Welcome to the October edition of Profound Connections.
In this issue of the newsletter, we launch Early Career Spotlight, where you’ll meet outstanding young researchers working on topics ranging from AI (Artificial Intelligence) to theoretical astrophysics to sustainable agriculture. This month we feature Computer Science PhD candidate, Domenic Rosati, who is conducting pioneering research on AI safety at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
This issue’s Researcher Spotlight profiles Kate Larson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and Research Scientist at DeepMind. Kate’s research focuses on multiagent systems and reinforcement learning, and applications of AI to support sustainable development and climate-related initiatives.
September was a busy month for the Profound Impact team. We celebrated the fifth annual Profound Impact Day on Monday, September 16, 2024. Inaugurated in 2019, Profound Impact Day is a celebration of the world’s diverse leaders, changemakers, and researchers who are leaving their mark on the global community through their initiatives, influence, and impact.
This year we recognized Roger Grosse, University of Toronto, Ali Ouni, ETS Montréal, and Liam Paull, Université de Montréal, the three winners of the CS-Can|Info-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Award. Professors Ouni and Paull participated in a panel discussion with Feridun Hamdullahpur, former President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Waterloo and inaugural winner of the Impactful Actions Award.
Celebrations also included a conversation between Dr. Kelly Lyons, Professor, Faculty of Information and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and Chair of the CSCan-InfoCan Awards Committee and Profound Impact’s Sherryl Petricevic. Kelly and Sherryl talked about the vital importance, challenges and benefits of industry-academia collaboration and the challenges of early-stage career research.
Check out the conversations with Kelly Lyons and the award winners on Profound Impact’s YouTube channel.
Profound Impact participated in the launch of Women Funding Women Inc. (WFW) Waterloo Region on September 18. This exciting event featured passionate conversations with forward-thinking investors, ambitious founders, and dedicated ecosystem leaders. We’re proud to be part of the powerful movement to bridge the funding gap for women-led businesses and reshape the future of angel investing.
We were pleased to sponsor the Accelerator Centre’s She Talks Tech event, a conversation focused on fostering a supportive environment for the next generation of women in STEM, on September 26. I participated in a panel conversation with other women entrepreneurs, innovators, creatives, and academics who have overcome barriers in their STEM careers. A full recording of the event can be found here.
Profound Impact team members Jacqueline Watty and Sherryl Petricevic were present to support our partner, Innovation Factory, southwestern Ontario’s business accelerator for tech innovation, at the 14th annual LiONS LAIR pitch competition in Hamilton on September 26. LiONS LAIR showcases the best local talent and innovation in Brant, Halton, Hamilton and Norfolk. Congratulations to prize winners Infinite Harvest Technologies, Yellowbird Diagnostics, Inc., Maman Biomedical and DOUBL.
Want to see firsthand how the revolutionary matchmaking features of our AI-powered platform, Research Impact, can transform your research projects by finding the perfect funding match? Join us for University Research Impact Demo Day on 23rd. Sign up here to participate.
As always, thank you for your support and we hope you enjoy this month’s edition of Profound Connections!
Kate Larson Professor, Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo Research Scientist, DeepMind
Kate Larson is an acclaimed AI (Artificial Intelligence) researcher whose work focuses on multi-agent systems and brings together computer science, mathematics, and economics.
As the daughter of a biology professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Kate thought she might like to study biology. “The trouble was that everyone in the department knew me as Katie, my father’s daughter,” she says. A very good course in first-year mathematics sparked her interest and led her to major in the subject as an undergraduate at Memorial.
Kate received an NSERC Undergraduate Research Award, and it was Sherry Mantyka, her supervisor for the research project that she conducted related to the award, who encouraged Kate to attend graduate school. She explains, “Sherry was very supportive and an important mentor. She submitted my project, which was on math and cognitive science, to a research conference. That was a really big deal!”
When looking at options for graduate school, Kate initially considered math programs in Canada, but was intrigued by the advice given by a researcher she met at a conference to study computer science in the United States. “I chose to focus on a field I knew nothing about in a place that was unfamiliar to me,” says Kate.
Kate earned a Masters’ degree in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis and went on to complete her PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Committee members for her thesis dissertation, Mechanism Design for Computationally Limited Agents, included computer scientists and a microeconomic theorist, exemplifying the multi-disciplinary nature of her research.
