Program

2017 Program

Friday, 3rd November

10am - 12pm		Programming Challenge Final (Room Drummond Centre & East, Level 3) By invitation only
12pm - 5pm	Faculty Meeting (Room Drummond West, Level 3) By invitation only
5pm - 6pm	Registration (Lobby, Level 4)		Poster (Foyer Ballroom, Level 4)
6pm - 9pm	Banquet (Ballroom West & Centre, Level 4) Margaret-Ann Armour		Poster (Foyer Ballroom, Level 4)
9pm - midnight	Social Event (Ballroom West & Centre, Level 4)

Saturday, 4rd November

9am - 9:55am	Keynote : Joëlle Pineau, McGill University, Improving Health-care through AI (Ballroom West & Centre, Level 4)
Tracks Rooms	Track 1 Companies (Ballroom West & Centre, Level 4)	Track 2 R&D (Drumond West, Level 3)	Track 3 Outreach (Drumond Centre & East, Level 3)	Track 4 Technology (Salons 6&7, Level 3)
10am - 10:55am	IBM	Kelly Lyons Service Systems and Social Features	Kate Arthur Kids Code Jeunesse	Virtual Reality
11am - 11:55am	Shopify	Grad Student Forum	Student Tech Talks	ElementAI Artificial Intelligence
12pm - 12:55pm	Lunch & Networking (Ballroom East, Level 4)	Faculty Meeting	Lunch & Networking (Ballroom East, Level 4)		Career Fair & Networking (Foyer, Levels 3 & 4)
1pm - 1:55pm	Accenture	Faculty Meeting	Lunch & Networking (Ballroom East, Level 4)
2pm - 2:55pm	Google	10 minutes to Share Your Passion for Your R&D Field	Sébastien Gambs Ethics	Electronic Arts Game Development
3pm - 3:55pm	RBC	Serge Villemure NSERC-CRSNG	Ville de Montréal IoT	Morgan Stanley Trading Technologies
4pm - 5:30pm	Panel : Being Women in IT & Closing (Ballroom West & Centre, Level 4)

Shopify, with Annie-Claude Côté, Lei Lopez, Daniella Niyonkuru, Francoise Provencher, Lynne Perrault as Panelists, Tiffany Tse as Moderator and Fadjiah Collin as Intern Mentor.

Shopify's mission is to make commerce better for everyone. We are intentional about building effective teams with diverse backgrounds and perspectives to build the best products for our merchants. Tiffany Tse, a Developer Advocate Lead on our Partnerships team, will moderate our panel of 4 Shopifolk in a variety of technical roles on different teams across Shopify. We will dive into their paths into tech, challenges their teams are currently facing, and how they each approach complex problems. There will be time for questions from the audience for our panelists at the end.

Annie-Claude Côté, Software Developper
Annie-Claude Côté is a software developer who actively gives a shit about UX. She solves front-end and back-end problems at Shopify, most recently working on Partnerships engineering integrations. She is serious about code quality, optimization, and finding all the edge cases.

Lei Lopez, Production Enineering Team
Lei graduated from McGill University in Computer Science after an ill-fated start in biology. Now she works on tools to make developers happier as part of the Production Engineering team at Shopify. Her favourite emoji are the potato and the mermaid.

Francoise Provencher, Leader of a Data Science team
Françoise is leading a data science team at Shopify, an e-commerce SaaS company based in Canada. Her focus is to help product teams make data-informed decisions. Her team achieves this using fancy algorithms and good old common sense.
Before joining Shopify, she earned a PhD in experimental physics and a post-doctoral fellowship in machine learning. Although she loves the switch to data science, she secretly misses shooting lasers on stuff.

Lynne Perrault, Lead in the Security Team
Lynne joined Shopify in June 2016 as a Lead in the Security team responsible for Platform Integrity. This entails detecting, monitoring and responding to cyber threats, spam related issues and fraudulent activity. The team’s goal is to provide a safer environment for our merchants on which they can grow their business. For the previous 5 years, Lynne was CRTC’s Director of Electronic Commerce Enforcement Division responsible for the enforcement of the Canadian Anti-Spam legislation (CASL). Lynne’s career path includes roles as the Executive Director of the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance Canada; as a Computer Forensics Officer in the Electronic Evidence Unit (EEU); and as an Enforcement Officer conducting both criminal and civil investigations at the Competition Bureau. In the past, Lynne led the 2nd largest investigative firm in Ontario for more than a decade, expanding into three other provinces within 5 years. As a respected leader and young entrepreneur, she was twice recognized as one of Ottawa’s top 40 executives under 40 in 1997 and 1999 and nominated for Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 1998.

