Technology

Artist residency at U of T helped actor Sébastien Heins develop innovative new theatre performance

siddiq22 — Thu, 04 May 2023 16:40:55 +0000

Artist residency at U of T helped actor Sébastien Heins develop innovative new theatre performance

siddiq22 Thu, 05/04/2023 - 12:40

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U of T Assistant Professor David Rokeby (right) is working with actor and former BMO Lab artist-in-residence Sébastien Heins on No Save Points, a stage show using cutting-edge technology (photo by Tara Maher and David Rokeby)

Topic

City & Culture

BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts

Faculty of Arts & Science

Technology

An innovative new theatre production created by actor Sébastien Heins that was developed at the University of Toronto's BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI will premiere in Toronto in June.

David Rokeby, associate director and assistant professor, teaching stream at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science, collaborated with Heins – one of BMO Lab's first artists-in-residence in 2020-2021 – on No Save Points, which runs from June 6 to 25 at Lighthouse ArtSpace.

The residency program is a partnership between the BMO Lab and Canadian Stage, in which two artists are selected to immerse themselves in the lab’s technologies and experiment with ways to apply them to live performance.

Rokeby and Heins also worked together on a workshop of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht in April 2022.

Video games, theatre and memoir collide in the fast-paced adventure narrative of No Save Points, as Heins places the control(er) in the hands of the audience – entrusting them to pilot his performance using state-of-the-art motion-capture and haptic technology.

“It's really exciting as an artist to be able to link up with somebody with as much experience as David,” Heins said.

“Oftentimes technology seems like an impediment, but interacting with somebody who is capable of turning technology into art inspires everybody to see technology as a fluid, very human tool.”

The use of a motion-capture suit was just one of the technologies Rokeby and Heins experimented with during the residency. The suit shadows a person's motions and sends information to a computer from sensors at 100 times per second – these sensors detect three-dimensional orientation and movement of the person wearing the suit. That data are then mapped onto a corresponding digital avatar or character that can be projected onto a screen.

The play's story was inspired by real-life events – following his mother's diagnosis of Huntington's disease, Heins found himself contemplating the loss of control such illness imposes on people's lives, bodies and emotions.

The situation reminded him of his childhood, when he would chafe against attending events with his parents and his mother would allow him the escape of playing video games on his Game Boy.

“I started to wonder how my love of theatre, video games and my mother could intersect,” Heins said. “I found myself wanting to escape from the truth of [her] diagnosis – and so the Game Boy became a symbol of taking back control.”

In the one-man show, Heins plays up to 10 different characters, using the motion-shadow suit, a hacked Game Boy and a controller to weave his way through the narrative of what happened to his family. Amid a series of monologues, the main character escapes into a game that represents the psychological processing of his experiences.

“The use of technologies as a metaphor here is really key, because it shifts it from being, ‘Here's a cool thing you can do,' to ‘Here is a way this character is working through things,'” Rokeby said.

“The best uses of technology and art are when they are not just as spectacle, but there is a metaphorical relationship to the content in the story so that the technology is adding to the texture of what the audience is thinking and experiencing, rather than just adding something cool.”

The audience has a key role in the show as well. The hacked Game Boy system allows an audience member to use a gaming controller to send signals to buzzers that are placed on Heins’ body through a haptic feedback system. Each buzzer tells Heins which direction to move in – or if he should jump or duck – in the video-game world, while those motions are reflected in a digital avatar representing Heins as his 10-year-old self. The scene is projected onto the show's set – a 15-foot-tall Game Boy.

Heins experiences the buzzer sensations as akin to receiving a text message on a cellphone in his pocket – and will be anticipating those signals during the performance so he can respond in the moment.

Rokeby describes such moments as similar to a sprinter in a race waiting for the starting pistol to go off – he notes the physical demands of Heins' show are incredibly high, but the usage of such new technologies in theatrical performance makes for an inspiring challenge.

As Heins and his theatre company Outside the March rehearse in preparation for No Save Point's opening in June, he will continue working with Rokeby to test the game on players to improve the audience experience.

“Having the mixture of a live performance in motion capture and this other world that the actor is also participating in creates this really interesting tension, which speaks to the fact that we now live so much of our lives at the precipice between the physical and the virtual,” Rokeby said.

“If played properly, that disjunction of the virtual and the real actor together speaks to a very contemporary experience.”

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Tara Maher

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Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies

Research reveals what Google searches can tell us about the global human rights movement

siddiq22 — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 19:33:40 +0000

Research reveals what Google searches can tell us about the global human rights movement

siddiq22 Thu, 04/27/2023 - 15:33

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Geoff Dancy, an associate professor of political science at U of T Mississauga, used Google Trends to research where in the world people are most interested in human rights (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

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University of Toronto Mississauga

When Geoff Dancy wanted to research where people are most interested in human rights, he fully expected it would come from countries in the Global North – such as Canada and the United States.

But when Dancy – an associate professor in the University of Toronto Mississauga's department of political science – and his colleague delved deeper into the topic, they discovered the total opposite was true: it is those in the Global South, who regularly face suffering and violence at the hands of their governments, who consistently search online for information about human rights.

“Our expectations were completely flipped on their head,” Dancy says. “It goes against this academic narrative that exists right now that human rights aren’t from – and don’t resonate in – the Global South. We found the exact opposite of that.”

Dancy, along with his colleague Christopher Fariss, an assistant professor in the University of Michigan's department of political science, detail their findings in a new paper published in The American Political Science Review.