Kate’s research focuses on multiagent systems and reinforcement learning and applications of AI to support sustainable development and climate-related initiatives. She is especially interested in research challenges that emerge when cooperation is made the heart of AI systems. Issues associated with cooperation are pervasive and important and can be found at scales ranging from daily routines like driving on highways, scheduling meetings and working collaboratively, to global challenges like peace, commerce, and pandemic preparedness. With AI-powered machines playing an increasingly greater role in our lives, it will be important to equip them with the capabilities necessary to cooperate and foster cooperation.
Kate’s work has earned her a Province of Ontario Early Researcher Award, the Canadian Association of Computer Science/Association d’informatique canadienne (CACS/AIC) Outstanding Young Researcher Prize, a University of Waterloo Research Chair and the Pasupalak AI Fellowship. She currently splits her research time as a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and as a Research Scientist at DeepMind in Montreal.
Kate’s role as a researcher and professor has included serving as graduate student supervisor and PhD thesis examiner and committee member for many students during the 20 years she has been on faculty at the University of Waterloo. She is also an active member of the university community, acting as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Cheriton School of Computer Science during the COVID pandemic and as a member of the University Senate representing the Faculty of Mathematics. Kate has also been active in outreach activities to female high school students and in events for university students to promote Computer Science as a career option for women.
The international scientific community has benefitted from Kate’s expertise in her roles as a member of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Board of Trustees Board, program chair for the IJCAI 2024 conference, and member of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and CS-Can|Info-Can Boards of Directors. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and has served as Associate Editor and member of the editorial board for a range of AI scientific journals.
Kate strongly believes that the advancement of AI will benefit greatly from collaborative research that incorporates a diversity of ideas and backgrounds, leading to the consideration of a range of interesting questions. “Issues affecting those with lower incomes, women, and minority populations need to be addressed in AI research. A homogenous group of researchers will develop tools to solve a narrow set of problems,” notes Kate. Kate Larson’s research on cooperation in AI, her emphasis on diversity and interdisciplinary research teams, and her work in both academia and industry are leading the way to machines learning to find common ground to address a wide range of global challenges.
Domenic Rosati Computer Science PhD Candidate, Dalhousie University Head of Artificial Intelligence, Scite
In 2023, senior AI (Artificial Intelligence) researchers and company executives, including Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Sam Altman, signed a statement noting that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Domenic Rosati, Computer Science PhD candidate at Dalhousie University in Halifax, is an early-career researcher whose work focuses on understanding these AI safety risks, both current and potential, and to constructing and measuring future defenses against bad actors who might purposely fine-tune Large Language Models to achieve harmful goals.
As the son of tech entrepreneurs, Domenic grew up around computers, attended summer computer camp and learned to program while very young. “At the time, personal computers weren’t what they are now. With no apps to work with, I naturally picked up programming at a very early age,” he says.
As a teenager, Domenic’s enthusiasm for technology waned and he became more interested in the humanities. “I was really good at programming and already knew the material that my high school offered in computer sciences courses. I took history courses instead,” he adds.
Domenic studied history at Carleton University in his hometown of Ottawa. “For most of my course work, I employed methods using computational linguistics. That got me back into computing,” he explains.
After completing an undergraduate degree in linguistics, Domenic applied to conduct graduate work in history using these methods. After rejections from the University of Toronto and McGill University, he applied to and was accepted to the library and information science program at Dalhousie. He says, “I very quickly understood that working as a library or archivist wasn’t for me. I wanted to do deeper technical work, so I started taking masters’ level computer science courses. By the final year of my program, I was exclusively studying computer science.”
Domenic’s masters’ research was in machine learning for natural language processing, conducted at a time when deep learning was quite new and was being used primarily for computer vision tasks.
“In 2016, I had a moment where I had to choose between pursuing a PhD in computer science or continuing to work in industry,” he says. With a young family to support, he decided to move from academia to industry, where he joined a start-up company doing machine learning for video analysis for movie studios. As Director of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, Domenic worked for two years in both research and engineering roles.
In 2018, Domenic founded a start-up that focused on reinforcement learning. “It didn’t work out but was a really good experience,” he notes.
In 2020, Domenic joined Scite, a platform that uses deep learning, natural language processing to deliver a new type of citation index for literature discovery tasks, as one of the first employees. He says, “We were lucky to build a generative AI experience for doing research tasks, including writing, before ChatGPT.”
Domenic’s work at Scite attracted him back to his roots in computational linguistics. “The motivation to pursue my PhD studies was having industry experience with generative AI, early on before the emergence of ChatGPT, and understanding that customers could use it in really unsafe and irresponsible ways. I knew that someone needs to think, on a regulatory and ethical level, about the safety implications of using these models,” he adds.