Tiffany Tse, Front End Developer
Tiffany is a front end developer, educator and speaker. She currently works as a Front End Developer Advocate Lead at Shopify where she specializes in front end development, user experience design, accessibility. She is passionate about educating young designers and developers. Previously, she was a Chapter Lead for Ladies Learning Code and taught as a Professor at Algonquin College in Ottawa.

Fadjiah Collin, Industrial Engineer
Graduate in industrial engineering at the ÉTS, Fadjiah has several experiences in data analysis, notably in culture, transport, education and more recently in e-commerce at Shopify. Sharing knowledge in data science is at the heart of her concerns, this is why she is responsible for organizing Meetup R user group. Also, Fadjiah was one of the founders of the start-up GrowClean, who had the ambitious project to put data science at the service of food sovereignty. That won her the first place in the entrepreneurial category at the contest inventing the world of tomorrow 2016 of the network of engineers of Quebec.

Olga Garcia, Senior Manager, Accenture
Women in Technology roles, getting to equal and unconscious bias

Talking points:

Women in Technology roles
Getting to Equal
Unconscious Bias

Biography
Olga Garcia is a Senior manager at Accenture. She started her career at Accenture in Spain more than 10 years ago, taken a variatey of Technology roles and since then she had the opportunity to be part of Accenture in 3 different countries: Spain, Australia and Canada. Overall she has more than 15 years of consulting experience with clients across a wide range of industries, including resources, communication, finance and the public sector. She studied Technical Eng. In Computer Science in Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain). Olga is passionate about Inclusion and Diversity in the technical fields and how to increase awaress to close the gender gap.

Google, by Cait Phillips, Christine Multidor, Karolina Zurowska, Hira Shanmugaraj and Erika Shapiro
Women in Tech: Creating an Inclusive Environment

Google is committed to empowering all women by connecting, developing, and fostering a sense of community
amongst women in tech. Join us for a special Google Women in Tech Panel where we'll build that community and
conversation together, as we share why we're empowering Googlers to address unconscious bias, imposter
syndrome, and how we're encouraging all Googlers to celebrate diversity and inclusion. Moderated by Caitlin
McDonough, University Programs Specialist at Google.

Cait Phillips, Senior Software Developer, Google Canada
Cait joined Google in 2011, as a member of the Chrome team in Montreal. Since then, she has worked on various aspects of Chrome including security, code health, and currently Chrome for Enterprise. Cait has an MSc. in Computer Science from McGill University, specializing in Machine Learning.

Christine Multidor, People Consultant, Montreal, Google Canada
Christine works in Human Resources based in the Montreal office. She joined Google 10 years ago where she worked in the New York office and "la joie de vivre" brought her to Montreal about five years ago. Christine has touched different aspects of Google's People Operations organization including staffing, benefits and now works as a People Consultant. Outside of Google, Christine enjoys biking, salsa dancing and learning about this city she now calls home. Christine used to volunteer as "English as a Second Language" instructor and this is a great opportunity to connect with students at this inspiring time of life.

Karolina Zurowska, Software Engineer, Google Canada
Karolina joined Google 3 years ago, after taking time to finish PhD in Computer Science at Queen's University. During her graduate studies as well as at Google, Karolina has been a fierce supporter of diversity in computing, for instance, she helped to organize the first edition of ONCWIC in 2010, the predecessor of CAN-CWIC!

Hira Shanmugaraj, Product Manager, Google
Hira is a Product Manager at Google and has worked on Search Autocomplete, International Search and Hotels. She joined Google after graduating from Management Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Beyond work, Hira strives to increase diversity in technical fields through community development, including leading STEM programs and mentoring underserved youth.

Erika Shapiro, Program Manager, Google
Erika has been with Google since 2013 and has been working on an incredible variety of Consumer Hardware Products as a Program Manager. Since graduating from McGill University, Erika has worked in many industries including medical device, disk drive design and manufacturing, and low tech consumer products. She has had the opportunity to travel the world in a variety of roles from New Product Introduction, engineering design, quality, manufacturing, and commodity management.

