The Faculty of Science Department of Computer Science invites you to a (virtual) public lecture series by alumni and friends of the Department of Computer Science.
The Faculty of Science Department of Computer Science invites you to a virtual public lecture with Computer Science friend Tim Belsher, currently a Technical Art Director at Electronic Arts, on Thursday, February 29th, 7 p.m. – 8 p.m. CST via zoom: please be sure to register in advance by clicking here
In this talk, Tim will go through his career in Computer Graphics that spans more than 25 years, in both film and games. His career objective has always been to combine his technical and artistic skills in a creative environment. He will describe how the film and games industries combine the technical and art disciplines to create amazing imagery and experiences. He will describe the rewards and challenges of combining these two disciplines and outline the similarities and differences between the games and film industries. He will finish with future interesting challenges facing the computer graphics industry, including incredible advancements in real-time graphics and the new possibilities of Generative AI.
Tim has been in the computer graphics industry for over 25 years. For the first 20 years of his career, he worked in the film industry, where he was hired in both technical and artistic leadership roles as a CG Supervisor, Pipeline Supervisor and Technical Director at companies such as Industrial Light + Magic, Digital Domain and Image Engine. Tim moved into the games industry seven years ago, and is currently at Electronic Arts as a Technical Art Director. His résumé includes work on films such as: "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens", "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith", "Doctor Strange", "Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier", "TRON: Legacy", and "District 9"; and video games such as: "Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville", "UFC 4", and "UFC 5".
Tim was born in Regina and moved to British Columbia in 1985. He has a Computer Science degree from Simon Fraser University.
If you ask Google "who created Microsoft Windows Task Manager", David Plummer is the reply. David is an entrepreneur, programmer, and U of R alumnus. After graduation, he went on to work with Microsoft and create systems that we use to this day. David was born and raised in Regina and now lives in the Seattle area with his family.
To read more about David Plummer, please see:
Larry Matthies' job with the Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology allows him to personally participate in putting robots on other planets, like Perseverance on Mars.
The Perseverance Mars rover landed in Jezero Crater, where we can see from orbit that a river flowed into the crater, which held a lake, and a delta formed at the mouth of the river. The mission of Perseverance is to explore around the delta to improve our understanding of the ancient climate and to examine the possibility that life or precursor molecules evolved there. The rover will also acquire a set of samples and leave them for a mission that the U.S. and Europe plan to send later this decade to bring the samples back to Earth. This sequence of missions is called the Mars Sample Return campaign. Perseverance also carries a small helicopter called Ingenuity, which is intended as a technology demonstration of the first heavier-than-air aircraft ever to attempt flight on another planet. This lecture will give a brief introduction to Mars exploration and these missions.
Dr. Larry Matthies has 39 years of experience in computer vision R&D for autonomous navigation of robotic ground and air vehicles on Earth and in space. He has been with the Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology since 1989, now as a Senior Research Scientist. He has pioneered development of many computer vision-related capabilities that had and will have high impact on robotic solar system exploration. Of all his experiences at NASA, he says that the most extraordinary was being at the 1997 landing of the first Mars rover (Sojourner). He was awarded the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal in 2007. For further information, please visit mars.nasa.gov.
Social learning helps humans and animals rapidly adapt to new circumstances, and drives the emergence of complex learned behaviours. In this talk I will explore whether we can use insights from social learning to improve artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. I will introduce Social Reinforcement Learning, which focuses on leveraging social learning to enhance AI learning and generalization, coordination with other AI agents, and human-AI interaction. For example, I propose new algorithms for enabling AI agents to learn from experts that are present in their environment, or learn how to have better conversations with humans by learning from their social cues. I also show how competition between agents can lead them to learn more complex behaviours, and generalize better to new tasks at test time. Overall, I argue that Social Reinforcement Learning is a valuable approach for developing more general, sophisticated, and human-compatible AI.
Natasha Jaques holds a joint position as a Research Scientist at Google Brain and post-doc at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on social reinforcement learning -- developing multi-agent RL algorithms t that can improve single-agent learning, generalization, coordination, and human-AI collaboration. Natasha received her PhD from MIT, where she focused on Affective Computing and new techniques for deep/reinforcement/machine learning. Natasha earned her Masters degree from the University of British Columbia, and undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of Regina.
In this talk I will give a high-level overview of AI in healthcare, followed by a discussion of key trends that I think will impact developments in the area over the next several years. This will include examples from a "laundry list" of tools I would love to develop for clinicians. Finally I will discuss some of the challenges and solutions to AI implementation in healthcare, with examples from my work over the last decade in the USA.
Dr. Mitchell is currently the Alberta Health Services (AHS) Chair in AI in Health, a professor in the Department of Medicine, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alberta. He is also a Fellow with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute ( https://www.amii.ca/ ) and the Senior Program Director of Artificial Intelligence Adoption with AHS. After his BSc and MSc degrees from Regina, he received his PhD at the University of Western Ontario and has been working in the fields of biomedical imaging, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for 30 years. Dr. Mitchell was the inaugural Artificial Intelligence Officer at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Florida from 2019 to 2021. There, he led efforts to develop AI tools to improve the efficiency and quality of cancer care, including models to predict patient outcomes from electronic health record data, and natural language processing to infer diagnostic codes from free-text pathology reports. He was a Professor of Radiology at Mayo Clinic in Arizona from 2011 to 2019 and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Radiology, and Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Calgary from 2000 to 2011. He was recognized with an Alumni Crowning Achievement Award from the University of Regina in 2011.
The space domain enables everyday life in commercial, civil and military industries. Today, technology development is driving lower cost launch and the proliferation of space assets. The intersection of government and commercial developments provide hybrid space architectures which accomplish missions with newfound speed and agility. As space matures, technology that was once hosted on the ground is moving to space. However, space is increasingly becoming contested, putting future developments at risk.
Ross Niebergall is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of L3Harris Technologies, an agile global aerospace and defense technology innovator that delivers end-to-end solutions that meet customers’ mission-critical needs. The company provides advanced defense and commercial technologies across space, air, land, sea, and cyber domains. Dr. Niebergall leads the company’s engineering, technology & corporate strategy organization, including driving the company’s overall technology strategy. Dr. Niebergall joined Harris Corporation in 2017, prior to the company’s merger with L3 Technologies, after a long career at Raytheon.
Dr. Niebergall was born and raised in Saskatchewan. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Regina, and an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Notre Dame. Before joining Raytheon, he served as an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of North British Columbia and as a post-doctoral research fellow and visiting scientist at McMaster University.
From the privacy issues with Facebook to the recent explosion of AI concerns, IT Ethics are now political issues that we must all work to clarify. IT Professionals are needed to describe the facts and issue the warnings. As past Chair of the Saskatchewan Information Technology Sector Partnership with government and educators, Donna led discussions about recruitment into the IT sector and how to support career paths in Saskatchewan and Canada. Donna will describe some lessons learned and some challenges for growth of Ethical IT Talent in Canada.
Since Donna retired from SaskTel 12 years ago, she has written a book called "The More Things Change: A Case Study to Introduce Information Technology Ethics" and has been awarded the status of CIPS fellow (see https://cips.ca/DonnaLindskog/ ). IT Ethics are an important part of being an IT Professional and it is where Donna continues to encourage industry discussions.