As part of their research, Dancy and Fariss used the Google Trends analytics tool, which collects aggregated data on what people are searching for on Google. They examined Google searches from between 2015 and 2019 for the term “human rights,” looking at data from 109 countries and across five languages.

As they analyzed the data, they discovered that interest in human rights was more pronounced in the Global South – for example, in countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, Zimbabwe and Uganda.

Ugandan activists gathered for a Pride rally in 2015 to mark a temporary loosening of anti-LGBTQ+ laws – in recent years, the government has passed stringent legislation against being openly gay (photo by Isaac Kasamani /AFP via Getty Images)

Dancy and Fariss found that the top three countries that searched for “human rights” the most in English were Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Uganda. In the Spanish-language group, the most searches came from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico.

“The biggest correlation of searching for human rights is political violence," Darcy says. "If you live in a place where the government is attacking its citizens, then you see more searches for human rights."

He points to Uganda, whose government has passed stringent anti-LGBTQ+ laws that subject people to lifetime imprisonment – and more recently, the death penalty – for being openly gay.

“People are searching for human rights because they want to fight back against that,” Dancy says.

In Global North countries, the researchers discovered a different pattern. The United States, which did not make the top 12 searchers, scored high for one week in the summer of 2018 when there was extensive media coverage of family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border.

While Dancy notes that 2021 falls outside of the study’s time period, he has since discovered a similar pattern in Canada. In September 2021, Google searches for human rights spiked in Canada – which coincides with major news events at the time, such as the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, as well as vaccine mandates.

“In the Global North, they get very brief and ‘faddish’ interest in human rights and then it goes away,” Dancy says. “But in the Global South, people are constantly searching for human rights. There aren’t spikes and troughs, just steady searches.”

He adds that the research challenges scholars who claim that many people today are less attuned to concepts around human rights.

“There are a number of scholars who argue that human rights isn’t getting the job done – it isn’t going far enough to make change, and so people will lose interest in human rights as a global movement,” Dancy says.

“But people in the Global South very much want human rights . . . and find them to be a useful tool still. In some ways, this [research] is a reclamation of the importance of the human-rights movement around the world.”

The research received support from the Global Challenges Research Fund, the Social Science Korea Human Rights Forum, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

U of T prof to offer experimental course taught with AI tools like ChatGPT

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 18:36:36 +0000

U of T prof to offer experimental course taught with AI tools like ChatGPT

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 04/10/2023 - 14:36

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Paolo Granata, associate professor and program coordinator in the Book & Media Studies program at St. Michael's College, has developed a new course that explores the ethics and impact of AI tools (supplied image)

Faculty of Arts & Science Staff

Topic

Our Community

Experiential Learning

Academics

Artificial Intelligence

Faculty of Arts & Science

St. Michael's College

Technology

A new experimental University of Toronto course will be taught with artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

The advanced fourth-year seminar, AI as a Classroom, will be offered in fall 2023 by the Faculty of Arts & Science as part of the book and media studies program at St. Michael’s College.

The seminar will address a variety of issues concerning artificial intelligence and its growing influence on society, including the ethics of AI and its impact on culture and media.

The course is the brainchild of Paolo Granata, an associate professor and program coordinator in the book and media studies program who has a history of engaging in experimental pedagogy.

During the pandemic, Granata – who is also the founder of the Media Ethics Lab and leads the Toronto School Initiative and the 3D Gutenberg Lab – used virtual reality technologies to foster experiential learning. He sees the new AI course as a way of expanding these explorations of new media and the learning space.

“This is an exciting opportunity for students to explore the cutting edge of AI and its potential for education,” Granata said.

The seminar will also engage with provocative questions about the role of the professor in the creation and curation of the learning experience – and in the potential of AI to enhance learning and promote proactive thought.

Using the most advanced technologies in the field, including generative AI and large language models – an AI system that uses a vast amount of training data to process and generate human-like language – the course will feature a customized version of ChatGPT that has been expressly trained on course research questions.

Throughout the course, students will develop skills in the use of artificial intelligence in order to develop cutting-edge critical analyses of AI from a variety of ethical, practical and philosophical perspectives.

Based on the late philosopher and U of T professor Marshall McLuhan’s adage “the medium is the message,” the course will provide an innovative context through which to investigate the potential for AI to enhance human agency in previously unimaginable ways, Granata said.

“By experimenting with AI tools in the classroom, we hope to provide our students with a unique and enriching learning experience that will prepare them for the challenges of the 21st century, where AI literacy is key.”

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Power and prediction: U of T's Avi Goldfarb on the disruptive economics of artificial intelligence

siddiq22 — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 16:38:57 +0000

Power and prediction: U of T's Avi Goldfarb on the disruptive economics of artificial intelligence

siddiq22 Fri, 01/20/2023 - 11:38

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Avi Goldfarb, a professor at the Rotman School of Management and research lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, says the AI revolution is well underway – but that system-level change takes time (supplied images)

Daniel Browne

Topic

Global Lens

Technology and Society

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

Artificial Intelligence

Business

Health

Rotman School of Management

Startups

Technology

In the new book Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, co-author Avi Goldfarb argues we live in the “Between Times”: after discovering the potential of AI, but before its widespread adoption.

Delays in implementation are an essential part of any technology with the power to truly reshape society, says Goldfarb, a professor of marketing and the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and research lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

He makes the case for how AI innovation will evolve in Power and Prediction, his latest book co-authored with fellow Rotman professors Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans. The trio, who also wrote 2018’s Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, are the co-founders of the Creative Destruction Lab, a non-profit organization that helps science- and technology-based startups scale.