Sherry Munslow, Senior Manager UX & BSA Team, Digital Content Services, Royal Bank of Canada

Technology at RBC. Powered by ideas. Inspired by you.

We’re revolutionizing the way the world lives, works, and banks. With projects in Agile, Big Data, Cloud, Digital, Security, Machine Learning Research, amongst many others, you have the opportunity to make a direct impact to shape the future of the financial industry with innovative technologies. That’s why we’re looking for people like you – brilliant, entrepreneurial, original, and extraordinary.

Want to do incredible work that shakes up an entire industry? You’re in the right place.

Join our Workshop if you’re interested in learning about RBC’s Technology group. We’ll be talking about the latest trends in technology, how they are impacting RBC, and new projects that could have the chance to work on!

Biography
Sherry Munslow has been working within Technology for 15 years. As a certified usability professional, Sherry manages a team of User Experience Designers and Business System Analysts within Digital Content Services at RBC. “We are the requirements hub, Requirements for the project solution on the front end, (the UX Designer) and the requirements required for the system specifications (the BSA)” this means we engage with every type of IT professional you can think of to bring a project from zero to life. It also means you get to see the length and breadth of technology and all its interesting places”
“We are creating for the future now, and that future needs to be designed for all in mind. To ensure the future upholds equality in all corners of our lives we need women more than ever to be part of our digital solutions. Therefore we need a diverse set of individuals to innovate and create. I strongly believe in diversity on the team as this brings a wealth of perspectives to a solution. This diverse pool needs to be an equal balance between women and men. My personal opinion on inhibitors to women in technology is that they don’t see them-selves as coders and have an impression that to be in technology you need to be highly technical or do code.
There are so many critical roles in technology where innovation, creativity, and problem solving are in high demand. We need strategists, researchers, designers of all types; User Experience, Visual Designers, UI and Interaction designers, QA’s, Business Analysts and Business System Analyst, Project Managers and Program coordinators, Agile SrumMasters and Product leads, the list goes on. We have each one of these roles and more here in technology. So you don’t have to code to be involved. It’s challenging but rewarding work to see your visions come to life and adopted out there in the market place”

Track 2 : R&D

Grad Student Forum : please consult the subtab 'Grad student forum' in the Program submenu or click here for more information.

Faculty Meeting : please consult the subtab 'Faculty meeting' in the Program submenu or click here for more information.

Kelly Lyons, Associate Professor, University of Toronto
Studying Service Systems and Social Features through Industrial-Relevant Research Projects

The emerging field of service science is the study of service systems which are defined as configurations of resources (people, information, organizations, and technology) adapting dynamically and connecting internally and externally to other service systems to bring about benefit or value. A defining aspect of service systems, called value co-creation, takes place when entities interact to create value together. These interactions take place within and among organizations. Successful value co-creating interactions can make use of social features to support relationship-building, group interactions, collaborative work processes, and information sharing across organizational and geographic boundaries. In this presentation, I will introduce the concept of service systems and define social features and social platforms. I will then present four industrial-relevant research projects that each take a different approach to studying social platforms to support interactions in service systems.

Biography
Dr. Kelly Lyons received her PhD from Queen’s University in 1994 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and Associate Dean, Academic in the Faculty. Prior to joining the Faculty of Information, she was the Program Director of the IBM Toronto Lab Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS). Her current research interests include service science, social media, and knowledge mobilization. Currently, she is focusing on ways in which social media can support human‐to‐ human interactions in service systems and data-driven knowledge mobilization. Kelly has co‐authored a number of papers, served on program committees for conferences, given many keynote and invited presentations, and co‐chaired several workshops. She has been the recipient of NSERC Discovery Grants, an NSERC Collaborative Research and Development Grant with SAP, an NSERC Strategic Partnership Grant, an IBM Smarter Planet Faculty Innovation Grant, has received funding through the GRAND Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) and has been the recipient of two NSERC Engage Grants (one with Sciencescape and one with Dell). Kelly holds a cross‐ appointment with the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science, is a member of the University of Toronto’s Knowledge Media Design Institute, and is an IBM Faculty Fellow. From 2008 to 2012, she was a Member‐at‐Large of the ACM Council and a member of the Executive Council of ACM‐W. Kelly is very interested in promoting Women in Technology initiatives and has given several presentations to young people and teachers on this topic. More details can be found at: http://individual.utoronto.ca/klyons

10 minutes to share your passion for your R&D field by Halima Elbiaze, Leila Kosseim, Sylvie Ratté and Karine Vincent.

