GenAI in Teaching and Learning Symposium

Vered Shwartz is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and the University of Washington. Vered’s research focuses on natural language processing, with the fundamental goal of building models capable of human-level understanding of natural language. In particular, she is interested in computational semantics and pragmatics, commonsense reasoning, multimodal models, and culturally-aware NLP models.

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed is a Canada Research Chair in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is cross-appointed between the Department of Linguistics and School of Information and holds a courtesy appointment in Computer Science. His research focuses on large language models in multilingual contexts, with a goal to innovate more equitable, efficient, and ‘social’ machines for improved human health, more engaging learning, safer social networking, and reduced information overload.

Bryce Traister is a professor of English literature, specializing in American literary, cultural, and religious history. He has served as the Dean of UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies since 2017. During this time, he has championed the value and role of the arts, creative practices, and knowledge production in and for the local communities of the greater Okanagan and beyond. He has been particularly engaged in the last two years in understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on creative arts and humanities education.

Based in San Francisco, Kurt Wilkinson is a 2009 alumnus from the Sauder School of Business at UBC. Kurt is on the leadership team of NinjaTech AI, which has partnered with Stanford Research and AWS to build AI agents for work. Prior to NinjaTech, Kurt spent nearly 10 years at Google focused on market expansion for new products, and five years at Accenture as a consultant. Kurt is also an active startup investor and non-profit board member.

Naznin Virji-Babul is a physical therapist, neuroscientist and Associate Professor in the Dept. of Physical Therapy, Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her laboratory is based at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health. She is also the Director of Interdisciplinary Research in the Office of the Vice-President, Health. Naznin’s research combines advanced neuroimaging techniques with machine learning and deep learning models to study brain dynamics, particularly in concussion/traumatic brain injury. She has led interdisciplinary research projects on AI-driven classification of concussions using raw, resting-state EEG data.

Kamil Kanji is a final year Honours Political Science and International Relations student in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. He has served as Vice-President, Academic and University Affairs of the Alma Mater Society at UBC, the largest student union in the country. In this role he served as Co-Chair of the UBC Generative AI Advisory Committee where he along with several others worked to develop UBCs first set of guidelines around the use of generative AI. Kamil has also served as a 3-term elected student Senator on the UBC Vancouver Senate where he has been Vice-Chair of the Senate, Vice Chair of the Academic Policy Committee, Chair of the Budget Sub-Committee and Chair of the Agenda Committee. He has worked in these roles to advance policy and culture around the better integration of AI into teaching and learning activities.