MARCH 2021

This is the 3rd event in a series of ethics dialogues leading up to our April 19th-21st Symposium on Ethics in an Age of Smart Systems, co-organized by the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP) at Loyola University Chicago, the AI4Society Signature Area at the University of Alberta and the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin.

For this Dialogue on Whistleblower Protections: Can organizations self-regulate? Our featured guests are:

• Rita de Sousa Costa - TMT Associate at PLMJ, Portugal
• Inês de Castro Ruivo - PLMJ TMT, Telecommunications, Media and Technology
• Tim Hannigan - University of Alberta Assistant Professor - Department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Management

Visit the CFP for our upcoming Symposium Ethics in the Age of Smart Systems here.

Registration is open until Tuesday, March 16th 9:00 pm MST | 10:00 pm CST | 4:00 am Berlin | 3:00 am Lisbon
After filling this form we will send to your email the necessary links to join us on the event: https://framaforms.org/dialogue-on-whistleblower-protections-1615403767

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Award winning international legal expert and path breaking LegalTech entrepreneur, Ms Suzanna Kalendzhian. Her firm, Legal Advice Middle East, is an AI-powered legal services marketplace which operates in 15 countries across the region and helps people access to justice by allowing them to find, communicate and transact with lawyers online.

Ms. Kalendzhian has also won the award for Most Innovative Woman in Legal Technology 2017 & Best Online Legal Advisory 2017. Legal Advice was also nominated for Dubai SME Stars of Business Awards.

Her book written along with some of the best legal experts from around the world on ‘Future of Law’ is used as a prescribed text book at University of Edinburgh.

Saturday, 20th March, 2021 | 4:30 PM UAE Time | 90 minutes including Q&A
Registration link (compulsory): https://cutt.ly/BzsIaGM
All participants will receive e-Certificate from Ureka UK.

Digital Law Tea Time Talks!

• March 25 (12:00 - 01:00) Alan Chan, PhD student at MILA, Quebec
  Digital Law Tea Time Talks are a chance for law and tech geeks to learn about topics at the intersection of those fields. A short presentation on a work in progress, recent article or experience will be followed by open Q&A. The 12-1 pm time block includes a "digital commute" allowing everyone to sign in and get settled. The actual presentation and discussion will go from 12:10-12:50 MT.

  Google Meets Link: https://meet.google.com/ges-xfow-qsj

Hosted by the Digital Law & Innovation Society. Find us at https://dlis.ca/

Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

The Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) in collaboration with the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Education Section, is holding a series of free virtual networking workshops, each thematically focused on a UN Sustainable Development Goal. The workshops are intended to bring together early-career researchers (ECRs) from all around the world interested in establishing connections to colleagues in their field.

The workshops are intended to bring together early-career researchers from all around the world interested in establishing connections to colleagues in their field. This networking webinar will focus on Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities.

• March 24th, 2021
• More information here
• Register before March 21 here

AI4Society Dialogs

On March 8th our fifth episode was premiered, Michael Frishkopf: Advancing ethnomusicology with AI. Visit the official site AI4Society Dialogues to hear this and our previous episodes.

What's coming - Episode Six: Nidhi Hegde: Privacy, Ethics and AI

The use of artificial intelligence across many high risk domains is raising many ethical questions. This includes issues around privacy and biases in data as well as questions about equity and inclusion. Dr. Nidhi Hegde is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta whose work is helping to drive new approaches in differential privacy.

Release date: March 22nd, 2021

Listen to all episodes on these platforms!

New AI4Society Collaboratories

We happily welcome Nidhi Hegde and Geoffrey Rockwell to start their work on the collaboratory called AI Ethics and Privacy, they will be working with a great team of researchers listed on their AI4Society Forum's website.

Secondly, a Collaboratory called AI 4 Sound Societies (AI4S2): Adaptive Sonic Environments for Well-Being will be guided by Faculty of Music professors Michael Frishkopf and Scott Smallwood alongside a fantastic group of researchers.

We are looking forward to the outcomes of these initiatives!

Wondering about hosting a Collaboratory with us?

Please refer to our information page, and don't hesitate to contact us for more information if you have a proposal for us!

CIHR: Health Research Training Platform Pilot

With the HRTP Pilot, CIHR will support the development of research leaders of tomorrow by equipping trainees and early career researchers (ECRs) with the experiences and skills needed to lead high-impact, interdisciplinary health research careers in a rapidly evolving research landscape.
Funding pools for this opportunity include: AI, Public Health and Equity; Boys, Men and Masculinities; Girls and Women's Health and Wellness; Integrating Mental Health Services within Primary and Community Care; Stigma Reduction and Life Course Mental Wellness for LGBTQ/2S Populations.

Application deadline: April 21st, 2021

Book Review

Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy and the Integrity of Social Life by Helen Nissenbaum (2010).

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg famously said “the age of privacy is over”. (Kirkpatrick, 2010) He’s walked back that statement in the ensuing years. However, there is a sense that with the proliferation of social media and the extent to which we are sharing information online, that we’ve evolved into a society that doesn’t value privacy as much as past generations.
At the same time, we also proclaim that privacy is important and should be protected. Regulators are looking towards privacy legislation like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or Canada’s proposed Bill C-11, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, as a means of governing the digital sphere.