Goldfarb will give a talk at the Rotman School of Management on Jan. 25 as part of the SRI Seminar Series. He spoke with the Schwartz Reisman Institute to discuss how the evolution of AI innovation will require systems-level changes to the ways that organizations make decisions.

(The interview has been condensed for length and clarity.)

What changed in your understanding of the landscape of AI innovation since your last book?

We wrote Prediction Machines thinking that a revolution was about to happen, and we saw that revolution happening at a handful of companies like Google, Amazon and others. But when it came to most businesses we interacted with, by 2021 we started to feel a sense of disappointment. Yes, there was all this potential, but it hadn’t affected their bottom line yet – the uses that they’d found had been incremental, rather than transformational. And that got us trying to understand what went wrong.

One potential thing that could have gone wrong, of course, was that AI wasn’t as exciting as we thought. Another was that the technology was potentially as big a deal as the major revolutions of the past 200 years – innovations like steam, electricity, computing – and the issue was system-level implementation. For every major technological innovation, it took a long time to figure out how to make that change affect society at scale.

The core idea of Power and Prediction is that AI is an exciting technology – but it’s going to take time to see its effects, because a lot of complementary innovation has to happen as well. Now, some might respond that’s not very helpful, because we don’t want to wait. And part of our agenda in the book is to accelerate the timeline of this innovation from 40 years to 10, or even less. To get there, we then need to think through what this innovation is going to look like. We can’t just say it’s going to take time – that’s not constructive.

What sort of changes are needed for organizations to harness AI’s full potential?

Here, we lean on three key ideas. The first idea is that AI today is not artificial general intelligence (AGI) – it’s prediction technology. The second is that a prediction is useful because it helps you make decisions. A prediction without a decision is useless. So, what AI really does is allow you to unbundle the prediction from the rest of the decision, and that can lead to all sorts of transformation. Finally, the third key idea is that decisions don’t happen in isolation.

What prediction machines do is allow you to change who makes decisions and when those decisions are made. There are all sorts of examples of what seems like an automated decision, but what it actually does is take some human’s decision – typically at headquarters – and scales it. For organizations to succeed, they require a whole bunch of people working in concert. It’s not about one decision – it’s about decisions working together.

One example is health care – at the emergency department, there is somebody on triage, who gives a prediction about the severity of what’s going on. They might send a patient immediately for tests or ask them to wait. Right now, AIs are used in triage at SickKids in Toronto and other hospitals, and they are making it more effective. But to really take advantage of the prediction, they need to coordinate with the next step. If triage is sending people for a particular test more frequently, then there need to be other decisions made about staffing for those tests, and where to offer them. And, if your predictions are good enough, there’s an even different decision to be made – maybe you don’t even need the tests. If your prediction that somebody’s having a heart attack is good enough, you don’t need to send them for that extra test and waste that time or money. Instead, you’ll send them direct to treatment, and that requires coordination between what’s happening upstream on the triage side and what’s happening downstream in terms of the testing or treatment side.

AI is as exciting a technology as electricity and computing, but it will take time to see its effects, Avi Goldfarb says.

Will certain sectors have greater ease in adopting system-level changes than others?

There is a real opportunity here for startups because when building a new system from scratch, it’s often easier to start with nothing. You don’t have to convince people to come along with your changes, so it becomes a less political process – at least within your organization. If you’re trying to change a huge established company or organization, it’s going to be harder.

I’m very excited about the potential for AI and health care, but health care is complicated; there are so many different decision-makers. There are the patients, the payers – sometimes government, sometimes insurance companies, sometimes a combination of the above – and then there are doctors, who have certain interests, medical administrators who might have different interests, and nurses.

AI has potential to supercharge nurses, because a key distinction between a doctor and a nurse in terms of training is diagnosis, which is a prediction problem. If AI is helping with diagnosis, that has potential to make nurses more central to how we structure the system. But that’s going to require all sorts of changes, and we have to get used to that as patients. And so, while I think the 30-year vision for what health care could look like is extraordinary, the five-year timeline is really, really hard.

What are some of the other important barriers to AI adoption?

A lot of the challenges to AI adoption come from ambiguity about what’s allowed or not in terms of regulation. In health care contexts, we are seeing lots of people trying to identify incremental point solutions that don’t require regulatory approval. We may have an AI that can replace a human in some medical process, but to do it is going to be a 10-year, multibillion-dollar process to get approval – so they’ll implement it in an app that people can use at home with a warning that it’s not real medical advice.

The regulatory resistance to change, and the ambiguity of what’s allowed, is a real barrier. As we start thinking about system changes, there is an important role for government through legislation and regulation, as well as through its coordinating function as the country’s biggest buyer of stuff, to help push us toward new AI-based systems.

There are also real concerns about data and bias, especially in the short term. However, in the long run, I’m very optimistic about AI to help with discrimination and bias. While a lot of the resistance to AI implementation right now is coming from people who are worried about [people who will be negatively impacted by] bias [in the data], I think that pretty soon this will flip around.

There’s a story we discuss in the book, where Major League Baseball brought in a machine that could say whether a pitch was a strike or a ball, and the people who resisted it turned out to be the superstars. Why? Well, the best hitters tended to get favored by umpires and face smaller strike zones, and the best pitchers also tended to get favoured and had bigger strike zones. The superstars benefited from this human bias, and when they brought in a fairer system, the superstars got hurt. So, we should expect that people who currently benefit from bias are going to resist machine systems that can overcome it.