His work as an early provider of a generative AI solution for research writing tasks led him to think about the next generation of technology, prior to its development and release. Domenic says, “I’m really concerned about the use of large language models, not as they are today, but as they start to be used to accomplish tasks autonomously, as agents in the world. That very strongly motivated me to try to resolve some of the AI safety issues.”
The main focus of Domenic’s PhD research is a very particular type of threat around the ability of large language models and other neural networks to be trained to competently conduct a wide spectrum of tasks. “Some of the tasks that you can make large language models do are very harmful. For example, autonomously hacking websites, developing security exploits, generating hate speech or misinformation campaigns,” he says.
He notes that the problem with large language model research is that some classify it as a dual use risk problem. “The better you make the technology, the easier it is to use for harmful purposes. There is a massive market incentive for commercial companies and the research community to develop more and more capable large language models. This comes at the risk of those models being able to autonomously perform harmful tasks much better. Completely autonomous agents could take a series of harmful actions.”
Safety guards are the mainstream method used for AI safety. With the use of safety guards, if a model in a commercial or research application is tasked to perform a harmful action, it will refuse and will explain why it’s harmful. The standard AI paradigm is to develop better and better safety guards that refuse more and more harmful tasks.
Domenic’s research is not about better safety guards, but how to prevent their removal through training. If safety guards can be easily removed, they don’t matter.
Domenic will continue to work on his PhD for the next several years. When considering his next career steps, he notes that his focus will be on foundational rather than applied research. That work could be conducted as a university researcher, in industry or as a technical voice to help inform government regulations to build AI for the future.
This early-career researcher’s work in machine learning, natural language generation systems and AI safety is truly pioneering and key to defending against the risks of advanced AI systems.
Profound Impact is continuing to work with eVision Inc. to finalize the details of our partnership, which will embody our joint vision to disrupt the US $2.5 trillion annual Research Tech industry by offering the first-ever AI-enabled end-to-end Research Grant Management solution. Canadian technology is taking the lead on the global stage to transform end-to-end Research Grant Management while creating an AI-enabled grant system that matches workflow and compliance effectively.
Profound Impact is also proud to partner with Vector Institute’s FastLane program as a member, along with an amazing group of like-minded innovators. FastLane enables Canadian start-ups to accelerate their AI commercialization journey and compete more effectively in the global economy. You can learn more about the FastLane program and what Vector Institute has to offer here.
The Profound Impact team has been busy with presentations on the use of AI to strengthen technical communities and uncover innovative ways to align people with opportunities. Last month, I was a guest on The Smart Connector’s livestream to discuss the intersection of AI and funding and to provide insights into innovative funding strategies and the latest technological advancements. You can hear my conversation with Jane Bayler at AI for Impact: Transforming Research Funding with Technology.
Brian Romansky, Profound Impact’s Chief Strategic Advisor, led a session on effective policy-compliant AI use cases for research administrators at the National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) conference in Washington, DC on August 6th.
The Profound Impact team is working on plans for the 5th Profound Impact Day, a time to commemorate the world’s innovative researchers and changemakers who are leaving their mark on the global community through their research, innovation, and impact. As the proud sponsor of the CS-Can|Info-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Award, we will celebrate on September 16th by honoring the award nominees and three award winners. Dr. Feridun Hamdullahpur, the former President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waterloo, will lead a virtual fireside chat with Professor Ali Ouni and Professor Liam Paull, two of the award winners. Register to attend this free eventhere!
On September 17, at 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. EST, Brian Romansky will review how AI technology stands poised to revolutionize the research funding ecosystem at a webinar presented by CARA, the Canadian Association of Research Administrators. You can get more information and register to attend the webinar here.
In this month’s issue of Profound Connections, you’ll meet Lisa Lambert, CEO of Quantum Industry Canada. Lisa is a versatile and dynamic leader and mentor who has dedicated her career to driving innovation, execution, and business growth in high-velocity, ever-evolving environments. And you’ll learn about Alfred Menezes’ career as a world-renowned cryptography researcher, industry advisor, outstanding teacher, and YouTube content creator in this month’s Researcher Spotlight.
As always, thank you for your support and we hope you enjoy this month’s edition of Profound Connections!
Dr. Alfred Menezes Professor, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo
In 1983, as a Grade 13 high school student at St. Aquinas Secondary School in Bramalea, Ontario, Alfred Menezes’ dream was to attend the University of Waterloo. Born in Tanzania and raised in Kuwait, Alfred came to Ontario to live with his aunt and uncle for his final year of high school, with plans to attend university in Canada.