When it comes to our data, our words and actions seem out of sync. Do we actually value privacy?

Read the full review by Katrina Ingram here.

Who

Any UofAlberta community member (faculty, researcher, or student) interested in any and all aspects of Artificial Intelligence!

Why

• To stay informed about AI-related funding opportunities and events (research grants, internships, competitions, ...)
• To access AI4Society support for research and teaching initiatives
• To profile your research and to collaborate with other community members, through our Forum.

How

Send an email with a brief description of your affiliation, interests, and activities related to artificial intelligence to ai4s@ualberta.ca.

AI-centered Projects with ScotiaBank

ScotiaBank is interested in the development of AI-centered projects, to be supported via an existing donation managed by the Department of Computing Science. Interest is sought in the areas of: information retrieval related to chatbots and natural language processing, fraud detection and prediction from transaction data, call-centre topic labelling and prediction, customizing GPT3 for banking chatbot purposes.

Please contact csacr@ualberta.ca by March 19th for further details.

Postdoctoral Fellow Position in Network Science

The Postdoctoral Fellow will be based in the Women’s and Gender Studies and the Digital Humanities programs and will work closely with Prof. Deb Verhoeven on research concerned with dynamics and control of complex networks and associated research projects.
This position will be part of an international research project, funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council investigating gendered inequality in the global screen industries: “GEP Analysis: Assessing, understanding, and modelling the impact of gender equity policies (GEP) in the film industry”.
We are looking for a Postdoctoral Fellow, who has extensive hands-on experience in network science, social network analysis, simulation, mathematical modelling, and machine learning. This Network Scientist/Analyst position is responsible for conducting network analysis on large data sets.

Find more information here

EDI Building Layout Design Intern

Under the general direction of the Department of Computing Science EDI Committee and supported by the AI4Society Signature Area, the EDI Building Layout Design Intern will be the primary collector and organizer of materials on building layout design related to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).
This position has a max length of 100 hours at a rate of $19.69/hour. The desired output after the 100 hours is a document of publication quality (venue TBD) that includes ideal features related to EDI to include in the layout design of a building, along with features to ideally avoid.

Find more information here

Call For Papers: Replaying Japan 2021

Are you interested in Japanese game culture? The ninth international Replaying Japan Conference will be held online August 9-13 2021 - hosted by the University of Alberta. This year’s theme is Artificial Intelligence in Japanese Games. We invite submissions to be submitted to replayingjapan@gmail.com as a MS Word Document. The abstract should be no more than 500 words.
Replaying Japan 2021 is being organized by a partnership of the AI4Society signature area, the Prince Takamado Japan Centre (PTJC), and the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) at the University of Alberta. It is organized in collaboration with the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies, the University of Delaware, Bath Spa University, Seijoh University, University of Liège, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and DiGRA Japan.
Proposals in Japanese are most welcome! 日本語の発表要旨はrcgs[a]st.ritsumei.ac.jpにご送付ください。詳しくはRCGSのウェブサイトをご覧ください。

• More information here
• Deadline is March 31st, 2021
• Notification of Acceptance: May 2021

Call For Proposals: Ethics in the Age of Smart Systems Symposium

In collaborative partnership, the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, the AI4Society Signature Area at the University of Alberta, and the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy at Loyola University Chicago are co-organizing a Symposium on Ethics Dialogues in the Age of Smart Systems. This Symposium also marks the 10th Annual International symposium for the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (#CDEP10th) and is the first convening of virtual delegates for this online gathering.
This Symposium brings together researchers from Canada, the USA and Germany and beyond working in the interdisciplinary area of AI, ethics and policy. We welcome papers that deal with systemic issues around the social impact and ethics of big data, automated systems, artificial intelligence, and robotics. It builds on the Ethics Dialogues series that has been running since February 2021.

• Find the full information here
• Deadline is March 19th, 2021

Opportunity for Engaging with High-Schools

Youreka Canada is an educational organization with branches at six Canadian universities that offers a research and data science curriculum to 200+ high school and undergraduate students each year.

During the program, high school students, paired with undergraduates, apply our curriculum to complete a novel research project. At the end of the program, our students compete at a regional symposium, which graduate students adjudicate. Top teams compete at our national symposium, where the winners will have the opportunity to publish in the Canadian Science Fair Journal.

We are also working with an educational lab in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, where we are running a multi-year study on the effectiveness of our educational model. We currently have a paper accepted to the Canadian Society for the Study of Education Conference 2021.ps://youreka-textbook.netlify.app/.

We are looking for diverse and talented individuals to join our organization. In particular, we are looking for individuals who have an interest in any of the following areas:

1) Developing a research and data science curriculum for students across Canada.
2) Collaborating with students, researchers, and external organizations across Canada.
3) Leading a national undergraduate training program for educational skills.
4) Performing educational research (proficiency in research, R, Python, or LaTeX appreciated).
5) Developing a nation-wide hackathon.

If you are interested, please send an email to Eddie Guo, Associate Director of Programs, at eddie.guo@yourekacanada.org

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