Latest News
We are delighted to welcome Dr. Chukwunonso Nwokoye and Dr. Joelma Peixoto to the Trustworthy AI Lab team. Both join us as postdoctoral research fellows, working on accessible explainable AI for people with disabilities, in partnership with CNIB.
Dr. Peter Lewis, Trustworthy AI Lab Director and Canada Research Chair, and Dr. Theresa Stotesbury, Assistant Professor in Forensic Science and head of the Forensic Chemistry and Materials Lab also at Ontario Tech, delivered a joint webinar at the Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Section of the Canadian Society for Forensic Science.
We are recruiting for a postdoctoral research fellow in the area of accessible explainable AI for people with vision loss. We would welcome and encourage applicants with lived experience of vision loss. See here for more details or email Peter for an informal chat about the role.
On October 11th Peter R. Lewis, Zahra Ahmadi, and Parisa Salmani led the Bias and Fairness in Algorithms Breakout Session at the Women in STEM Summit. The Summit’s focus was on allyship and disrupting bias, and empowering the next generation of women leaders by celebrating the successes of those who came before.
Trustworthy AI Lab Director and Canada Research Chair Dr. Peter Lewis gave an invited keynote talk at the 2023 Toronto Public Library Digital Expo. The talk, held at the new exhibition venue at the North York library, explored aspects of trust and trustworthiness in the face of recently-developed AI-based tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, highlighting impressive results as well as some surprising causes for concern. In the talk, Dr. Lewis drew attention to the importance of a human-centred conception of trust, and what we can do to empower people to make good trust decisions about AI.
From the 25th-29th of September, members of the Trustworthy AI Lab attended the 4th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS2023), here in Toronto!
Peter, this years (co) General Chair, was delighted to welcome and bring this wonderful research community back together in person for the first time in four years!
With new federal funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Dr. Peter Lewis and researchers at the Trustworthy AI Lab are embarking on a new 5-year program of research to develop a new generation of socially reflective intelligent machines.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and other forms of machine intelligence are increasingly integrated into society, this new research program aims to discover how to build more socially sensitive AI technology. We will do this by augmenting AI systems such as robots, virtual assistants, smart devices, and other agents with the ability to reflect. Here, this reflection includes learning and reasoning using self-models that include social factors, including context, trustworthiness, norms, network structure, and likely outcomes of actions. The latter, and the focus of this research program, requires internal simulations of the social systems of which the AI system is part. The impact of this will be intelligent socio-technical systems able to act collectively to intentionally create more sustainable, equitable, and efficient outcomes in shared environments. We plan to demonstrate this impact using simulation models of global sustainability challenges that include AI-based decision making, plus a case study on AI-supported community building for food security in Toronto.
This is part of a large investment of Canadian federal funding across research projects at Ontario Tech Univeristy. Read more at the Ontario Tech news site.
At the end of August, our Doctoral Student Nathan Lloyd attended the European Social Simulation Association Summer School in Social Simulation 2023 at the James Hutton Institute’s campus in Aberdeen, Scotland. This interdisciplinary course brought together international specialists to engage in computer modelling, with a primary focus towards solving ‘wicked’ social problems.
Dr. Peter lewis was interviewed live on the ‘NOW with Dave Brown’ show, on AMI TV. Peter talked about the accessibility of AI systems, and highlighted new research being carried out at Ontario Tech University, in collaboration with CNIB. There is an audio version of the interview available on Dave’s podcast, available here.
Read more about our research on accessibility and AI, funded by Accessibility Standards Canada, at the Ontario Tech news site.
