AI & Christianity

Date/Time
Date(s) - January 25, 2025
10:00 am - 1:00 pm

Location
Michael Smith Labs

Categories No Categories


This event is co-hosted by the Canadian Scientific & Christian Affiliation (CSCA). The Society of Catholic Scientists (SCS) has enjoyed working with CSCA in the past, and is delighted to partner again.

This watch party will feature two remote speakers (biographies below). After watching the webinar, we will have a lunch, and then move to the panel discussion.

Schedule

– 10:00-11:30am: Webinar watch party (MSL 102, theatre)

– 11:30am-12:15pm: Lunch (MSL 101, multipurpose room)

– 12:15-1:00pm: Panel Discussion (MSL 102, theatre)

  • Remote presenters (webinar)

Joanna Ng is a former IBM-er, pivoted to a start-up founder, focusing on Artificial Intelligence, specialized in Augmented Cognition, by integrating with IoT and Blockchain, in the context of web3, by applying design-thinking methodology. With forty-nine patents granted to her name, Joanna was accredited as an IBM Master Inventor. She held a seven-year tenure as the Head of Research, Director of the Center for Advanced Studies, IBM Canada. She has published over twenty peer-reviewed academic publications and co-authored two computer science books with Springer, The Smart Internet, and The Personal Web. She published a Christianity Today article called “How Artificial Intelligence Is Today’s Tower of Babel” and published her first book on faith and discipleship in October 2022, titled Being Christian 2.0.

Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory; co-founder of Affectiva, which provides Emotion AI; and co-founder and chief scientist of Empatica, which provides the first FDA-cleared smartwatch to detect seizures. Picard is author of over three hundred peer-reviewed articles spanning AI, affective computing, and medicine. She is known internationally for writing the book, Affective Computing, which helped launch the field by that name, and she is a popular speaker, with a TED talk receiving ~1.9 million views. Picard is a fellow of the IEEE and the AAAC, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and a Masters and Doctorate, each in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from MIT. Picard leads a team of researchers developing AI/machine learning and analytics to advance basic science as well as to improve human health and well-being, and has served as MIT’s faculty chair of their MindHandHeart well-being initiative.

  • Local panelists (in-person)

Martin Ester, PhD

Martin Ester received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1989 with a thesis on knowledge-based systems and logic programming. He has been working for Swissair developing expert systems before he joined University of Munich as an Assistant Professor in 1993. Since November 2001, he has been an Associate Professor, now Full Professor at the School of Computing Science of Simon Fraser University. From May 2010 to April 2015, he served as the School Director. Dr. Ester has published extensively in the top conferences and journals of his field such as ACM SIGKDD, WWW, ICDM and AAAI. According to Google Scholar, his publications have received more than 66,000 citations. He received the KDD 2014 Test of Time Award for his paper on DBSCAN. Martin Ester’s research interests are in data mining and machine learning, with a current focus on causal discovery and causal inference and transfer learning. Dr. Ester is very interested in the translation of his research results into practical applications and has had many collaborations with partners in industry, science, and government. Last but not least, he cares about the integration of his science with his Christian faith. He has been a member of the CSCA since 2012 and part of a team that has been offering the “God and Reason” public lecture series at Simon Fraser University since 2011. He co-authored a chapter on AI in Brownnutt & Foxx (eds.), Global Perspectives on Science and Christianity (Langham, 2024).

Yuriko Ryan, D.Bioethics, MA, HEC-C

Yuriko is a bioethicist and gerontologist based in Vancouver, with an interdisciplinary background spanning business, academic research, and healthcare administration. Currently a contributing fellow at AI and Faith, she delves into the intricate relationship between artificial intelligence and Christianity. Passionate about public engagement, she actively fosters ethical reflections within the community, bridging complex concepts with accessible discourse.

Paul Bucci, PhD

Paul is a startup-founder, researcher and interaction designer from Vancouver, BC. His research is on emotional interaction with machines, and has included building soft robots and sensors, building machine learning models of emotion based on biophysical signals, and qualitative sense-making with large-scale data. His design practice spans print, film, 2D and 3D interfaces, and large-scale interactive installations. Most recently, he has been working on commercializing his PhD research on large-scale data by founding a startup called Teleoscope. He teaches software engineering and cognitive systems at UBC and Corpus Christi College.

https://www.catholicscientistsvan.org/event-details/ai-christianity

Also available online (10 – 11:30)

https://network.asa3.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1889760

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