About the Event

As part of the first-ever SDG Week Canada, the Climate Action Summit will bring together climate action leaders from both campuses to share climate-forward initiatives and research at Lakehead. The first hour of the event will include information on Lakehead's Year of Climate Action (YOCA), the release of the YOCA Report, YOCA Research Award winners research presentations, student work from a YOCA- inspired special edition of Pathways Journal, student speeches and performances, and an update from the Board of Governors on climate action commitments at the university. The second hour is an informal climate caucus meet and greet where anyone interested in climate action can network with others who are interested or already doing work in this area.

About the Speaker

Dr. Savage Bear is a rabble-rouser, Nehiyaw’iskwew (Cree woman) and member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation in northern Saskatchewan. She is the Director for the McMaster Indigenous Research Institute (MIRI) and is an Assistant Professor within the Indigenous Studies Department. Savage is also the National Director of Walls to Bridges (an education program bringing post-secondary education to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks). Before coming to McMaster, Bear worked at the University of Alberta, where she was the Director of the Indigenous Women & Youth Resilience Project and the academic lead on ‘Indigenous Canada,’ a highly successful online course boasting over half a million learners; she was also an assistant professor of Native Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies.

An accomplished academic, Bear has made significant contributions to Indigenous scholarship and the national Indigenous education landscape since earning her PhD from the University of Alberta in 2016. Her current research includes social justice, prison abolition, body sovereignty, sexuality, gender and reproductive justice, contemporary Indigenous art, and Indigenous literature. When she is not marking, teaching or enjoying her new role as Kookum (grandmother) you will find her literally chasing waterfalls around Hamilton’s amazing trails with her dog, Odin.

Registration

To register for this event, please click here.

Hosted by:

About the Event

About the Event

Speaker: Kevin Donald Willison, (PhD - Community Health, Social and Behavioral Health Sciences, University of Toronto).

After a period of three months an e-module knowledge mobilization tool was developed as of February 2023.  This was created by a student IT team from NAIT (the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology) as well as a content developer (Dr. Kevin Willison) from Lakehead University. Spearheaded (funded) by the Canadian Association of Research Ethics Boards this e-module will help educate research ethics board members and stakeholders across Canada on the importance of ethics within community-based participatory research initiatives.  CAREB is a national membership organization intended to represent the interests of all Canadian research ethics boards, and to reflect REB perspectives and concerns. Associated with the theme for this year's R&I Week "Improving Our Lives Through Research" this particular project aims to beneficially impact the lives of individuals as well as communities, not only for those within Ontario but also across Canada (and possibly beyond).

About the Speaker

Dr. Kevin Willison completed his honours undergraduate degree (Major: Sociology) at Queen’s University (Kingston) and his Master’s degree (Major: Sociology) at Lakehead University (Thunder Bay). He earned his Ph.D. (Major: Community Health) via the Division of Social and Behavioural Health Sciences from the University of Toronto (Faculty of Public Health Sciences). He has served as a faculty member with Lakehead University continuously since 2007. He is currently a faculty member of the Department of Sociology as well as the Department of Health Sciences at Lakehead University. Moreover, since 2021 Dr. Willison has served as an alternate research ethics board member with the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre. A sample of Kevin’s 12+ internationally distributed peer-reviewed publications may be found on Academia.edu, Research Gate and, within such databases as Sociofile, PsycINFO, CINAHL and, PubMed.

Date/Time:  April 18, 2023; 1:00 PM
To register for this event, please click here.

About the Event

Please join Denise Baxter, Vice-Provost of Indigenous Initiatives, to learn how to work towards reconciliation in your organization. Participants will explore ways to demonstrate a commitment to Indigenous relations through their leadership actions, employment initiatives and recruiting activities, business development and relationship building with Indigenous businesses, and through their community engagement.