Although he had never used a computer, Alfred and his parents had been assured that a career in computer science would be the path to a good future. “I had good teachers in high school, liked math a lot, and was good at it,” notes Alfred. Waterloo had acquired a reputation as an emerging school for computer science, so he applied to and was accepted by the Faculty of Mathematics.
A visit to Alfred’s math class by Professor Scott Vanstone from the university’s Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the Faculty of Mathematics was a defining moment in his academic and career path. “Scott talked to us about St. Jerome’s College at UW and gave an informal lecture on cryptography. Before he left, he shook my hand. His visit made a major impression on me – I signed up to live and study at St. Jerome’s right away. I would otherwise never have dreamt of doing so.”
Scott was on sabbatical during Alfred’s first year at St. Jerome’s, but Alfred ran into him again at the beginning of his second year, while lined up to register and pay tuition fees. “I saw Scott, but was too shy to speak to him, so I turned away. Scott stopped and said “Hi Alfred, how’s it going?” – remembering me and my name from his visit to my high school 18 months earlier!”
In Alfred’s third year of study, Scott arranged an undergrad research term for him – the beginning of his research career. “I didn’t have other plans after graduation, so I did a Master’s degree, with Scott as my academic supervisor. I wanted to continue to live in Canada, so went on to complete a PhD, working again with Scott. My work on cryptography progressed from a summer undergrad project to my research focus.” His main areas of research are Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), provable security, and related areas.
Alfred’s first academic position was as a professor at Auburn University in Alabama. When Scott Vanstone and Doug Stinson were awarded research chairs in 1998, creating additional research positions at the University of Waterloo, Alfred returned as a faculty member at his alma mater.
“The field of cryptography is fast-moving. My academic work and interaction with Scott, who had co-founded Certicom with UW faculty members Ron Mullin and Gord Agnew, introduced me to the industry,” says Alfred. In addition to research and teaching, Alfred has worked as a consultant for Certicom, BlackBerry, InfoSec Global, and TrustPoint Innovation.
Alfred’s book, Elliptic Curve Public Key Cryptosystems, published in 1993, was the first book devoted entirely to ECC. He co-authored, with Scott Vanstone and Paul van Oorschot, the widely-used reference book Handbook of Applied Cryptography.
Alfred’s focus for the last several years has been on teaching. “I have always loved teaching and have taught cryptography 19 times during my tenure at the University of Waterloo.” The very popular course, the largest fourth-year course in the Faculty of Mathematics, has attracted 250 students for each of the last seven offerings. Alfred’s current challenge is to move the class online in order to reach a broader audience.
“I will be retiring from the university next August, and have decided to become a YouTuber!” says Alfred. He started producing video classes during the pandemic and found that using good audio and camera equipment, adding music, special effects and some humour made lectures a bit lively and less boring and generic to students stuck at home watching video lectures all day.
His first courses offered on his YouTube channel, including Error-Correcting Codes and Post-Quantum Cryptography (Kyber and Dilithium), launched in August and have been well-received, with almost 3,000 views in their first two weeks online. “The post-quantum cryptography course is accessible to cryptographers, but not the general public. The next course, on applied cryptography, will be more accessible and should have a larger audience, including undergraduate students who want to focus on cryptography but don’t have a course available to them at their university and the professors in many countries who don’t have the knowledge or the time to learn the material well,” says Alfred. Developers who want to learn more about the field but find that textbooks on the subject are too mathematical, too elementary, or just outdated, are another potential audience.
Alfred plans to work with contacts in southern Africa to gather students from neighbouring universities to watch videos. He will offer follow-up online office hours two or three times per week to answer questions and will conduct further discussions and answer questions on a Discord channel. He is currently developing a three to four-year plan of courses, topics, accessible videos, and potential interviews with notable people to offer via his channel if the audience is large enough.
Alfred Menezes has come a long way from the shy student who enjoyed and excelled at math in high school. He is recognized internationally as an expert in the field of cryptography and his love of teaching is appreciated by his students who routinely rate his courses as “awesome” or “great.” Students’ online comments about his teaching include “One of the best profs I’ve ever had. His lectures are very clear and informative and he has a passion for the subject,” and “Best prof ever!” His YouTube channel will introduce students around the world to cryptography and will provide them the opportunity to benefit from Alfred’s expertise, passion and talent for teaching.
