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Friday, October 18, 2019

Ethical by design

We have an intimate relationship with technology. It is infused in our daily life, from our home and car to our finances and health care. As we welcome new technologies into our most personal spaces, there is a growing recognition that design-based thinking needs to consider ethics and the users it serves.

There is no cure for cancer, but treatment could be dramatically improved thanks to an invention out of the University of Waterloo.

Parsin Haji Reza and his team at the university are working to revolutionize cancer detection.

“We discovered that we can use our technology to distinguish between the healthy and cancerous tissue,” said Haji Reza, director of the PhotoMedicine Labs at the university.  

This week, the denizens of Twitter began posting photos of themselves with an odd array of labels. Some, like “face,” were confusingly benign, while others appeared to verify harder truths: Your humble writer was declared a cipher, a nobody, “a person of no influence.” Fair enough. But many of the labels were more troubling. There were rape suspects and debtors. A person would be labeled not just black, but “negro” and “negroid.”

A second-year Waterloo Engineering student shared the top prize at a recent hackathon focused on the creation of technology to protect privacy.

Lena Nguyen of systems design engineering teamed up with Anne Chung, a second-year computer science student at the University of Waterloo, to develop software that puts browsers on kids mode by disabling web page fields asking for sensitive information such as addresses and credit card numbers.

Cancer treatment could be dramatically improved by an invention at the University of Waterloo to precisely locate the edges of tumors during surgery to remove them.

The new imaging technology uses the way light from lasers interacts with cancerous and healthy tissues to distinguish between them in real-time and with no physical contact, an advancement with the potential to eliminate the need for secondary surgeries to get missed malignant tissue.

A Waterloo startup has partnered with a German automotive giant to demonstrate how its artificial intelligence technology can potentially accelerate the development of the electronic brain behind autonomous vehicles.

Artificial neural networks simulate the human brain's ability to make decisions, to learn and to adapt to the environment. A team of engineers at Audi saw a reduction of more than 90 per cent in the number of hours spent processing and refining data for those networks using technology developed by Waterloo-based DarwinAI.