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Field Lecture: Joanna Mills Flemming (Dalhousie University, Halifax/Nova Scotia, Canada)
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Title:"Portholes into an Underwater World: Data and Models Unveil Secrets of the Sea""Much can be learned about the ocean and its inhabitants despite the scarcity of direct observations. Instead, we frequently rely on ocean technologies to explore, study, and make use of its resources. The data collected by these efforts, when combined with (often complex) statistical models, play a crucial role in improving our understanding of the ocean and how it is responding to climate change, mitigating (other) environmental challenges, and sustaining various industries. This talk describes three research projects each of which uses vastly different ocean technologies, data, and statistical models to unveil secrets of the sea."
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Sedgewick Lecture: Kathleen Fraser (Ottawa/Ontario, Canada)
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Title:"Ethical AI: What does it mean, how can we do it, and why should we care?""Every day brings exciting new advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and yet questions remain about whether these technologies have the ability to make the right moral choices -- and who gets to decide what the "right" choice is, anyway? In this talk, I will define eight key pillars of Ethical AI, as established by Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society: privacy, accountability, safety, transparency, fairness, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and the promotion of human values. I will illustrate each theme with real-world examples of the harms that result when these pillars are overlooked -- and ways that we can avoid these harms to build a better, safer, and more equitable society with AI technology."
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Blundon Lecture: Franklin Mendivil (Acadia University, Wolfville/Nova Scotia, Canada)
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Title:"Sets of sums and sums of sets""Most of us learned about infinite sums in a calculus class where we were initiated into the mysteries of when such a sum converges or diverges. In this talk, we revisit this mathematical locale but instead consider what you can "construct" if you look at ALL the possible (convergent) subsums of an infinite series. The resulting sets have pleasing structure and include fractals, both familiar and unfamiliar.
This question has been investigated since at least 1914 and has generated some pretty mathematics. It is also tied to geometric questions about sums of Cantor sets."