Growing up in small community in Northern Ontario, Lisa Lambert was a curious kid. “I would stare at the night sky, fascinated to know what was going on up there,” she says. “My mother was very patient with me as I was always up to something – building things or taking things apart.”
Her maternal grandfather, a self-trained mechanic and power engineer who loved nature, encouraged her inquisitiveness. “We’d go out for a walk and he would say: ‘Be careful where you trot, this is living stuff.’ He had a second-grade education but was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. He was civically engaged and cared about how the world worked. I had conversations about politics with him from a young age, which tuned me into the importance of government policy. He taught me to be curious, understand my world, and not take things for granted.” Her grandfather’s wisdom stuck with her and remained inspirational for Lisa as she navigated the path she would follow for her studies and her career.
Lisa wanted to study science and decided to attend Western University in London, Ontario. “We had family friends in London and I knew the city from visits with them,” she says. “I didn’t realize how big the Western campus was, with a student population larger than that of my entire hometown!”
She had planned to pursue an MD and PhD in neuroscience, but her interest in the importance of bridging science to society was sparked by her undergraduate thesis supervisor, who was very involved in science communication outreach in the field of neuroscience. Lisa decided to attend Laurentian University to study Science Communication, the first-and-only program of its kind in Canada offered at the graduate level in collaboration with Science North. “Being such a new field, it was a risk to study science communication instead of enrolling in more traditional graduate training. But it enabled me to chart my own path filled with exciting opportunities to make a difference.”
Lisa’s curiosity has informed her career path. “My formal education was important, but some of my best learning has been from trying new things.” After completing her graduate studies, she worked as an intern at CREO, a Montreal studio that was an innovator in science education projects. Lisa collaborated with creative, production, and technical teams on a range of interactive, game-based projects to ensure that the studio’s award-winning solutions captivated target audiences while incorporating scientific rigour.
Her next position, as one of the first Program/Research Associates at the Council of Canadian Academies in Ottawa, is where she learned about science, technology and innovation policy. “I worked with Peter Nicholson, who had a wealth of experience at the intersection of different areas, and the best experts from across disciplines to learn about how the assessment of evidence on complex scientific topics of public interest is used to inform science policy in Canada.”
Her growing expertise in science communication and public policy served Lisa well in her role as Manager of External Relations and Public Affairs at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo. “Perimeter had just started construction of the Stephen Hawking wing and was shifting its focus from a national to an international mandate in research and educational outreach,” notes Lisa. “It was a great place to grow as I worked with talented colleagues and researchers on global outreach, external relations, government relations, and special projects to establish Perimeter as a top global brand in the field.”
Prior to joining the leadership team at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre, Lisa was selected as one of 250 emerging leaders across Canada to participate in the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference 2015, a unique two-week program aimed at broadening perspectives on leadership, work, communities, and country. The conference’s theme of Exploring Innovation and Leadership provided Lisa with the opportunity to hone skills in stakeholder engagement, brand development, strategic partnerships, public policy, business transformation, community building, and strategic communications.
Lisa moved to British Columbia to join TRIUMF shortly after a new Executive Director was hired. As part of her responsibilities for transforming communications from a service unit into a strategic function to revitalize strategy, operations, and culture while elevating the global profile, Lisa worked on a fresh approach to a five-year plan that resulted in what was then the largest public investment in the organization’s history.
Early on in her role at TRIUMF, she applied to and was selected as one of 100 high-performers around the world to participate in one of the early cohorts of the altMBA program, a pioneering online leadership development workshop. Founded in 2015 by bestselling author Seth Godin, the altMBA engaged a group of students in an intense four-week process to hone critical leadership skills in decision-making, navigating uncertainty, change management, sales, and marketing. Lisa was recognized with the altMBA’s Winograd Award, a peer-nominated distinction awarded based on the recipient’s generosity in helping others. After completing the program, she was invited to join the coaching team and went on to become a Head Coach in the altMBA and other business workshops led by Godin. “I was exposed to a lot and I learned a lot in that capacity,” says Lisa. After working for four and half years at TRIUMF, Lisa’s curiosity and passion for developing new skills prompted her to consider her next career step.
Lisa’s experience in business coaching led to her founding two consultancies, one where she worked with deep-tech start-ups, helping them land and manage first proof of concepts/pilots and scale partnerships with large companies, the other where she helped organizations successfully navigate change and growth by building trust. She co-authored a book on trust-centred leadership with Rick Kitagawa. The Future is Trust is a concise and practical guide to building trust that became an Amazon bestseller.