Halima Elbiaze, Associate Professor, Université du Québec À Montréal
... And Hedy Lamarr created wireless communication

Biography
Halima Elbiaze holds a Ph.D. in computer science and a M.Sc in Telecommunication systems from Institut National des Télécommunications, Paris, France and Université de Versailles in 2002 and 1998, and B.S. Degree in applied mathematics from university of MV, Morocco in 1996. Since 2003, she is with the Department of Computer Science, Université du Québec à Montréal, QC, Canada, where she is currently an Associate Professor. She is the author or coauthor of many journal and conference papers. Her research interests include network performance evauation, traffic engineering, quality of service management in optical and wireless networks.

Leila Kosseim, Associate Professor, Concordia University
Automatic Discourse Analysis

Biography
Leila Kosseim is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science & Software Engineering Department at Concordia University in Montreal. She obtained her PhD from the University of Montreal ( http://diro.umontreal.ca/accueil/ ) in 1995 on the topic of Natural Language Generation. Then she obtained an NSERC Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowship and worked on the development of the Antidote Software ( http://www.antidote.info/ ) at Druide informatique Inc. ( https://www.druide.com/ ) From 1998 to 2001, she then served as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Montreal within the RALI group ( http://rali.iro.umontreal.ca/rali/?q=en/homepage ) , and in 2001, she joined Concordia University.
Since 2010, Leila co-directs the CLaC lab at Concordia. Her research interest is in the area of Natural Language Processing and, in particular, Discourse Analysis. Leila currently serves as Vice-President of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC https://www.caiac.ca/ ).

Karine Vincent, Yellow Pages Canada
User Experience, Engagement and Optimization of Digital Assets

In today’s world, digital properties are created and then disappear within a few weeks. Users are easily drawn to what’s new, but are increasingly difficult to retain. What are the challenges that product managers face today? How can we create more satisfying user experiences and engaging products? What are the most effective optimization tools and techniques? Using many rich examples, this seminar will try to answer these questions.

Biography
Karine Vincent currently manages all consumer websites for Yellow Pages Canada.
She has more than 18 years of experience in the conception, optimization and merchandizing of digital assets, and has worked for several companies that have disrupted their industries, thus leading to exponential growth (Luxury Retreats, DuProprio). She specializes in user engagement, lead generation and conversion strategies. Karine believes in the value of data and listening users in order to build strong experiences and engaging products.
Karine holds a Master’s degree in Marketing Research from the HEC and a certification in Direct Marketing from the Canadian Marketing Association.

Sylvie Ratté, École de Technologie Supérieure ÉTS
Can cues about our health be hidden in our language ? The story of my passion for computers and linguistics.

Biography
Sylvie Ratté is an Associate Professor in the Department of Software and IT Engineering at the École de technologie supérieure, and Director of the LiNCS (Cognitive and Semantic Engineering Laboratory). Master in Mathematics and Computer Science, Ph.D. in Linguistics, she was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT (Brain and Cognitive Sciences). Her current research interests include natural language processing, text and video mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

She is currently heavily involved in two areas of application. In education (collaboration with AERES University in the Netherlands), her team (Alinea project) invents algorithms to monitor the evolution of the use of specialized concepts by graduate students. In collaboration with the Medical University of South Carolina, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Hospital Psychiatrico Fray Bernardino Alvarez de Mexico, and the European group CLARe (Corpora for Language and Aging Research Group), her team (Cecilia project) develops algorithms to detect and characterize the evolution of Alzheimer's disease in the elderly using videos of natural conversations carried out in non-stressful environments.