What do you look for to indicate where disruptions from AI innovation will occur?

We’re seeing this change already in a handful of industries tech is paying attention to, such as advertising. Advertising had a very Mad Men vibe until recently: there was a lot of seeming magic in terms of whether an ad worked, how to hire an agency and how the industry operated – a lot of charm and fancy dinners. That hasn’t completely gone away, but advertising is largely an algorithm-based industry now. The most powerful players are big tech companies – they’re no longer the historical publishers who worked on Madison Avenue. We’ve seen the disruption – it’s happened.

Think through the mission of any industry or a company. Once you understand the mission, think through all the ways that mission is compromised because of bad prediction. Once you see where the mission doesn’t align with the ways in which an organization is actually operating, those are going to be the cases where either the organization is going to need to disrupt themselves, or someone’s going to come along and do what they do better.

Read the full Q&A at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

'Breaking down barriers': U of T opens Blue Door to external partnership opportunities

siddiq22 — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:44:48 +0000

'Breaking down barriers': U of T opens Blue Door to external partnership opportunities

siddiq22 Tue, 01/17/2023 - 10:44

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Executives from LG join U of T's Christopher Yip, left, to announce an expansion of their partnership at the Collision tech conference in Toronto in 2019 (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Tabassum Siddiqui

Topic

Global Lens

Blue Door

Artificial Intelligence

International partnerships

Medicine

partnerships

Research & Innovation

Startups

Technology

Partnering with University of Toronto has emerged as a key strategy for many companies, non-profits and government to achieve their most important goals – from furthering research and developing new products and services, to figuring out solutions to specific problems.

Alex Mihailidis (left) and Illan Kramer (photos supplied)

And many of U of T’s 600-plus partners access world-class talent and expertise via the university's new Blue Door portal.

A point of entry for organizations who want to work with the university, Blue Door is an online portal that helps potential – and existing – partners identify opportunities across the three campuses and connects them with the right people and departments.

“We often hear from prospective partners: ‘How do I partner with U of T? How do I find the right person to work with there?’ So, we wanted to ensure there weren’t barriers to us growing great new partnerships,” says Alex Mihailidis, associate vice-president of international partnerships and a professor in the department of occupational science and occupational therapy in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

Mihailidis, along with Illan Kramer, director of international research partnerships, developed the Blue Door initiative over the past two years – with significant input from U of T divisions – and officially launched it last February.

They recently spoke to U of T News about how the initiative helps streamline the partnership process and ensure both existing and emerging partnerships can evolve and grow.

What is the Blue Door?

Mihailidis: Simply put, it is a portal into the university. Within four clicks, a new partner or existing partner can be connected to the right person at U of T who will help them make further connections within the university to achieve their business goals. At a higher level, it’s a new philosophy in the way that we do corporate partnerships here at the university – a more collaborative approach across all the different divisions, campuses disciplines and departments.

U of T President Meric Gertler (front left) and Shigeru Sasaki, CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., sign a memorandum of understanding in 2017 (photo by Lisa Lightbourn)

Why was it important for Blue Door to include an online portal for partners?

Mihailidis: One of the things you always hear from partners is that “the university is so big – it’s so complex.” We’re kind of like a federated model – multiple divisions with multiple goals – but we are one university at the end of the day, even across three campuses.

We started talking early on about, “Well, what if we can provide a concierge-style model?’ Through these four clicks online, you’re connected with someone, and that one person becomes your contact at the university. In that way, we’re ensuring that U of T is not seen as this big place that’s complicated to navigate, but straightforward and easy to work with.

Why do so many organizations want to partner with U of T?

Kramer: When you look at U of T’s size and our quality, we’re pretty much peerless globally. And one of the consequences of being such a big, world-class institution is that you have disparate communities of expertise that can talk to one another in interesting and creative ways. It’s why sometimes you'll see an automotive company come to us and you think, “Oh, they're going to want to talk to a mechanical engineer or an electrical engineer.” But it turns out that the people whose work resonates with their needs might be child psychologists or kinesiology experts. The big research and development challenges that these companies are looking to us to help solve are interdisciplinary. And at U of T, we have that kind of interdisciplinarity baked into our size and quality.

Mihailidis: These companies realize that partnering with University of Toronto just adds strength from a variety of levels – whether it’s research, accessing our talent or other areas to help their objectives. All that provides them with a competitive advantage at the end of the day.

In partnership with Moderna, Assistant Professor Omar F. Khan (back row, second from left) and his lab team focus on diseases that are currently incurable and untreatable (photo by Safa Jinje)

What are some examples of successful U of T partnerships?

Kramer: One longstanding partnership is with [Japanese electronics company] Fujitsu. They established a Toronto R&D hub in the Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship where grad students and Fujitsu researchers work elbow-to-elbow on new inventions and innovations. Since then, we’ve been expanding that collaboration to multidisciplinary applications by applying their microelectronics expertise to other fields like traffic engineering, financial modelling, surgical scheduling and beyond – touching on expertise that exists across the entire university.

Another impactful partnership is with [South Korean conglomerate] LG Electronics. One of the coolest things about this partnership is that it doesn't start and stop at collaborative research – it also includes elements of professional development. We’ve developed what we call an “inverted internship,” where LG scientists embed themselves with U of T research teams for four months to upskill their own AI abilities.

