais Family Summit.
The Summit is an interactive exhibition that gives our Global Engagement students the unique opportunity to share their research projects on this year’s theme, “Me and my Robot.” You can view footage from last year's Summit here.
Starting at 6:30 pm at the United College Ceremonial Fire Grounds (weather permitting), we'll head to United College’s Alumni Hall at 7:00 pm to hear from panel speakers Ryan Gariepy, Heather Woods, AJung Moon, Evan Ackerman and Kristen Thomasen and interact with the student projects. Refreshments will be served!
This is a public event featuring projects by our Global Engagement Seminar students and contributions from our six distinguished 2024 Jarislowsky Fellows.
Please register below and email Brooke Barnes with any questions.
Register for the Summit
Meet the Panel Speakers
Ryan Gariepy
Ryan Gariepy is co-founder and CTO of both Clearpath Robotics and OTTO Motors by Rockwell Automation. He is a regular speaker, panelist, and expert guest on topics including robotics, AI, and technology policy. Ryan completed both a BASc in Mechatronics Engineering and a MASc in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo and has over seventy pending patents in the field of autonomous systems.
Heather Woods
Heather Woods is a scholar and researcher of digital rhetoric and the author of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right with Leslie Hahner. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Communication Studies at Kansas State University, and her areas of expertise include memes, virtual assistants Siri and Alexa, online activism and social media, and smart homes.
Kristen Thomasen
Kristen Thomasen is a leading expert in robotics law and policy and an assistant professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC. Specializing in drone regulation and the privacy impacts of robotic technologies and artificial intelligence, her research is focused on the ways automation and robotic technologies in public spaces affect equity, accessibility, and privacy, and how automation and surveillance can introduce privatization into the public sphere.
AJung Moon
AJung Moon is an experimental roboticist, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at McGill University, and Director of the McGill Responsible Autonomy & Intelligent System Ethics (RAISE) lab. She investigates how robots and AI systems influence the way people move, behave, and make decisions in order to inform how we can design and deploy such autonomous intelligent systems more responsibly.
Evan Ackerman
Evan Ackerman is the digital senior editor at IEEE Spectrum, the award-winning flagship publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology on topics ranging from the emotional expressiveness of Disney’s robots and Tesla’s humanoid robot to human-robot teams for first-responder situations where remote control and communications are unreliable.
Meet the Students
Group 1 - Robo Jury
Juliana Kim, Annie Gao, Evie Bouganim, Stephanie Muresan
Robots vs Humans – who (or what) should be held accountable for mistakes during a procedure involving a robot? Who will be the accused in a malpractice claim?
Join the Robo Jury group for a glimpse into the future of medical malpractice cases, where robots are playing a larger role in the medical field and are intertwined with humanity. Explore Canada’s current policies on robotics in the healthcare sector and broaden your understanding of the ethics and liabilities involved.
Discover what your stance is based on what you value through a series of interactive games and determine how you would want to shape our future world
Group 2 - Evolutionary
AJ Drake, Angela He, Kevin Wang
Team Evolutionary has taken major robot representations in film and TV in the past century and analyzed how changes in public consciousness affected the different types of robots portrayed in the selected media. By taking a longitudinal look at the diverse ways robots are shown to the public through mass media, different trends emerge. These are mapped out through various visualizations to spark conversations with the audience
Group 3 - Vanguard Automata
Julia Berg, Kritik Kaushal, Emily Yang, Ryan Yua
Vanguard Automata is an interdisciplinary group researching the impacts of robotic technologies in military applications. The group explores the potential upsides, downsides, and realistic futuristic scenarios of lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) in war and draws similarities to historical breakthroughs in war such as nuclear weapons. The psychological effects of the uncanny as a weapon in war are also explored with specific examples.
Group 4 - The Effect of Appearance on Assistive Robotic Devices
Rawan Miznazi, Thushanth Parameswaran, Savraj Sahota
Appearance is crucial in almost all design aspects, as it draws you to a product. This generally extends to robotics, where appearance is expected to play a vital role in the design of robots, yet it is often overlooked. Upon analyzing exoskeletons that help children walk, they lacked an aesthetic appearance. If appearance is a consideration in all other design aspects, why does it seem to be overlooked in this case? During the past three months, our group evaluated whether the appearance of a robot to help children walk affects their desire to use the device.
Group 5 - AKA
Ajit Rakhra, Arvind Nagabhirava, Kae Ainsworth
Automation forcing people to choose between early retirement and retraining? Athletes being coached by robots? University courses that teach students how to adapt to a robotized world?
These scenarios sound like the stuff of the future... What if I told you we’re already there?
By imagining how current events might unfold in a robotized future, this book investigates the similarities between the challenges of tomorrow and the challenges of today. Each chapter consists of a story that takes place in a robotized future before investigating the real-world grounding that the story is rooted in. In the form of first and third-person narratives, interviews, diary entries and more, this book asks the audience to consider the future impacts of robot and AI technologies by highlighting the precedents that are being set in the present.
Group 6 - TechTalk
Justin Chapman, Catherine Szarek, Anthea Tawiah
We are TechTalk, and we are here to educate everyday audiences about robots! We’re debunking myths and misconceptions about robotics and showing people what's actually going on behind the scenes in all those viral videos and news articles. Ultimately, our goal is to educate people who don’t typically engage in robotics so we can gain different perspectives and eventually see a more academically diverse group working on the inventions of tomorrow.
Our research shows that our target audience, more often than not, discovers new tech through social media. So that’s how we’ll show our project— a collection of entertaining bite sized clips, posts and more to engage our audience!