Serge Villemure, Director, Scholarships, Fellowships & Chairs for Women in Science and Engineering, NSERC/CRSNG
Sex, Gender, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion : Strengthening Research Excellence

NSERC has been implementing initiatives to increase women and girls’ participation in natural sciences and engineering research since the 1980s. These initiatives are now being complemented by additional institutional commitments and a Council-wide action plan to increase equity, diversity and inclusion as elements of research excellence. Our current strategic plan, NSERC 2020, has as one of the five strategic goals “Building a Diversified and Competitive Research Base” which includes gender equity as a key priority.
This presentation, recognizing the range of issues contributing to current participation rates of women and under-represented groups in science and engineering research in Canada, introduces the initiatives and actions NSERC is committed to and undertaking to increase gender equity, diversity and sex, gender and diversity analysis in research.

Biography
Serge Villemure joined NSERC in 1991. Since 2010, he has been Director of the Scholarships and Fellowships Division. In 2013, he also became Director of the Chairs for Women in Science and Engineering Program and at the same time undertook the responsibility of integrating gender equity and diversity considerations into policies and programs, and facilitating Gender-Based Analysis capacity building across the Agency.

Track 3 : Outreach

Kate Arthur, Founder and Executive Director, Kids Code Jeunesse
Code in Canadian Children's Education

How is Canada integrating digital skills learning into children's education? What are the challenges and opportunities? Since 2013, Kids Code Jeunesse has worked with over 25,000 children and 3000 teachers, and works with various levels of government across the country to help integrate coding into the classroom. Canada has made great advances in the past 4 years - do we have much further to go?

Biography
Founder and Executive Director, Kids Code Jeunesse
Kate is fierce supporter of children’s education in digital skills and entrepreneurship. She is founder and executive director of Kids Code Jeunesse, a not for profit dedicated to bringing computer programming to children and teachers across Canada. Kids Code Jeunesse also represents Code Club Canada, which is part of the international organization, Raspberry Pi. Kate is a mentor and coach with Technovation, an international app competition for girls. She sits on the board of directors of Compucorps, an Ottawa-based charity dedicated to training indigenous youth with tech skills. She is also on the board of directors of the Canadian Federation of Friends of Museums, which focuses on volunteerism in museums across Canada.
Kate Arthur is the recipient of the 2016 Emerging Leader of the Year Award, Women in Communication and Technology, Canada. She is a recipient of the 2015 Tech Girls Canada Portraits of Strength and 2015 YES Women in Tech Role Model.

Student Tech Talk : please consult the subtab 'Student Tech Talk' in the Program submenu or click here for more information.

Sébastien Gambs, Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal
Fairness, accountability and transparency in personalized systems

In our Information Society, profiling users for personalization and recommendation has become the norm, which has lead to the development of services that are targeted to the specific needs of individuals but also raise important ethical issues. In particular, the lack of transparency on the personalization and profiling process makes it impossible for an individual to question the decision taken by the personalization algorithm and to make it « accountable » on why this decision was taken. For instance based on the information collected about him, an individual could have the amount of his health insurance fee increased or he could be denied the access to a particular ressource without being able to appeal against this decision. In addition, transparency is a prerequisite to be able to analyze the possible bias that the personalization algorithm could have (e.g., discriminating against a particular sensible category of the population) and eventually to correct them.

In this talk, I will review the main challenges related to fairness, accountability and transparency that have appeared in the recent years before describing the main approaches that have been proposed to address the challenges. Finally, I will conclude by highlighting some open research questions.

Biography
Sébastien Gambs is a professor at the Computer Science Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) since January 2016, after having held a joint Research Chair in Security of Information Systems between Université de Rennes 1 and Inria from September 2009 to December 2015. His research interests encompass subjects related to computer security, with a particular focus on location privacy, privacy-preserving data mining as well privacy-enhancing technologies in general.
He has co-authored over 45 refereed publications (mostly international), including 9 journal articles and more than 35 conference and workshop papers. He is also the co-author of two patents that are related to the protection of privacy. He has supervised or co-supervised 5 PhD students and 15 MSc students that have successfully graduated. In 2014, he has defended his Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches (HDR) on the subject of “Protection of privacy in the Information Society”.