More recently, we launched a really exciting partnership with [American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company] Moderna, a company that a lot of people became familiar with in the last couple of years. Moderna recognized a huge level of expertise, especially in mRNA and regenerative medicine research, at U of T and wanted to do something comprehensive that would help them expand beyond the COVID-19 vaccine to a host of other potential applications. They’ve since launched a project with Omar Khan, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and have had several early successes already. So that’s a partnership where we really see the opportunity to be on the leading edge of something that has the potential to impact millions – maybe even billions – of people around the world.

U of T President Meric Gertler (left) and I.P. Park, the president and CTO of LG Electronics, sign a five-year collaborative AI research agreement in 2018 (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

What is the value of these partnerships to U of T?

Mihailidis: They obviously bring funding to the university to support the work that is happening here. But it also brings our faculty, researchers and students together with cutting-edge, world-leading companies to help them accelerate the development of their research and move their findings into the real world, where they can have maximum impact.

Of course, there are always questions around protection of intellectual property and appropriate handling of confidentiality. These considerations are handled in an up-front and transparent way through contractual agreements, each of which takes into account our partner’s motivations as well as the motivations and expectations of the professors who may get involved in the partnership. That way, professors and their research teams can still benefit from groundbreaking innovations, while our partners can improve upon their own products and services. Ultimately, these partnerships give us access to other experts around the world and help grow the reputation of the University of Toronto and our community.

Kramer: There's no shortage of ambition among U of T's research community. Our researchers are world-class – they do work that is excellent and excellence doesn’t come for free. If we want to do big things, we need to have world-class facilities; we have to attract the best professors, postdocs and graduate students – in general, we need to be able to outfit our labs with the right equipment and expertise in order to do that research.

Bringing industry on board helps ensure U of T remains a cutting-edge institution. I’ve seen professors’ labs transform with a key industry partner where they went from, “Hey, this is kind of neat work that our academic peers are paying attention to,” to “Oh my God, I'm literally impacting millions of people now.” That’s incredibly exciting.

U of T and RBC launch scholarships to bolster inclusive excellence in technology fields

mattimar — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 17:56:46 +0000

U of T and RBC launch scholarships to bolster inclusive excellence in technology fields

mattimar Wed, 06/08/2022 - 13:56

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(Photo by Unsplash)

Topic

Research & Innovation

Startups

Technology

Women

The University of Toronto and RBC are launching a scholarship to support women and other equity-deserving groups, including Black and Indigenous students, in the emerging technology sector.

The RBC Scholarships for Diversity and Innovation in Technology will be selected based on academic achievement and innovative accomplishment. Six eligible third-year undergraduate students enrolled full-time at U of T will be supported with a scholarship valued at $15,000 annually over a two-year period.

“RBC was an early champion of the innovation ecosystem at the University of Toronto and these awards are another example of how industry and academia can work together to create a culture of inclusive excellence,” said Leah Cowen, vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

Martin Wildberger, RBC’s executive vce-president, technology and operations, said the financial institution views diversity and inclusion as an engine for innovation and is committed to removing biases and barriers. “This renewed partnership with the University of Toronto will help support diverse talent and help create a more equitable future for the next generation of technologists,” he said.

The scholarship joins a growing network of U of T supports to advance inclusive excellence in the innovation, research and entrepreneurship realms. They include the Black Research Network, Indigenous Research Network and the Black Founders Network.

U of T-Waterloo research data to put self-driving cars to ultimate test: Canadian winter

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 16:10:33 +0000

U of T-Waterloo research data to put self-driving cars to ultimate test: Canadian winter

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 02/03/2020 - 11:10

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A new dataset will enable engineers to test and refine new algorithms for self-driving cars that can overcome the perception challenges posed by snowy weather (Image courtesy Steven Waslander)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Breaking Research

Artificial Intelligence

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Institute for Aerospace Studies

Research and Innovation

Self-Driving Cars

Technology

Newly released data from a collaboration between the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo and Scale AI will help train future self-driving cars to handle the challenges of winter driving.

Along with their teams, Steven Waslander, an associate professor at U of T's Institute for Aerospace Studies in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, and Krzysztof Czarnecki, a professor at the University of Waterloo, this week unveiled the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions dataset.

Based on actual scans of icy, snow-covered Canadian roads, the dataset acts as a virtual training course for the computer algorithms that enable cars to drive themselves.

“There are lots of great training datasets out there already, but they were collected on sunny, summer days,” says Waslander. “If you take algorithms trained on those datasets and try to use them in adverse conditions, they tend to get confused. They can misclassify objects – such as pedestrians and other vehicles – or even miss them entirely, all because of the changes in sensor data caused by snowfall.”

To tackle this challenge, the two professors decided to create a dataset that would capture what Waslander describes as “some of the worst conditions that you might see while trying to drive in Canada.”

“We want to engage the research community to generate new ideas and enable innovation,” says Czarnecki. “This is how you can solve really hard problems, the problems that are just too big for anyone to solve on their own.”

The dataset was created with the Autonomoose, a Lincoln MKZ hybrid that has been equipped with a full suite of sensors, including eight onboard cameras, a lidar (light detection and ranging) scanner and a GPS tracker. Waslander and Czarnecki developed the vehicle as a test bed for self-driving software, but the Autonomoose also has a recording mode that captures data at a rate of 10 images or scans per second.

