September 21th, 2021

AI4Society calls for proposals for activities, grant support, big questions, and other initiatives for the 2021-2022 academic year.

The Call
AI4Society is a University of Alberta Signature Area that brings together interdisciplinary research around artificial intelligence, big data, ethics, and social impact. Researchers at the University of Alberta in any discipline are invited to propose projects, grant preparation ideas, and big question events for funding support from AI4Society. Applications should:

• Be led by a full-time faculty member of the University of Alberta
• Include an interdisciplinary team of researchers. (Researchers at other universities and community researchers are welcome)
• Be relevant to the focus of the AI4Society Signature Area

Applications will be reviewed over the Fall 2021 term. We will continue to accept applications over the academic year or until our funding is finished.

More information here

The AI Arts & Culture Salon

As part of AI4Society Collaboratories initiative, between January and April 2021, Dr. Jonathan Cohn presented a stellar line up of researchers presenting their work on his Salon. We had a fantastic reception by the community and we want you to revisit the series through our recordings archives

What is AI4Society?

Thank you for joining us! We are a Signature Area at the University of Alberta, a VPRI (research) initiative that focus in the development of AI in the modern world, we have a large variety of initiatives and events. Please visit our Forum and website for more information.
You will find one of these every fifteen days, if you think some information that can be include please contact us at ai4s@ualberta.ca

AI4Society Team

What we have done so far?

Interested in our activities of our first year? check our annual report by clicking on the image below. We thank all our members, students, and associates for the hard work and support, this is a shared success!

EVENTS

AI4Society is proud to be part of the organizing team of this important event:

UNESCO Working Group on Information Accessibility (WGIA) Hosts Global Gathering

28 September 2021

2nd Annual Artificial Intelligence for Information Accessibility (AI4IA) Conference Highlights the International Day for Universal Access to Information (IDUAI)

The UNESCO Working Group on Information Accessibility (WGIA) is set to host its 2nd Annual Artificial Intelligence for Information Accessibility (AI4IA) Conference bringing together global experts to draw attention to the International Day for Universal Access to Information (IDUAI). Recognised annually on the 28th of September, this year's themes are “What We Know about our Right to Know” and "The Right to Know - Building Back Better with Access to Information". The theme will highlight the role of access to information laws and their implementation to build back strong institutions for the public good and sustainable development, as well as to strengthen the right to information and international cooperation in the field of implementing this human right.

This year’s event is hosted in collaboration with the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies (KIAS) and the AI for Society (AI4S), both at University of Alberta, Canada, the International Centre for Information Ethics (ICIE), Future Africa at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy (CNED) in ORF, India and the Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica, all under the auspices of the UNESCO Caribbean Office and the UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa.

You can find out more information and register at https://www.i-c-i-e.org/ai4ia.

WaiSYMPOSIUM
Canadian Leaders in Artificial Intelligence

As per popular demand, we are bringing Canadian leaders in AI from industry, entrepreunership and research to talk about a variety of topics in the upcoming event by Women in AI Canada: #WaiSYMPOSIUM.

We have joined hands with our partner organizations AltaML, Next AI and University of Alberta, Faculty of Science to bring you this symposium.

• Are you looking to learn more about AI in Industry?
• Are you looking to build an AI startup, but need guidance?
• Are you looking to learn more about the most recent research topics in AI?

WaiSYMPOSIUM is a great opportunity to listen to distinguished women leaders from industry, startup accelerators and universities in a single event. You will be able to directly converse them during the Q&A towards the end of the event.

Register today to book your spots here!

October 1, 12:00 - 1:30 pm ET

NRC Responsible Data Speakers Series.

AI for Logistics Program / Programme IA Logistique (NRC/CNRC)

Please join us for the 2021-22 NRC Responsible Data Speakers Series.

The bi-weekly series structure, as well as the choice of themes, reflect the feedback we received following the Forum last winter. We have maintained our focus on research, data sharing, and research ethics-type concerns. Talks will occur on alternating Tuesday afternoons (Eastern Time).

This year’s themes are:

1. Responsible Collection and Use of Internet-Derived Data
2. Cultural Knowledge and Community Data in research and publication
3. De-identification and Anonymization of Data for Sharing or Collaborative Research Purposes
4. Interoperability in Research Data Storage and Analysis Platforms

Theme 1 Details: Responsible Use of Internet-Derived Data

September 28: Considerations when using consented and unconsented Internet data in research - Shikha Gupta, Université de Montréal, Adjunct Professor, Queens University

Register here

5th International School on Deep Learning

(DeepLearn 2022 Winter), Bournemouth, UK, January 17-21, 2022

DeepLearn 2022 Winter will be a research training event with a global scope aiming at updating participants on the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of deep learning.
Graduate students, postgraduate students and industry practitioners will be typical profiles of participants. However, there are no formal pre-requisites for attendance in terms of academic degrees, so people less or more advanced in their career will be welcome as well.

More information 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.

Grant Opportunities

UofA and EPS Seed Grant Program

The Office of the Vice-President (Research and Innovation) (OVPRI), the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), and the AI4Society Signature Area (AI4S) at the University of Alberta, in partnership with the Edmonton Police Service (EPS), are pleased to announce the launch of Year 2 of our University of Alberta and Edmonton Police Service Seed Grant Program.