Ville de Montréal, IOT, by Carolina Paez, Gianina Mocanu and Marie-Odette St-Hilaire
Montreal: Digital Smart City

City of Montreal's Smart and Digital City strategy plan and its accompanying action plan propose the use of various sensors to improve services for citizens, such as traffic and street light management, snow removal automation, automate public waste management to limit CO2 emissions and public parking space management.
All data produced by these sensors will eventually be processed by:

decision support systems (predictive and prescriptive analytics). These systems will exploit artificial intelligence techniques to perform optimizations and information extractions that were difficult to achieve with traditional approaches
integrated traffic management systems
public safety management systems

The approach for the City of Montreal will be "decouple" sensors from the algorithms to maximize re-use of the data produced by the sensors for several types of analysis.

We will present some of the initiatives currently driven by the City’s Information Technology department in order to implement this vision. We will address three themes from from the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) at City of Montreal: Infrastructure, Analytics and Ethics.

Carolina Paez, Telecommunications Architect
Carolina Paez holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering. She has more than 10 years of experience in telecommunications. She works as a telecommunications architect on the IoT research project at City of Montreal with Mcgill University. Passionate about her job Carolina plans to work on the development of smart city Montreal.

Gianina Mocanu, Infrastructure and Operation Director
Gianina Mocanu joined City of Montreal in 2015 committed to participate actively to the program to transform Montreal into a smart digital city. She is currently working as Infrastructure and Operation Director for the Information Technology Service of City of Montreal.
Gianina holds an MBA degree from UQAM, an Executive MBA from Paris Dauphine University and a MEng degree from Politechnique, University of Montreal. She has more than 15 years experience in IT.

Marie-Odette St-Hilaire, IT Architect
Marie-Odette St-Hilaire works at City of Montreal as IT architect specialized in data science. She is involved in smart city projects such as intelligent transport, open data and connected objects (IoT) by analyzing data from a variety of sensors deployed throughout the townsite.
She received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2007. She has over 15 years of experience in data analytics, mostly in the sectors of smart city and maritime surveillance.

Track 4 : Technology

Virtual Reality, by Sophie Callies and Eric Lavallée
Virtual Reality, from entertainment to training

VR is entertaining and offers many research possibilities, its applications include healthcare, safety, security, as well as corporate training which makes for an inevitable medium with exceptional and unique features.
The conference will also present a 360 tour of VR, as well as its evolution and nuances of virtuality. Ms. Callies and Mr. Lavallée will also discuss methods used and challenges encountered in the context of a VR development project led jointly by UQAM and ellicom.

Sophie Callies, R&D Manager, Ellicom
Sophie Callies obtained her PhD in 2016 in cognitive computer science at UQAM. Her thesis focused on serious games architecture. She has just finished a postdoc in virtual reality applied to corporate training, and she is now the R&D manager at ellicom, a company which develop and produce custome-made training.

Éric Lavallée, Master Candidate at UQAM
Éric Lavallée has completed a bachelor's degree in computer science at UQAM. He is a NSERC scholarship student. He has just started a master program in artificial intelligence with the professor Éric Beaudry.

ElementAI, by Naomi Goldapple and Negar Rostamzadeh
Artificial Intelligence: what you need to know now and what is on the horizon

Unless you have been living in a cave, it would be difficult to not have heard of recent and major advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Canada and around the world. By combining "big data" strategies of the past few years with exponential improvements in computer computing power, today we can deploy new highly effective AI solutions at the enterprise level. After presenting the building blocks of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we will present several examples of their use in a variety of industries, such as self-driving cars and health care, and will even predict the trends that lie ahead over the next few years.

Naomi Goldapple, Program Director, ElementAI
Naomi has the unique experience of being both a start-up entrepreneur and a seasoned business professional.
Naomi is currently a Program Director at Element AI, one of the largest applied research labs in the world. Naomi’s role is to work with clients and organizations to identify the most impactful ways of leveraging AI solutions that fit into Element AI’s roadmap and research goals. Prior to this, Naomi was the VP of Business Development and COO of Nexalogy Environics, a startup that specialized in semantic clustering algorithms. She led the company to work on meaningful problems with the federal government in security, health and environment sectors. Naomi’s experience was gained through business and technology consulting for IBM. She worked in Latin America on various technology projects . She held the position of Director e-business for Royal LePage Commercial Inc, one of Canada’s largest commercial real estate companies. Her entrepreneurial experience began in 2005, starting up and running Maman, bébé et café inc., a center for young families where the adults could get fit, socialize, shop or get pampered while their children were playing in the state of the art play area. The efforts paid off by winning the Concours Québecois Entrepreneuriat 2007, Défi feminin compagnie F 2007 and being nominated as a finalist in the Prix Femme d’Affaire du Québec 2008. Naomi has been a mentor with Founder Fuel for the past 6 years and uses her expertise to help technology entrepreneurs with strategy and financing. Naomi has an International MBA, specializing in developing markets in Latin America, from the Schulich School of Business as well as a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University.

