Keynote 2026

Change reaches us in different ways. Some of it is planned, announced, and mapped out in advance. Some of it arrives unannounced and asks us to adapt faster than we’d like. And some of it is still ours to shape, through the choices we make together each day. Whatever form it takes, change can feel like being handed a map with half the roads missing.

This keynote is about what happens to people and teams when the ground shifts faster than the relationships that hold them together. A new structure, a new colleague, or a new way of working can bring people together on paper long before they feel like a team. Closing that gap is rarely about finding the perfect plan. It’s about how people see their work, and each other.

Seeing teams as part of a larger system, the talk offers a different way to read the map. Rather than starting only from where we stand today, we’ll look at our work from two other directions: from the people we serve, and from the future we want to build. Along the way, we’ll explore why uncertainty lands so differently on different people, what helps teams hold together, and where each of us has more room to act than it might first appear.

You’ll leave with a few simple questions to bring back to your team, so you can start drawing the map ahead together.

Chun is an Online Instructional Designer and Learning Specialist in Organizational & Human Development at the University of Waterloo. He began his career as a biologist, studying how endocrine responses help animals keep their salt and water in balance as conditions change. Today he asks the same question of people and teams: how do we stay steady while everything around us moves? As an executive and team coach, he helps leaders and teams build trust, adapt, and work well together through change.

Along the way, he became a certified executive coach, a certified accessibility professional, and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. He holds a PhD in Biology from York University and an MEd from OISE, University of Toronto. He also serves in governance and committee roles with the University of Toronto and the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being rapidly adopted across industries despite its known security and privacy vulnerabilities. In this talk, I will provide a systematic overview of the key security and privacy challenges facing AI systems, along with potential countermeasures. I will then explore how AI security differs fundamentally from traditional security and discuss the implications of these differences for defense design. Finally, I will present several promising strategies for developing more robust defenses that address the root causes of failures in existing AI security approaches.

Florian is a professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (joined in 2017) and a member of the CrySP group. He was the NSERC/RBC chair in data security (2019-2025) and served as the inaugural director of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (2018 – 2021). Before he worked as chief research expert at SAP in Karlsruhe (2005 – 2016) and as a software architect at Arxan Technologies in San Francisco (2002 – 2004). He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2010) and a master's degree from Purdue University (2000). He is an IEEE Fellow (2026), an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2019), a winner of the Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award from CS-Can/Info-Can (2019) and a winner of the Faculty of Math Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award (2022).