Over the past two winters, the teams have taken the Autonomoose around southwestern Ontario, recording data from more than 1,000 kilometres of driving. Of this, approximately 33 kilometres in harsh, snowy conditions were selected to form the basis of the dataset.

The teams partnered with Scale AI, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company, to label the data. Through a combination of computer and human image recognition, Scale AI tagged more than 178,000 instances of passing vehicles and more than 83,000 instances of pedestrians, along with many other objects.

“Data is a critical bottleneck in current machine learning research,” said Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale. “Without reliable, high-quality data that captures the reality of driving in winter, it simply won’t be possible to build self-driving systems that work safely in these environments.”

Finally, the teams conducted statistical analysis, processing and validation, placing the data into a format that can be parsed by currently available software. The result: a virtual environment that represents Canadian winter driving at its finest.

In addition to the dataset, the teams have provided full documentation and support tools in GitHub, and a scientific article posted publicly on arXiv. All are open-access, available free of charge to researchers. (An additional license is required to use them for the development of commercial products.)

“We’re hoping that both industry and academia go nuts with it,” says Waslander. “We want the world to be working on driving everywhere, and bad weather is a condition that is going to happen. We don’t want Canada to be 10 or 15 years behind simply because conditions can be a bit tougher up here.”

Waslander and his team will also be making extensive use of the data in their future work.

“In my lab, we’re building up a strong research program trying to resolve the issues around winter driving perception,” he says. “We hope that the techniques we develop to locate and track objects in adverse weather will eventually be incorporated into future autonomous vehicle software packages around the world, making them safer for everyone.”

U of T computer scientist named NSERC/Autodesk Industrial Research Chair in Human-Computer Interaction

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 13:52:28 +0000

U of T computer scientist named NSERC/Autodesk Industrial Research Chair in Human-Computer Interaction

noreen.rasbach Thu, 11/14/2019 - 08:52

Cutline

“We'll be looking at how modern interactive technologies, such as wearable devices, augmented reality, collaborative robots and mixed-initiative systems, will allow people to work and learn in ways that were never before possible," says Tovi Grossman

Alexa Zulak

Topic

Our Community

Advanced Manufacturing

Ontario Impact

Computer Science

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research & Innovation

Technology

The manufacturing industry is changing. Jobs that once relied on individuals to carry out manual labour are increasingly turning to automation because of the growing power of machines and computing systems.”

But humans still need to know how to work with the technology – and where they fit in.

“These rapidly evolving technologies are forcing individuals in impacted industries to work in new and unfamiliar ways, creating new human-computer interaction challenges,” said Tovi Grossman, an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s department of computer science, in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“It’s critical to our future that new interactive systems are developed to allow users to work efficiently with these automated design and fabrication systems and to support their learning, training and retraining, to keep pace with the rapidly changing needs of their skill base.”

It’s a challenge Grossman is dedicated to helping find a solution for as the new NSERC/Autodesk Industrial Research Chair in Human Computer-Interaction.

The five-year appointment – for early-stage researchers demonstrating exceptional promise – will allow Grossman to focus on developing human-computer interaction approaches to support hybrid interactive systems in the design and fabrication sectors. These systems help workers create efficient work patterns and maintain their agency while they perform tasks alongside automated technologies.

“Specifically, we’ll be looking at how modern interactive technologies, such as wearable devices, augmented reality, collaborative robots and mixed-initiative systems, will allow people to work and learn in ways that were never before possible,” said Grossman.

An expert in human-computer interaction with a focus on understanding and improving human learning in complex scenarios, Grossman joined U of T in 2018 after working as a distinguished research scientist in Autodesk Research’s User Interface Research group.

“I’m very excited to have been named the NSERC/Autodesk Industrial Research Chair in Human-Computer Interaction,” said Grossman. “As someone who recently transitioned from working in industry to working in academia, this position will give me the best of both worlds.”

The position builds upon U of T’s longstanding relationship with Autodesk, a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. NSERC acknowledged the partnership with a Synergy Award for Innovation in 2011, recognizing the collaboration as a model of an effective partnership between industry and higher education.

The partnership has led to a number of research publications, numerous highly skilled computer scientists and many patents and awards. Several employees of Autodesk have joined U of T as graduate students and faculty members, including Grossman himself.

“The partnership with Autodesk will provide me and my students the unique opportunity to transfer research solutions into real-world products that reach millions of users,” said Grossman.

Computer science's Interim Chair Marsha Chechik is proud to recognize Grossman’s success.

“His research often reaches beyond the boundaries of computer science, with collaborations from engineering, architecture and even anatomy,” said Chechik. “His current collaboration with Autodesk is a primary example of a partnership between academia and industry for creating solutions to real-world problems.”

The appointment will also allow Grossman to mentor the next generation of computer scientists, while working on challenging and innovative academic research problems with far-reaching implications in diverse areas, like the education, manufacturing and construction industries.

“Funds for this program will train and prepare a new cohort of computer scientists and give our graduate students in computer science the opportunity to apply their research to real-world problems – putting new technologies into the hands of real people.”

Jeroen Tas, chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips, visits U of T, gives Exponential Impact Lecture

rahul.kalvapalle — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:38:53 +0000

Jeroen Tas, chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips, visits U of T, gives Exponential Impact Lecture

rahul.kalvapalle Mon, 10/28/2019 - 12:38

Cutline

Jeroen Tas, chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips, delivers the first U of T Exponential Impact Lecture last week at U of T's Rotman School of Management (photo by Johnny Guatto)

Rahul Kalvapalle

Topic

Global Lens

Artificial Intelligence

Computer Science

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Medicine

Global

Health

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Research & Innovation

Rotman School of Management

Technology

Ted Sargent

Vector Institute

Seventeen years ago, Jeroen Tas got what he describes as “the phone call that every parent dreads.”