These grants provide support for the co-development of research collaborations between University of Alberta researchers and members of Edmonton Police Service. The program will fund up to three projects per year. Grants are capped at a maximum of $10,000 each, are to be carried out over a period of 18-months, and should focus on one or more the following areas:

• Policing among marginalized populations
• Police legitimacy and racism
• Use of data and analytics in policing
• History of Colonialism and the impacts on policing today
• Evaluation of Edmonton Police Service training initiatives

The Program Guidelines are attached for your information. They can also be found on our Internal Research Funding website. Applications are to be submitted to Leslie Parsad at uofaepsgrant@ualberta.ca by 4:30 p.m. on December 10, 2021.
Find more information and the full call here

Research Proposals

Research and Knowledge Initiative

The Research and Knowledge Initiative (RKI) is a competitive, merit-based contributions funding program that supports data and research on issues related to public infrastructure and communities. The purpose of the Research and Knowledge Initiative is to advance the understanding of public infrastructure needs, challenges, and opportunities relevant to Canadians. The program aims to strengthen the evidence base on public infrastructure and communities in Canada, facilitate collaboration and partnership among key public infrastructure actors and stakeholders, and support data, research, and knowledge-sharing activities.

The Research and Knowledge Initiative is currently inviting research proposals under the theme: Cultivating Community Data and Research to Inform Public Infrastructure Decision-making.

Submission deadline is October 25, 2021.

More information here

Mitacs Job Opportunities

Data Scientist, Analytics and Modeling for Social Science focussed Research

The Northpine Foundation is an exciting startup combining ideas of innovation and intersectionality to combat systemic issues in society through ardent focus driven by strong relationships. We use philanthropy to design, fund, and partner on initiatives that improve community flourishing, and aim to enable Canada’s most marginalized populations to thrive. The Northpine Foundation firmly believes in ‘nothing about us without us’, wherein the most impactful work for a community should be pillared by the community. The focus of The Northpine Foundation is to rigorously support Canada’s underserved, underinvested, and underprivileged – people in both urban and rural centres whose opportunities have been limited by economic and social disadvantages. This is done through facilitating, funding and following a spectrum of investments on impactful “all my relations”-centered initiatives that open opportunities for some of the most marginalized members of the population.

Starting date is September 30th, 2021.

More information here

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Mindset Digital Rights Management

Over the past year Mindset has been building relationships with speakers and creators. While not a piece of technology, these relationships are key assets within the Digital Rights Management industry. We’ve been able to build these relationships because of the size of our app and the scale of our YouTube businesses. While building these relationships, we also began building foundational technology to manage digital audio usage and to facilitate a royalty sharing process.

At this time, our software allows us to manage content libraries, creator lists, speaker lists and automated royalty algorithms. This effectively but inefficiently solves the speech licensing process, leaving much of the workload to be done by our team.

In order to further validate and scale our DRM business, the next step in our technology is to build two new software modules, allowing us to 1) uniquely identify “fingerprint” audio files, and 2) search for those audio fingerprints across platforms like YouTube.

Starting date is October 1st, 2021.

More information here

Competitions

Futures Forum on Learning - Tools Competition 2021

The Futures Forum on Learning launched the 2021 Learning Engineering Tools Competition. It invites technologists, digital learning platforms, researchers, students and teachers from around the globe to propose innovative tools or technologies that address one of the pressing challenges in education. The competition expects to award at least $3 million in prizes, and competitors are eligible to receive prizes of up to $250,000. The deadline for applications is October 1st, 2021.

Proposals for this year’s competition should focus on (1) accelerating learning in elementary and secondary literacy and math, (2) transforming K-12 assessments in both cost and quality, (3) facilitating faster, better, and cheaper learning science research, (4) drive improvements in adult learning that boost middle class wages.

We’d love to see proposals that focus on data science in either K-12 or adult education.

More information here

Geometry and Statistics in Data Sciences

First announcement: registration

It is our pleasure to announce the thematic three-month program entitled Geometry and Statistics in Data Sciences at the Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP) in Paris. Registration free but mandatory, please do so here

Important: the deadline for financial support requests is March 15th, 2022

The Institut Henri Poincaré can help you to find an accommodation during your stay in Paris.

An Introductory School will be organized at IESC (Corsica), from September 5th to 9th, 2022. Register here

Three conferences will be organized at IHP:

1. From October 3rd to 7th, 2022: Non-Linear and High Dimensional Inference Register here
2. From October 10th to 14th, 2022: Geometry, Topology and Statistics in Data Sciences Register here

3. From November 21st to 25th, 2022: Measure-theoretic Approaches and Optimal Transportation in Statistics Register here

We are looking forward to welcoming you!
The organizers: Eddie Aamari, Catherine Aaron, Frédéric Chazal, Aurélie Fischer, Marc Hoffmann, Alice Le Brigant, Clément Levrard, Bertrand Michel

NeurAlbertaTech, is the premier neurotechnology innovator network in Alberta. We are focused on promoting interdisciplinary research and innovation in the neurotech space; hosting special events and facilitating project teams in international neurotech competitions. From late September to early December we will offer a variety of accessible and applied workshop streams for students (Undergraduates, Masters, and PhD students are all encouraged to join) and professionals interested in neurotechnology or related spaces. Many of our workshops are accessible with minimal to no prior knowledge.

The skills and intuition gained from attending our four unique workshop streams (Software, Hardware, Machine Learning, and Neuroscience) are readily generalizable to all data analytics, software development, wearables, project management, and much more! Learn more and Register today!

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AI experts, and AI-related events and opportunities,
visit https://ai4society.ca