“I have been fortunate,” says Lisa. “One of the highlights of my career has been to work with and to learn from Margaret Atwood on her legacy project, Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible powered by Disco.” Lisa collaborated with the world-renowned author, teacher, and environmental activist to develop and deliver a global futures-design experience to explore possibilities for a net-zero future that was centered on community, collaboration, and interaction.
“When the project with Margaret was complete, I wanted to continue to work on advancing transformational solutions and was considering how I could bring my skill set to Canada’s growing clean-tech or quantum sectors,” she adds. While at Perimeter, Lisa had worked with the quantum research community. She reached out to former colleagues and quickly learned her timing couldn’t have been better: Quantum Industry Canada (QIC), the national industry-led consortium of quantum technology companies and allied organizations, was in the process of recruiting its inaugural CEO and Lisa’s experience and expertise was a perfect match for the organization. She joined QIC in October of 2023.
QIC’s mission is to translate the country’s quantum capabilities and strengths into business success and economic prosperity. “Canada has been an early quantum pioneer. As the quantum landscape moves from lab to market, this critical sector presents an enormous opportunity to shape our country’s future for the better,” says Lisa.
As a woman who has worked in largely male-dominated environments, Lisa is pleased to see that the landscape is changing. “I was often the only woman in the room. In Canada in particular, I’m delighted to see that there are a considerable number of extraordinary women in leadership roles in quantum. We are at the dawn of the industry – now is such an important time to have role models to help encourage more young women in the field.”
Lisa Lambert has dedicated her career to driving innovation, execution, and business growth in high-velocity, ever-evolving environments. As a mentor to young entrepreneurs her advice to young people interested in a career in science echoes what she learned from her grandfather: “Go have fun. Explore. Take chances. Never stop learning. Be a professional curiosity seeker!”
Profound Impact is proud to sponsor the 2023 CS-Can|Info-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Awards. The awards will be presented at the Second CS-Can|Info-Can Conference Co-Located with CASCON, November 11-14 at York University in Toronto. Congratulations to all three winners!
Roger Grosse of University of Toronto
Dr. Roger Grosse is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. With a robust research focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence, Dr. Grosse’s work explores innovative approaches to learning algorithms and their applications. His research interests span topics such as neural network training, probabilistic models, and scalable learning methods.
Dr. Grosse holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and has contributed significantly to the field through numerous publications and collaborations. His work is instrumental in advancing our understanding of complex machine-learning systems and their practical implementations.
As a leading researcher, Dr. Grosse is committed to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with machine learning technologies, making impactful contributions to both academia and industry.
Ali Ouni of ETS Montréal
Dr. Ali Ouni is a Professor at École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS) in Montréal, specializing in computer vision and machine learning. His research focuses on developing advanced algorithms for visual perception, object recognition, and scene understanding.
Dr. Ouni’s work is pivotal in the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence, where he explores innovative techniques to improve visual data analysis and interpretation. His contributions aim to enhance the capabilities of machine learning systems in understanding and interacting with visual information.
With a robust academic background and a strong track record of research, Dr. Ouni is dedicated to advancing the state of the art in computer vision and its applications, driving progress in both academic and practical contexts.
Liam Paull of Université de Montréal
Dr. Liam Paull is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on developing algorithms that enable robots to perceive and interact with complex environments.
Dr. Paull’s work explores areas such as autonomous systems, robot perception, and human-robot interaction. He is dedicated to advancing the field of robotics through innovative research and applications that address real-world challenges.
With a strong academic background and a commitment to impactful research, Dr. Paull is shaping the future of robotics and AI, contributing valuable insights and technological advancements to the field.
Profound Impact is thrilled to announce that we are joining forces with eVision Inc., a leading research tech company located in Montreal and known for its innovative solutions in research administration, compliance workflow and grant management. We are excited to combine our strengths as two leading research tech companies to make finding and managing research funding easier and more efficient than ever before. We’ll be announcing more details about this powerful collaboration and how it will redefine the future of research funding.
Profound Impact is proud to sponsor the CS-Can|Info-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Awards. The awards will be presented at the Second CS-Can|Info-Can Conference Co-Located with CASCON, November 11-14 at York University in Toronto. In this issue of Profound Connections, you’ll meet award winners Richard Grosse, Liam Paull and Ali Ouni and learn about the research they’re conducting in areas including AI, Neural Networks, Robotics and Software Engineering.
Profound Impact team member, Adele Newton, was honoured by ACM SIGGRAPH, the global non-profit organization serving the evolution of computer graphics and interactive techniques, at the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference in Denver on July 30. Adele received the Outstanding Service Award for her forty years of outstanding service to the computer graphics community and the SIGGRAPH organization and conference. Congratulations, Adele!
