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University Pedagogy, Institute for the Study of

laurie.bulchak — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 07:16:02 +0000

University Pedagogy, Institute for the Study of laurie.bulchak Tue, 07/30/2024 - 03:16

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https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/isup/

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Campus

Mississauga

Nonlinear Analysis and Modeling, Centre for (CNAM)

laurie.bulchak — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 07:14:38 +0000

Nonlinear Analysis and Modeling, Centre for (CNAM) laurie.bulchak Tue, 07/30/2024 - 03:14

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https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/math-cs-stats/cnam

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Mississauga

Students' Union (U of T Mississauga)

laurie.bulchak — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 04:47:05 +0000

Students' Union (U of T Mississauga) laurie.bulchak Tue, 07/30/2024 - 00:47

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https://utmsu.ca

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Mississauga

Lost and Found, U of T Mississauga

laurie.bulchak — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 23:38:40 +0000

Lost and Found, U of T Mississauga laurie.bulchak Mon, 07/29/2024 - 19:38

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https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/iits/utm-service-desk-resources/lost-found

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Scarborough

U of T Mississauga Library

laurie.bulchak — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 18:48:05 +0000

U of T Mississauga Library laurie.bulchak Sat, 07/27/2024 - 14:48

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https://library.utm.utoronto.ca

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SpinUp

laurie.bulchak — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 01:07:07 +0000

SpinUp laurie.bulchak Thu, 07/25/2024 - 21:07

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https://spinup.utm.utoronto.ca

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ICUBE UTM

laurie.bulchak — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:47:36 +0000

ICUBE UTM laurie.bulchak Thu, 07/25/2024 - 20:47

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https://icubeutm.ca

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U of T researcher to talk about AI opportunities – and designing household robots

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 17:21:42 +0000

U of T researcher to talk about AI opportunities – and designing household robots

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 11/08/2017 - 12:21

Cutline

Sanja Fidler, an assistant professor in U of T Mississauga's department of mathematical and computational sciences, talks about her research earlier this year at the ElevateTO conference (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Chris Sorensen

Topic

City & Culture

Artificial Intelligence

Computer Science

Faculty of Arts & Science

Subheadline

Sanja Fidler will be one of several speakers during campus career event

Sanja Fidler has a back-of-the-envelope way to track Toronto’s rapid emergence as a global centre for artificial intelligence, or AI: the number of machine learning graduate students who are jumping at offers to do their research at the University of Toronto.

“You typically have some ratio of ‘accepts’ because there is MIT, Stanford and Berkeley and we all compete for the same people,” says Fidler, an assistant professor at U of T Mississauga's department of mathematical and computational sciences and a founding member of the Vector Institute for AI research.

“But this year almost everyone accepted.”

The flood of interest reflects both U of T’s growing global reputation in the booming field of AI and the degree to which Canada’s strategy of investing in AI research through initiatives like Vector, a partnership between U of T, government and industry, is helping to attract and retain top talent.

That includes top researchers like Fidler, who specializes in computer vision and applied machine learning. She will be speaking at U of T Thursday as part of an AI career event with Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia, a Vector partner that designs graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are often used to handle the intense computations necessary for AI applications.

“I do a lot of things connecting computer vision with natural language – so moving towards robots that are not only going to see but also communicate with people in natural ways,” Fidler says.

“The grand vision is we want to teach a robot how to do anything in a household – make coffee, clean your room. Maybe watch TV with you?”

Kidding aside, developing a Jetsons-like robot is far more difficult than it sounds. While companies like Uber, Google and others are rushing to develop self-driving cars, Fidler says creating robots that can interact with people in their homes is actually a more challenging problem in some respects.

Whereas cars operate in a relatively contained environment – streets or highways equipped with lanes, signage and stoplights – a robot wandering around your house, by contrast, could come in contact with any number of different objects, from an empty cereal box to a cat sleeping on the window sill.

“Imagine I’m taking a picture in my office,” says Fidler. “There are so many different objects that will appear in the picture and some will only have a very few pixels, a very tiny region in the image.

“In order to identify all these things, to outline the region and where each object is, as well as determine the [robot’s] task, is a very hard problem.”

