May 1: AI Leadership Panel and Presentations

Registration and Check-in

8:30 a.m. - 9 a.m.

Saint Mary’s University, Loyola 290

Opening Remarks

9 a.m. – 9:15 a.m.

Panel discussion

9:15-10:15 a.m.

Panel Discussion: Reimagining Atlantic Canada through the Lens of AI

Moderated by Dr. Michael Zhang

  • NS Health
  • Google
  • Empire
  • EY
  • KPMG

AI Research Presentations

10:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Please note that each time slot has two concurrent presentations. Feel free to move back and forth. There are five minutes between presentations.

See the sessions below.

Theme A: AI and Ethics, Policy, and Human Behavior

Loyola Conference Hall (LA290)

Sessions are 20 minutes each.

  1. Operationalizing AI Ethics
    Stephanie Kelly (SMU)

  2. From Algorithms to Transparency: Ethics, Politics, and the Public Understanding of AI
    Robert Thacker (SMU)

  3. Are LLMs a Good Model of Human Thought? The Challenge of Compositional Learning
    Hassan Sajjad (Dal)

  4. Generative AI in Business Decision-making: Do LLMs Show Biases Similar to Human?
    Xichen Zhang (SMU), Hasan Cavusoglu (UBC)

  5. Fact Retrieval from Knowledge Graphs through Semantic and Contextual Attention
    Enayat Rajabi (CBU)

  6. AI Applications in Intra-Logistics and Logistics
    Uday Venkatadri (Dal)

Theme B: AI for Health, Environment, and Society 

Scotiabank Theatre (SB201)

Sessions are 20 minutes each.

  1. Connecting the Dots: Clinical Genomics, AI, and the Future of Precision Medicine
    Victor Martinez (Dal)

  2. AI for Sustainable Livestock Farming ~ Advancing Welfare, Efficiency, and Climate Resilience
    Suresh Neethirajan (Dal)

  3. Privacy Preserving Machine Learning: Securing Sensitive Data in AI
    Lydia Bouzar-Benlabiod (Acadia)

  4. Real-time REM Sleep Stage Detection using Deep Learning
    Danny Silver (Acadia)

  5. AI in Ocean Technology
    Christopher Whidden (Dal)

  6. Harnessing Agentic AI for Secure and Efficient Confidential Data Analytics
    Yigit Aydede (SMU), Chukwuemeka Nwankwo (novastorms.ai)

Lunch and Networking

12:30 p.m. - 1:30 pm

Keynote Speaker Chief Data Officer NSH

AI Research Presentations

1:30 - 3:30 p.m.

Please note that each time slot has two concurrent presentations. Feel free to move back and forth. There are five minutes between presentations.

See the sessions below.

Theme C: AI in Security, Systems, and Science

Loyola Conference Hall (LA290)

Sessions are 20 minutes each.

  1. Cybersecurity Gets Smart: How AI is Changing the Game
    Amir Eaman (Acadia)

  2. The Power of Data: Fueling AI in Cybersecurity
    Kwasi Boakye-Boateng (UNB)

  3. Paving a Foundation for Intelligence Everywhere with Beyond Explainable AI (xXAI) at the Edge
    Hung Cao (UNB)

  4. Advancing Machine Intelligence Through Reinforcement Learning
    Janarthanan Rajendran (Dal)

  5. AI for Autonomous Navigation
    Thumeera Wassinghe (MUN)

  6. AI in Physics
    Terrence Tricco (MUN)

Theme D: AI in Education, Learning, and Communication

Scotiabank Theatre (SB201)

Sessions are 20 minutes each.

  1. AI in Higher Education: Opportunities, Challenges, and Lessons from the Front Lines of Implementation and Research
    Jason Pearson (UPEI)

  2. Considerations around GenAI use in Teaching, Learning, and Research
    Matt McGuire (UNB)

  3. Investigating Fine-Tuning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Enhance AI Model Performance in High-Level Computer Science Courses
    Shadi Aljendi (UNB)

  4. From Paperwork to Patient Care: How can we better leverage LLMs to support occupational therapy documentation?
    Kristina Kupferschmidt, Gus Skorburg, Brendan Wylie-Toal, Kieran O’Dohert (UPEI)

  5. Human vs. AI: The Creative Battle Transforming Marketing
    Hadi Eslami (SMU)

  6. Robust and Effective Workflows for Machine Learning Development
    Matthew Hamilton (MUN)

Industry Workshop

3:30 p.m.-5 p.m.

Google AI Research and Applications (Chief Information Security Officer Google Cloud)