Our team is working on plans for the 5th Profound Impact Day, usually held on September 14th, but this year we will be celebrating on September 16th. Profound Impact Day is a time to commemorate the world’s innovative researchers and changemakers who are leaving their mark on the global community through their research, innovation, and impact. Check out Profound Impact’s social media channels and next month’s issue of Profound Connections to learn how you can join us to celebrate these researchers and their ground-breaking achievements.
Are you ready to revolutionize your research process? To learn how you can use the power of our AI-driven platform, Research Impact, watch our demo to see how we automatically match researchers with the perfect funding opportunities, saving time and boosting success.
As always, thank you for your support and we hope that you enjoy this month’s edition of Profound Connections!
May was a month of celebration for the Profound Impact team, our partners and our communities.
I was honoured to be recognized, along with my late husband, Scott Vanstone, renowned mathematician, researcher and co-founder of Certicom Corporation, as a Laureate in the 2024 Waterloo Region Entrepreneur Hall of Fame for our founding of TrustPoint Innovation Technologies. The Entrepreneur Hall of Fame celebrates local business founders who have made a positive, lasting impact in the community and I’m delighted to join this group of innovative leaders.
Profound Impact Corporation was proud to sponsor the 2024 KW Oktoberfest Rogers Women of the Year Awards, an event that celebrated, recognized and paid tribute to the collective accomplishments and of 123 incredible women in the Waterloo Region. As sponsor of the STEM category, we’re pleased to congratulate award recipient Linda Li, an Environmental Engineer and Associate with Dillon Consulting. Linda has contributed to complex and multidisciplinary projects in the area of water, energy, and climate change.
I was pleased to be interviewed by Disruption Magazine Canada to share how Profound Impact leverages AI to provide the perfect match of funding opportunities with academic researchers and corporate partners. You can read about my career journey and the work we’re doing at Profound Impact in this Women in Tech article as well as a feature in the I Am Unbreakable magazine.
Guardian Women, a community built by Guardian Capital Advisors LP to focus on bringing women together to learn from one another, presented a Women Disrupting with Purpose event on May 29, where I participated in a fireside chat with Micha Choi, Client Portfolio Manager at Guardian. It was a pleasure to share stories of my experience as an entrepreneur and philanthropist at this exciting event.
The Profound Impact team was busy connecting with our academic partners in May. Sherryl Petricevic, our Director of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships, presented at CARA 2024 on Revolutionizing Grant Funding Using AI, sharing insights from current users of our Research Impact platform. CARA, the Canadian Association of Research Administrators, serves as the national voice for research administrators in Canada, uniting professionals from diverse roles in this ever-evolving field. We’re proud to have been a part of this informative event, featuring expert panelists and fostering innovation in research administration.
Jacqueline Watty, our Business Development Manager, hosted a round table discussion at the Polytechnics Canada Conference on May 15th. Topics included the challenges and opportunities faced by polytechnics and colleges when it comes to securing funding, working with industry partners and tackling a growing to-do list on a shrinking resource budget.
We’re pleased to introduce you to Joanne McKinley in this month’s Impact Story. Joanne, who is Director of Software Development at Google and Co-Site Lead of Google Waterloo, is an established industry leader, passionate advocate and mentor, recognized innovator, a role model for women in technology and an inspiration for young women considering careers in computer science.
In this month’s Researcher Spotlight, you’ll meet Professor Anita Layton, the Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematical Biology and Medicine, and Professor of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Pharmacy and Biology at the University of Waterloo. Anita has been recognized as an influential figure in applied mathematics research at the interface of mathematical computation and biomedical sciences, has inspired new experimental and clinical studies in the area of renal physiology and associated medical care and has highlighted the importance of gender differences in mathematical models for biological systems.
As we move into June, we look forward to participating in the Collision Conference in Toronto on June 17-20 and the NCURA AI Symposium in Alexandria, VA on June 24. We look forward to seeing many of you at these events.
As always, thank you for your support and we hope that you enjoy this month’s edition of Profound Connections.
Anita T. Layton Professor of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Pharmacy and Biology Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematical Biology and Medicine University of Waterloo
As the daughter of a mathematics teacher, it was assumed that Anita Layton would follow in her father’s footsteps to study math. “All of my father’s colleagues said, ‘You will be a mathematician like your dad.’ I was rebellious and didn’t know what I liked – but I knew that I didn’t want to do math because everybody expected that I would!”