The challenges are made even more difficult by the fact that any object a robot “sees” will appear to change as either the object or robot moves around the room. “If I take a pen and rotate it, the image is changing a lot,” says Fidler. “So these neural nets have to capture this kind of variability.”

This is precisely the problem that U of T University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton discussed on stage at Google’s GO North event last week. Hinton, who does AI research for the search engine giant and is sometimes referred to as the “godfather” of deep learning, recently published two papers that offer a new approach called “capsule networks” that aim to make it easier for computers to recognize the same object from different perspectives.

Read the Wired magazine story on Hinton's latest research

“This is how research is driven,” Fidler says. You always want to think of better ways to do things. Everyone right now is thinking about convolutional neural nets for images, but maybe there’s a better way to design these nets.”

Fidler says her goal at the Nvidia event, which also feature presentations by two Nvidia researchers, will be to inspire students by emphasizing how “cool” AI research is and the number of truly difficult problems that need to be solved.

“Imagine you’re on the team that builds a car that’s going to drive itself,” she says, noting that her U of T colleague, Associate Professor Raquel Urtasun, who heads up Uber’s self-driving vehicle lab in Toronto, recently drew a crowd to an Uber career event at U of T.

“You’re going to go down in history.”

And creating robot assistants who will do your laundry?

“I think that’s huge, too,” Fidler says. “But it’s also a little more out there – farther into the future.”

#UofTBackToSchool: You’re home! U of T international students get warm welcome at Pearson Airport

Romi Levine — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 18:58:06 +0000

#UofTBackToSchool: You’re home! U of T international students get warm welcome at Pearson Airport

Romi Levine Tue, 09/05/2017 - 14:58

Cutline

Incoming student Mahaksh Malhodra and his sister chat with members of the U of T's Pearson airport welcome team (photo by Romi Levine)

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Global

International Students

Centre for International Experience

Rotman Commerce

UTSC

UTM

It’s a 20-hour journey from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Toronto – the longest trip Moksha Antani has ever taken, but also the most exciting.

She’s about to begin her first year at the University of Toronto’s Rotman Commerce program, and, even after an exhausting day of travel, she finds it hard to contain her enthusiasm.

“I’m looking forward to new people, new culture – everything!” she says.

Thousands of international students pass through Toronto Pearson International Airport’s Terminal 1 and 3 on their way to U of T. While they share first-day jitters with domestic students, they also have the hefty task of navigating their way around an unfamiliar city.

That's why U of T airport welcome teams are there. The teams, made up of students from U of T Mississauga, U of T Scarborough and the downtown Toronto campus, help new international students with anything they need, from directions to residences to advice on the best place to exchange money.

Moksha Antani was glad to see some friendly U of T faces at the Pearson welcome booth (photo by Romi Levine)

So far this year, students from 41 different countries – from the tiny island of Mauritius to the Baltic nation of Estonia – have come by the welcome booths.

People also visit the booth to ask for everything from directions to the nearest washroom to information about U of T’s engineering programs.

The welcome team has witnessed some amazing moments too, from tearful reunions to a hoard of fans waiting to greet the 13-member Korean Pop boy band Seventeen – as seen in the video below.

@saythename_17 at #torontopearson today! #somanyscreamingteens #seventeen #kpop #whatathrill #korea #seventeentour #seventeentoronto #6ix #416 #tdot #kpoplife

A post shared by UofT Airport Welcome Team (@yyzaws) on Aug 24, 2017 at 5:30pm PDT

Like the incoming first-years, the welcome team comes from all over the world, with 19 students who speak over 22 different languages.

“I'm an international student so I understand the importance of this for having a good first impression and getting help,” says Salman Khan, a management student at U of T Scarborough, who came to study in Toronto from Bangladesh.

U of T's MasterCard Scholars were given a warm welcome in Terminal 3 (photo by Romi Levine)

Khan’s booth-mate, Ingrid Llambi, is an English and cinema studies student at U of T’s downtown Toronto campus. Llambi says when she sees the relief in students’ faces, it drives home how meaningful – and necessary – the welcome booth is.

