Artificial Intelligence @ Dawson
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies are spreading rapidly, impacting the labour market and generating major transformations in the workforce. Along with these changes come ethical and social issues that will need to be tackled, sooner or later. According to a recent report released by the World Economic Forum on The Future of Jobs, technological breakthroughs such as high-speed mobile internet, machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, big-data analytics, and cloud technology will be spearheading companies’ adoption of new technologies between 2018 and 2022. Furthermore, according to the same report, “in purely quantitative terms, 75 million current job roles may be displaced by the shift in the division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms, while 133 million new job roles may emerge at the same time.”
The education sector is mobilizing to identify the many challenges and opportunities that the proliferation of AI presents. Dawson College is well-positioned to make substantive contributions to this enterprise and to fill an important role in the burgeoning AI ecosystem. Regardless of program of study, all of our students will graduate into a rapidly evolving economy driven by powerful, pervasive and somewhat nebulous technologies The pace and scale of change makes the exact future that awaits them is difficult to predict.
However, as a community and through a variety of approaches and a wide range of initiatives, Dawson College aims to revolutionize college education and better prepare the leaders of tomorrow. We will not delegate this responsibility to undergraduate or graduate studies. Groundbreaking technologies offer great rewards to those who learn to master them, but equally dire consequences to those swept along in the tide of change without a basic understanding of the landscape. Dawson College is in a unique position to influence how the CEGEP network ultimately decides to address this turning point in economic history.
How to get involved
The AI initiative at Dawson is cross-disciplinary and multi-faceted and there is a myriad of ways to get involved. If you are faculty, there will be regular calls for proposals for research and teaching fellowships. There is also a Community of Practice that meets a couple times per month that is open to all. For those looking to influence the direction of the initiative itself, there is an AI task force composed of members of the Dawson community, which aims to have representation from across the college. For more information, contact the DawsonAI Project Co-Leads at: jtrudeau@dawsoncollege.qc.ca and cbouffard@dawsoncollege.qc.ca.
There will also be AI Events often organized and hosted by the AI Teaching and Research Fellows. The calendar of events will display below when there are upcoming events scheduled.
Upcoming Events
DawsonAI 2020 Speaker Series:
Call for Research Fellows
In April 2019, the Board of Governors of Dawson College approved DawsonAI Initiative: an ambitious, multi-faceted three-year strategic effort to better prepare our students for a future which will be increasingly shaped by new technologies such as Machine Learning, the Internet of Things, and Big Data.
The largest fraction of the approved financing is for the DawsonAI multi-disciplinary Community of Practice. CoP Fellows are faculty who meet regularly and collaborate on developing portfolios of teaching resources in their discipline, which are focused on incorporating themes pertinent to the DawsonAI initiative in their classrooms.
The second most important part of the budget is focused on supporting the development of applied research expertise amongst faculty with respect to these same themes. The DawsonAI Research Fellowship is meant to support faculty in research projects related to domains such as:
- Fundamental or Applied research in AI
- Machine Learning
- Ethics of AI
- Computational Linguistics or Natural Language Processing
- Digital Humanities
- Computational Social Science
THE CALL FOR FELLOWS IS NOW CLOSED.
The ultimate objective of the DawsonAI initiative is to expose as many students as possible, in as many ways as possible, to how data is transforming every facet of our lives at an unprecedented pace. The impact of social media platforms on democracy, algorithmic biases, digital surveillance, AI and the Arts, the economics of automation, computer vision, machine translation, augmented reality, learning analytics, biostatistics…these are but a few of the new frontiers where Dawson faculty may have research expertise. Students will invariably benefit from such a focused effort to systematically accelerate these types of research projects.
The DawsonAI initiative stands out from other similar projects at other institutions, because of its focus on building the local capacity of our faculty so that the impact spreads beyond the traditional math, science, and computer science, disciplines. The modern economy is increasingly inter-disciplinary: this initiative strives to mirror that in all its projects.