Negar Rostamzadeh, Research Scientist, ElementAI
Negar Rostamzadeh is a Research Scientist at Element AI. Her areas of interests are Machine Learning (particularity deep learning approaches) applied to Multimedia problems (mainly video classification/detection, captioning and segmentation)

Negar has received her bachelor degree in Computer Science from the University of Tehran. She started her Ph.D. at the Mhug (Multimedia and Human understanding) group, University of Trento, Italy. There she did research under the direction of Prof. Nicu Sebe. She worked as a research intern at the MMV (Multimedia and Vision) lab at the Queen Mary University of London, where she was supervised by Prof. Yiannis Patras. Negar spent more than 2 years of her Ph.D. at the MILA (Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithm) lab under the supervision of Prof. Aaron Courville. She was a Research Intern in the Research and Machine Intelligence group at Google (Seattle) in summer 2016. After her Google internship, she came back to MILA to continue her research on Video Understanding under the supervision of Prof. Aaron Courville. She finished her Ph.D. in April 2017. She is currently working at Element AI as a Research Scientist.

She was a co-founder of Women in Deep Learning (WiDL) workshop in 2016, organizer of Women in Machine Learning (WiML) workshop at NIPS 2017, Women in Computer Vision (WiCV) workshop at CVPR 2017, and Women in Deep Learning workshop at MILA deep learning summer school 2017.

Tulay McNally, Director of Quality Verification - BioWare, Edmonton
Imposter Syndrome: My Journey as a creative (non-technical) leader in Game Development

Imposter Syndrome is a phenomenon of the way we control our lives, of the way we control our destiny. It is common for women in the technology industry to suffer from imposter syndrome because the industry is still very male-dominated. We’ll talk about some techniques to manage imposter syndrome and how the work environment within my industry - Game Development - can be important to enabling that confidence.

Biography
Tulay McNally's focus is strategic planning, organizing, directing, and coaching of leaders with a focus on Development QA and Quality Engineering. In collaboration with other leaders across EA her goal is to ensure the success of our games, while anticipating future trends and technologies to build world-class QA teams. She holds an MA in American Studies, a BA in Psychology, and is a Certified Agile Practitioner. Tulay previously worked for companies like Microsoft, Alias Systems, CG Channel, Square Enix, and SEGA.

Aditi Noata, Vice President, Morgan Stanley
Electronic Trading @ Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley is a global leader in executing transactions in cash equity and equity-related products for institutional clients around the world using its cutting edge electronic trading platforms. Global institutes, hedge-funds and industry innovators turn to Morgan Stanley’s sales and trading team as we work to find new forms of investment and best venues to generate superior returns. Join us to learn how Morgan Stanley uses technology to automate trading and develop platforms that offer global electronic access across cash equities and listed derivatives (options and futures) by including broad suite of algorithms, low latency high frequency order managers, smart order routing and artificial intelligence.

Biography
Aditi Noata is a Vice President in the Technology Division at Morgan Stanley, Montreal.
Aditi has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Arizona, USA and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from India. She joined Morgan Stanley in 2006 as a Summer Intern and received an offer to join as Technology Analyst in 2007 in a global team based in New York responsible for developing sales and trading applications using cutting edge technologies for internal and external traders. She moved to Canada in 2014 to build and head her current team in Morgan Stanley’s Montreal office.
Before joining Morgan Stanley, she worked extensively in systems and network programming at Siemens, starting as an Intern and later as a Software Engineer. She is also a Cisco Certified Network Associate.
Aditi is the recipient of many awards and scholarships throughout her work and academia including “Women in Technology Scholarship” at Morgan Stanley, “High Performing Associate” at Morgan Stanley, awards of academic excellence in her undergraduate degree from President of India and high school from Prime Minister of India.