Anita’s journey from Hong Kong, where she spent her first 18 years, to Duke University in North Carolina, was prompted by her father’s lifelong desire to complete a PhD degree in the United States. “His family was poor, so he took a job instead of pursuing graduate studies,” she says. “I was told, from a very young age, that I would earn a PhD in the US. My father chose Duke and I chose physics and computer science as my majors – even though I had never taken a computer science course before college. I hadn’t thought about majoring in computer science until I realized I couldn’t do experiments – I’m really clumsy. With computer science, if something isn’t right, there is no fire and nobody has to know. You can just go back and fix it!”
While Anita was completing her undergraduate degree in North Carolina, her family moved to Richmond Hill, a suburb of Toronto. She decided to pursue her graduate studies at the University of Toronto, completing a PhD in computer science on numerical weather prediction in 2001. Her first postdoc was at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
Anita married Harold Layton, a mathematics professor at Duke University, in 2000, and wanted to return to North Carolina. She completed a second postdoc at Duke and then was hired as a tenure-track professor of mathematics there. “My husband was doing kidney research. I was tired of weather research after doing it for years and I wanted to work on anything but weather,” she says. She read one of her husband’s papers and noted that the kidney is about blood flow, which can be described with the same equations as the movement of the air in weather. “I thought – that’s cool. Maybe I can try my hand at it as a mathematical modeler even though I don’t know much biology,” she added.
Anita was a trained numerical analyst who used computers to solve mathematical equations very quickly, looking at other people’s models and systems of mathematical equations and working to solve them better, faster and more accurately. This skill, along with the biology she learned, eventually allowed her to build her own models. “I learned a lot about biology during that time. I attended biology meetings to meet people and to build professional relationships and was ultimately recognized as belonging to the research community,” she said.
Anita spent 16 years at Duke University, where she was the Robert R. & Katherine B. Penn Professor of Mathematics, and also held appointments in the department of biomedical engineering and the department of medicine. She was recruited to the University of Waterloo in 2018 as a Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematical Biology and Medicine. Anita is currently Professor of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Pharmacy and Biology at the University of Waterloo and heads the Layton Group, a diverse and interdisciplinary team of researchers that use computational modeling tools to better understand aspects of health and disease.
Layton Group undergraduate, graduate students and postdocs collaborate with physiologists, biomedical engineers, and clinicians to formulate detailed models of cellular and organ function. She explains, “My research had focused on the application of mathematics to biological systems to understand the impacts of diabetes and hypertension on kidney function as well as the effectiveness of novel therapeutic treatments. My research has since expanded to focus on drug simulation and how some drugs work better in men than in women.”
In addition to her work as a renowned researcher, Anita is active in the research community. She is an Associate Editor of SIAM Review Book Section, an Associate Editor of SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems, a Section Editor (AI/Machine Learning) of Hypertension and an Associate Editor of Maple Transactions. She says, “I love research but for most of my career, I’ve also held substantial administrative positions. I was Chair of the Arts and Sciences Council for three years at Duke and served as the Associate Dean, Research and International, for the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. I like to improve things and took the Associate Dean to help promote my colleagues’ research.”
Equity, diversity and inclusion are also very important to Anita. She serves on, and chairs, the Research Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Council at the University of Waterloo. She has also been active with the university’s Women in Math initiative, which encourages and advocates for women and gender minorities who are interested in studying mathematics and who seek careers in mathematics. She says, “There are many reasons women are discouraged from studying math. Through the Dean’s Distinguished Women in Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Lecture Series, we bring role models to speak to and with grad students. These excellent speakers, who also are renowned researchers and experienced mentors, are able to talk to and encourage those students.”
When asked what’s next in her career, Anita says, “I’m happy running my research program, but I want to do more to promote a supportive and rich environment for research and education in Canada. I’m especially interested in what I can contribute to science.”
Her advice to young people when considering what career to pursue is to “Follow your heart and your talent. Do something that keeps you happy and that you can do well.” For women in mathematics, Anita advises, “Keep your eyes open to find allies, both men and women, who can understand your concerns.”
Mathematics is the new microscope for Anita Layton and the members of her research group. Her work has inspired new experimental and clinical studies in renal physiology and related medical care, has constructed models to simulate new diabetes drugs, has highlighted the importance of sex differences in hypertension and has developed a new approach for diagnosing autism in children. And her passion for mentoring women and gender minorities and fostering diversity is a powerful demonstration of her commitment to the mathematics community at large.
