Guest: Anindya Sen, Professor at the Department of Economics, Faculty of Arts - University of Waterloo

Bio: I was born in Saskatoon and grew up in Calgary and Montreal. However, I spent my teens and young adult life in Nigeria and India. As a result I was exposed to rather extreme differences in economic conditions and material comforts. I became interested in why people in prosperous countries like Canada could obtain their groceries and household needs from large and clean stores while individuals in less developed countries, had to access tumultuous (and vibrant) bazaars. The acute and chronic poverty I also encountered impacted me, and I began to wonder on what a government could and should do in terms of policy intervention. I saw economics as a natural outlet to answer these questions.

Guest: Ali Ayub, Post-Doctoral fellow at SIRRL at the University of Waterloo

Bio: I am a Post-Doctoral fellow at SIRRL at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn. I graduated with a Ph.D. degree from REAL at The Pennsylvania State University, under the supervision of Professor Alan R. Wagner. Before joining Penn State, I completed my undergraduate in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. I was also a part of the Global UGRAD program funded by USEFP and spent a semester at the University of Central Missouri during my undergraduate studies.

My research is highly inspired by neuroscience and focuses on lifelong learning to enable long-term autonomy for assistive robots. In particular, I focus on robot learning from a limited number of interactions with humans in a lifelong manner. With respect to applications, my research is applicable in different fields of robotics that require long-term autonomy, particularly domestic robots and home service robots. Overall the main goal of my research is to develop autonomous assistive robots that can continually adapt to the dynamic real-world environments to support their users in daily living.

Guest: Helen Chen, Professor of Practice; Associate Director, Professional Practice Centre for Health Systems

Bio: Dr. Helen Chen is the Associate Director of Professional Practice Centre in Health Systems, she is also the faculty lead of the WHISTL research group. Additionally, she is an assistant research professor, jointly appointed to both the School of Public Health and Health Systems and to the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

Guest: Gautam Kamath - Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science.

Bio: I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science, and a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute. I run The Salon. I'm interested in reliable and trustworthy statistics and machine learning, including considerations such as data privacy and robustness.

I was a Microsoft Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing for the Fall 2018 semester program on Foundations of Data Science and the Spring 2019 semester program on Data Privacy: Foundations and Applications. Before that, I completed my Ph.D. at MIT, affiliated with the Theory of Computing group in CSAIL. I was very fortunate to be advised by Costis Daskalakis.

Before MIT, I spent four wonderful years at Cornell University, graduating in May 2012 with a degree in Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. At Cornell, I was incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to work with Bobby Kleinberg.

Guest: Brokoslaw Laschowski

Bio: Dr. Laschowski received his PhD from the Department of Systems Design Engineering, with a specialization in biomedical engineering, at the University of Waterloo and is member of Waterloo.AI

Guest: Vijay Ganesh - Co-Director, Waterloo.AI, and Associate Professor, Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo

Bio: Vijay Ganesh is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo's department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, cross-appointed with the School of Computer Science in the Faculty of Math, and the Co-Director of the Waterloo AI Institute. He is also a member of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, the Waterloo Computational Math program, and the Waterloo blockchain research community. Vijay completed his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2007 and was a research scientist at MIT from 2007 to 2012.

The primary focus of Vijay's research is the theory and practice of SAT/SMT solvers and their applications in software engineering, security, AI, mathematics, and physics.