Panel : Being Women in IT

Rima Brek, Associate Managing Director, B. Eng. – Ubisoft Toronto

Biography
A Ubisoft veteran of 19 years and a founding team member of the Toronto studio, Rima’s contributions at the studio are diverse. From kick-starting the technology team in Toronto and helping ship the critically-acclaimed Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist, to facilitating knowledge sharing between projects and providing strategic management guidance across teams, Rima is a sought after advisor whose guidance and leadership have directly helped Ubisoft Toronto grow to 600+ game developers in just seven years.
Before joining Ubisoft Toronto, Rima started her career in the game industry at Ubisoft Montreal as the first female programmer to join the studio. Following her passion for AI development, Rima was instrumental to shipping numerous projects in Montreal including Rainbow Six Raven Shield and Rainbow Six 3.
Rima volunteers her time to help educate Computer Engineering and Computer Science graduates looking to break into the games industry.

Leah Buchholz, Talent Acquisition Lead, Wealthsimple

Leah will share her insights in attracting and working with a diversity of talent.

Biography
Leah Buchholz comes with a diverse background with a masters in Speech-Language Pathology and accompanying experience working in clinics, as well as having served as a policy advisor in the federal government. Presently, as the Talent Acquisition Lead at Wealthsimple, she understands that diversity of experiences and backgrounds only serves to strengthen an individual team and company at large.

Rachel Chagnon, Professor, Director of UQAM's Institut de recherche et d'études féministes

Biography
Rachel Chagnon is a professor at the Département des sciences juridiques of the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is also the director of UQAM’s Institut de recherches et d’études féministes, a research center on feminist studies. Professor Chagnon is currently working on questions related to public policies on gender base violence. She’s taken part in several research projects related to the impact of the law as regards to women employment.
Among her most recent publications one may find: Rachel Chagnon, « Les Pères de la confédération et l’Acte d’Amérique du Nord Britannique de 1867 », in La conférence de Québec de 1864 : 150 ans plus tard, Brouillet, Gagnon et Laforest dirs, PUL, Québec, 2016, Collection Prisme; Rachel Chagnon, « Les femmes et la justice au Canada : quelle justice ? », Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, no 16, automne 2016; Rachel Chagnon, « Constats sur la difficile intégration d’une analyse intersectionnelle en droit canadien : le traitement de la polygamie dans l’Affaire Bountiful », Revue Nouvelles pratiques sociales, vol 26 no 2, 2014.

Lori Lalonde, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft
#ShePersisted: A Retrospective on my 20 Year Career in Tech

This year I celebrate 20 years in the tech industry, and what a ride it has been! In this no-holds barred session, I will share my experiences on what it was like for a woman in tech, long before diversity and inclusion initiatives were top of mind. I will discuss the obstacles I encountered, missteps that were made, and lessons learned along the way. At the end of it all, you will walk away with an understanding and appreciation for the adversity that you may still be faced with today, and how you can be an advocate for change to make the industry more welcoming and inclusive for all.

Biography
Lori Lalonde is a Technical Evangelist with Microsoft Canada, an Apress author, blogger, and international conference speaker. Although her career began in 1997, her love of technology dates back to her early childhood. Lori would spend countless hours teaching herself how to program using BASIC on a Commodore 64, and playing video games on an Atari 2600. She was a gamer girl before there was a name for it. In her spare time, Lori enjoys being involved in her community, serving as the lead organizer for Canada's Technology Triangle .NET User Group and participating in local Women in Technology groups.

Catherine Mathys, Chronicler, reporter and animator
Why Silicon Valley Can No Longer Do Without Women

Women's contributions in the field of computer science dates back to the beginning, but it has rarely been appropriately acknowledged. That said, beyond the obvious moral issue, the absence of women also has an impact on business growth.

Biography
Catherine Mathys has been a chronicler, reporter and animator for almost fifteen years. She specializes in the coverage and analysis of technological transformations. She particularly enjoys observing our relationship to technology and its impact on our daily lives. Holder of a master's degree in communication, the subject of her thesis focused on the role of technology in the work and identity construction of journalists. For some years now, we can hear her at ICI Radio-Canada Première and read her in several other media. Catherine is also a lecturer at Université de Montréal where she teaches the course Culture Mobile.