He was told to rush to the hospital, where his daughter was in the emergency room. She had nearly died, doctors told him, but was revived just in time.

Only 12 years old, Tas’s daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.

Her life-changing diagnosis, and Tas’s frustration with a health-care system that he found didn’t revolve around the needs of patients like his daughter, motivated him to leave behind a successful career in financial services to work in health-care innovation with Philips, where he is now chief innovation and strategy officer.

Tas shared the anecdote about his journey as he opened the first U of T Exponential Impact Lecture at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management on Wednesday.

The newly launched lecture series invites industry innovation leaders to discuss how they leverage novel technologies and multi-disciplinary strategies to develop impactful products and services.

Tas discussed Philips’s drastic transformation from a company synonymous with lighting and consumer electronics to one focused on health-care technology, and shed light on how the company is deploying emerging technologies to accelerate its mission to transform health care across the globe.

Prior to the lecture, Tas and senior executives from Philips Canada spent the morning taking in presentations from U of T researchers about their cutting-edge work in various realms of technology relevant to health care, and discussing potential avenues for collaboration.

Ted Sargent, U of T’s vice-president, international, said Tas’s track record of bold innovation – he was instrumental in launching internet banking services at Citibank in the mid-1990s and is credited with turning around Philips’ health-care IT business – made him the ideal person to inaugurate the Exponential Impact Lecture series.

“Our vision for the lecture was to have people who are thought leaders come in and inspire our students, faculty and staff. We wanted to attract, for our first speaker in the series, somebody who represented the quintessence of the exponential impact that the series was named after,” said Sargent, a University Professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. department of electrical and computer engineering.

“It was very clear to me from Jeroen’s background that he was somebody who was building a vision that was mission-driven. It was really about societal impact – in this specific case, through health care.”

Tas (left) speaks with Ted Sargent, U of T’s vice-president, international (photo by Johnny Guatto)

For his part, Tas said he was keen to visit U of T to deliver the lecture but also to have the opportunity to engage with university leaders, researchers and students.

“I heard about the vibrant ecosystem here. I heard about the MaRS Discovery District and what the university is doing in AI [artificial intelligence] and making that part of not only research and academia, but also bringing that into the startup world,” said Tas. “I was curious about that and I think I got what I wanted with this visit.”

Tas’s interest in exploring U of T’s expertise saw him engage with several researchers in the morning leading up to his lecture.

They included Sanja Fidler, assistant professor in the department of computer science, faculty member of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and director of AI at NVIDIA, who presented on data labelling and image recognition; Marzyeh Ghassemi, assistant professor in computer science and the department of medicine in the Faculty of Medicine and also a faculty member at Vector, who presented on applications of AI to improve health-care models; and Stephane Angers, professor and associate dean, research at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, who shared research pertinent to U of T’s multi-disciplinary, cross-faculty Precision Medicine Initiative (PRiME).

Tas expressed interest in connecting the U of T researchers to counterparts in Philips to discuss how they can potentially pool their expertise and resources to work towards their common goal of revolutionizing health care.

“I was really impressed by the research presentations and the kind of work you do at U of T. I could clearly see that U of T goes truly multi-disciplinary in addressing some of the biggest challenges,” said Tas.

“My role is to see whether this research is relevant to what we’re doing at Philips – and I saw quite a number of areas of interest to us, especially in the intersection of AI, computer science, data science and the medical space.”

In his lecture, Tas said it wasn’t easy for Philips to divest its legacy lighting business and television division to focus on health care, but said the company needed to reinvent itself and its mission.

“Many of us are driven by genuinely wanting to improve the health-care system – not just for my daughter, but the billions of other people who don’t even have access to normal care, let alone the kind of care that we’re discussing today,” he said.

“I think we’re now a company with a real purpose and I personally believe it’s important to have a purpose and have an impact.”

That purpose, Tas said, is to use technology to evolve contemporary health-care models that he said are crippled with flaws – including a tendency to place the onus of care co-ordination and record-keeping on patients themselves, and the organization of health-care delivery around doctors, hospitals and clinics rather than around patients.

He pointed out that most Western health-care systems consider some 2,000 metrics to measure quality of care, but only seven per cent of those metrics are related to patient outcomes – and only two per cent are patient-reported.

“Apparently, the health-care system is not that interested in how you’re doing, how you’re feeling, whether you’re getting better,” he said. “So that needs to change, and it will change.”

AI has a crucial role to play in that regard, said Tas.

He said Philips is leading the way in using AI to optimize intensive care unit (ICU) operations by measuring hospital capacities and prioritizing treatments on the fly, making it possible for a small team of nurses and intensivists (critical care physicians) to monitor and care for thousands of patients at a time.

Philips is also using AI to reduce drastically MRI scan times, which will allow the effective but expensive diagnostic machines to be used with more patients.

“We didn’t change the machine at all,” he said. “The machine is still the same. We just surrounded it with intelligence.”

AI is also helping make image-guided surgery safer and more effective, in conjunction with related technologies such as augmented reality and advanced robotics.