“Getting to do that is really great and they really need it in that moment,” she says. “They're super grateful, excited and happy.”

Ingrid Llambi and Salman Khan are two of the 19 student greeters at Pearson airport (photo by Romi Levine)

Mahaksh Malhodra says he was thankful for the U of T presence at the airport – it helped to calm his nerves.

Coming from Varanasi, India, Malhodra decided to study computer science at U of T “because it’s the best,” he says.

He’s looking forward to exploring his new city and can’t wait to make his way up the CN Tower and take a photo with the Toronto sign at Nathan Phillips Square.

The welcome booths will continue to greet students until Sept. 10.

Evolution of a killer: U of T study traces deadly fungus affecting bats

rasbachn — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 17:57:44 +0000

Evolution of a killer: U of T study traces deadly fungus affecting bats

rasbachn Wed, 08/16/2017 - 13:57

Cutline

About seven million bats have died of white-nose syndrome in the past decade (photo courtesy Ryan von Linden, New York Department of Environmental Conservation via Flickr)

Blake Eligh

Author legacy

Blake Eligh

Topic

Breaking Research

UTM

Biology

A new study from U of T Mississauga is shining a light on genetic changes happening in the darkest of places – bat caves.

First discovered in 2006, Pseudogymnoascus destructans is a fungus that has wreaked havoc on eastern North American bat populations. The fungus, which is thought to have been accidentally introduced from Europe, has taken hold in caves along eastern Canada and the United States, where it has thrived in a perfect ecosystem of cold temperatures and unsuspecting hosts. The fungus causes white-nose syndrome, so named because it covers the snouts and wing membranes of hibernating bats with a fuzzy white growth.

Bats who contract the fungus have trouble flying and hunting, and eventually starve. About seven million bats have died of the syndrome in the past decade.

Graduate student Jigar Trivedi has spent the past two years studying the fungus, working with U of T Mississauga's Linda Kohn, a professor of biology, and James Anderson, a professor of cell & systems biology. Trivedi’s findings, recently published in the American Society for Microbiology's journal mSphere, reveal new information about how the fungus reproduces and evolves over time.

“White-nose syndrome attacks the immune system of the bats,” Trivedi says. “They hibernate together in close quarters where the fungus is easily transferred and their immunity is low – the fungus acts as an opportunistic pathogen.”

The North American fungus is unique because there is only one strain.

“There are many strains of the fungus in Europe, where bats appear to be less affected, but in North America, only one strain was introduced and it hasn’t yet combined with a different strain. It has been reproducing asexually by creating clones of itself,” says Trivedi (right).

“Previous studies didn’t tell us if the fungus was evolving or not,” he says. “We wanted to see how it was evolving, and how much genetic diversity the fungus has accumulated.”

Trivedi grew cultures from fungus samples collected from bats, cave insects and cave walls in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.

“This is a cold-loving fungus,” Trivedi says. “We weren’t sure we could grow it in the lab.”

After about a month, Trivedi extracted DNA from the samples to create complete genetic sequences of the samples.

“We see that this fungus is slowly and steadily accumulating genetic variation through spontaneous mutations that have occurred over the last 10 years,” he says.

Trivedi’s findings have generated a lot of interest, with more than 3,000 views of the study in the first two weeks of publication and more than 15,000 posts on social media.

Trivedi warns that accidental introduction of a new strain of the fungus could cause additional evolution and spell disaster for bats that are already on the brink of extinction. He notes that the big brown bat has shown some resistance to the fungus, and hopes that the new data can provide further insight into how the pathogen and the host might evolve.

“We can look at what has happened in Europe over hundreds of years and see that it’s possible that the host and pathogen have co-evolved,” he says. “If the North American fungus has a chance to become more genetically diverse, it can cause even more trouble for the bats. You will see how natural selection acts – in favour of the bats or in favour of the fungus.”

“There are strict measures for biosecurity that we should take to prevent this,” Trivedi says.

He recommends that those intending to visit the caves take measures to quarantine clothes and gear.

“It’s like having the flu and being careful to stay away from children and others with low immunity,” he says.

The research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.