Patients, too, stand to be directly touched by AI, with Tas saying we’re not far from a time when it will be commonplace for elderly patients to use wearable monitors and voice assistants to receive remote monitoring at home rather than have to spend all their time in a hospital – something that studies show will boost patients’ quality of life while significantly reducing the financial burden on health-care systems.

“Ultimately, what we’re working on is creating a world in which health care is precise in understanding what drives health and disease, highly personalized – because the way disease manifests itself is hugely individual – and predictive, so that we can see things coming,” he said.

To that end, Philips is engaging in research with universities across the world, Tas said, in addition to incubating scores of startup companies in the High Tech Campus research and development hub that it set up in the Dutch city of Eindhoven.

Following the lecture, Sargent noted the “incredible alignment” between the approaches and mission of Philips and U of T.

“We’re both working on some of the same grand challenges, so the opportunities lie in linking our researchers as well as our entrepreneurship ecosystems,” said Sargent, pointing out that U of T, too, has incubated hundreds of startups across its three campuses, many of which operate in the AI space.

Tas said he came away from his visit to U of T impressed and eager to explore pathways to working together in the future.

“To me, one of the biggest assets you can have as a university is that you’re driving people’s curiosity, and people are interested in pushing the boundaries and getting deeper insights. That’s ultimately the key to what drives innovation.”

Renaissance-era Florence comes alive through immersive, location-based storytelling app

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 20:11:25 +0000

Renaissance-era Florence comes alive through immersive, location-based storytelling app

noreen.rasbach Wed, 09/04/2019 - 16:11

Cutline

Florence during sunset: A new app takes visitors on a walking tour through Florence’s rich past by linking locations around the city to the lives of 15th- and 16th-century characters (photo by Suttipong Sutiratanachai/Getty Images)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Jackman Humanities Institute

Technology

U of T Libraries

Undergraduate Students

“Every time I crack a skull or chase down a thief, I do it as Duke Cosimo’s right arm,” says Ercole, a 16^th-century birro, or police officer, assigned to clean up the streets of Florence under Cosimo de’ Medici’s stern rule.

Ercole is one of five historically based, fictional characters in a new location-based app called Hidden Florence, the brainchild of an international team of historians specializing in Renaissance Italy, including Nicholas Terpstra, a professor of history and interim chair of the department of Italian studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto.

The iconic Italian city was one of the most prosperous and powerful cities in Europe during the Renaissance – a key centre of politics, culture and industry. The app takes visitors on a walking tour through Florence’s rich past by linking locations around the city to the lives of 15^th- and 16^th-century characters who narrate their daily experiences as users navigate the city streets.

For his part, Ercole takes app users on a tour of what he calls “the darker side of Florence,” including locations where criminals were interrogated, imprisoned and executed.

“I’ll show you a side of Florence very few people ever see,” he promises.

Hidden Florence is an app that is the brainchild of Nicholas Terpstra (left), a professor in U of T's department of history, and an international team of historians specializing in Renaissance Italy

The app’s characters – voiced by professional actors, including James Faulker of Game of Thrones – range from a labourer in the bustling textile industry to an aristocratic widow whose sons were executed for plotting a murder. The players even include Cosimo de’ Medici, the ruler who laid the foundation for generations of the Medici family’s reign over the Florentine Republic.

“The humanities are all about setting individual experiences into the broader contexts of where people live, who they engage with, and what their lives are like,” says Terpstra. The kind of digital mapping on which the app is based “allows us to see connections that we might never perceive when just looking at the words in a manuscript.”

Hidden Florence works with a larger U of T project called DECIMA, the Digitally Encoded Census Information & Mapping Archive – a robust geographic information systems (GIS) mapping tool that collects, digitizes and analyzes historical data on things like human movement and economic activity in Florence during the Renaissance.

The project uses data from three censuses of Florence conducted in 1551, 1561 and 1632, which together comprise one of the richest stores of human data available before the 18^th century.

DECIMA is the product of collaboration and innovation by a variety of senior scholars, working with undergraduate and graduate students as well as U of T staff at the Map and Data Library and the GIS Mapping Office, and supported by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

“I’ve always been interested in spaces and places, and how people live in them,” says Terpstra, whose work has delved into GIS as a research and teaching tool, particularly in exploring the spatial, kinetic and sensory dimensions of early modern cities like Florence.

“Digital mapping allows us to take something purely quantitative – like a tax census – and make it a very rich tool for seeing what made a vibrant city work. We’ve been able to draw out voices that are otherwise often obscured, like women, the poor and children.”

Asked whether there is something we can learn from Renaissance Florence, a powerful city-state from more than five centuries ago, Terpstra advises that “amoral and self-serving people will always be around, but individuals can still make a difference. If you want a better society, you have to get involved. Just remember that politics will always be equal parts chess game and knife fight.”

Terpstra credited highly skilled students who transcribed 16^th-century Latin and Italian manuscripts, assembled the database and geo-referenced the data since 2011.

“The greatest resources at U of T are the people,” he says. "Two people in particular who have been absolutely vital are Colin Rose, now an assistant professor at Brock University, and Daniel Jamison, who will be continuing to work on DECIMA as a postdoctoral fellow this year. We’ve also benefited from places like the Jackman Humanities Institute, where we had a digital mapping working group running for two years.”

In addition to U of T, partners in the app include scholars from the University of Exeter and the University of Cambridge, as well as funding from the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and SSHRC.

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Jeroen Tas, chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips, visits U of T, gives Exponential Impact Lecture

Renaissance-era Florence comes alive through immersive, location-based storytelling app