Date: Wednesday, March 8
Time: 7 to 8 p.m.
Location: OA 1022, Simcoe Hall, Lakehead University | 500 University Ave., Orillia

About the Speaker

Denise has served as Vice-Provost of Indigenous Initiatives since 2017. She also teaches in the Department of Indigenous Learning and Department of Continuing Education. Denise is completing her PhD in Equity and Indigenous Education at York University. As an established education leader, Denise has worked in multiple contexts including public school boards, the Ministry of Education, Lakehead University, and First Nations private schools for the past 28 years. Within each of these contexts, she has built capacity and partnerships with multiple community stakeholders. Her work with the community has involved education conferences, workshop presentations, and traditional pedagogy. She currently serves on three services boards in Thunder Bay, as Trustee for Keewatin Patricia DSB and an EDI advisory committee provincially.

A Marten Falls First Nation member, she maintains that preserving and practicing cultural traditions and ceremony keeps her connected to the community, Indigenous cultures, traditions, and protocols. She works to establish networks, strengthen relationships with Indigenous communities and governments, and build capacity between Indigenous, public, and private partners which have supported multiple initiatives that advance educational outcomes for Indigenous students.

Join Lakehead University on Thursday, March 9, to learn about how it takes a community to be cyber-secure. Regional experts, Dr. Amir Ameli, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at Lakehead University, Detective Sergeant Vern Crowley, OPP Cyber Crimes Investigation Team, and Laura Payne, Chief Enablement Officer and VP Security Consulting at White Tuque, will discuss how to keep yourself, business and community safe.

Sponsored by the Town of Innisfil, County of Simcoe, City of Barrie, City of Orillia, and Georgian College.

About the Event        

The event will feature New Music composed and performed by LU students and faculty. This music presentation showcases creativity as a significant part of the 2023 Research and Innovation Week theme "Improving our Lives through Research.”                                                         

Performers

Lakehead University New Music Ensemble, Dr. Aris Carastathis (Director).

About the Presentation

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are commonly used in electric vehicles (EVs). However, the Li-ion battery performance degrades over time due to problems such as capacity degradation and impedance growth over time. A reliable battery health monitoring and prognostics system is very beneficial to diagnose the battery's state-of-health and predict the remaining-useful-life in order to improve battery performance. This speech presents a new technology to improve battery state-of-health monitoring and remaining useful life prediction. An enhanced particle filter technique is proposed to reduce the impact of sample degeneracy and impoverishment in state estimation. An evolving neurofuzzy predictor is developed to deal with the lack of new battery measurements during the prognostic period.

Speaker

Dr. Wilson Wang received his BSc in Electromechanical Engineering (SIT in China), MSc in Mechanical Engineering (Northeastern University in China), MEng in Industrial Engineering (University of Toronto), and PhD in Mechatronics Engineering (University of Waterloo) in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he was a Senior Scientist at Mechworks Systems Inc. in Waterloo, Ontario. He joined Lakehead University in 2004, and is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include mechatronics, artificial intelligence, machinery diagnostics, system state prognostics, and smart sensors. He received the LU Distinguished Research Award in 2017, and was a LU Research
Chair from 2019-2022. He has supervised 35 thesis-based MSc students, 16 PhD, and 10 postdoctoral fellows. He is also a fellow of International Society of Engineering Asset Management.

About the Presentation

In the last ten years, particularly in the last five, research involving pre-trained language models has expanded rapidly. These language models are expected to assist in fabricating text devoid of human prejudices and biases, and in order to meet such high standards, it is essential that key application areas are clearly delineated and accepted by subject matter experts. This will help determine whether the results obtained by these models are credible and may be implemented in practical applications.

In this research presentation, I will introduce the applications and novelties of natural language processing based solutions to better tackle the computational, as well as ethical issues arising from the domains of education, political discourses on social media and news channels, and the emotions expressed in conversation. The key areas of research include semantic similarity of words and sentences; sentiment, stance and emotion analysis of text and recognizing despondency in text. Given that these research projects have direct applications in government agencies, I will further discuss the partnership projects with Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre.

About the Speaker

Vijay Mago is an Associate Professor and Faculty-based Research Chair in Computational Ethics for Natural Language Processing at Lakehead University, ON. He received his PhD in computer science from Panjab University, India in 2010, and has worked as a postdoctoral fellow for two years at the IRMACS Centre, Simon Fraser University, BC. Before joining Lakehead University in 2015, he worked as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the United States. His research interests include big data analytics, health informatics, text analysis, natural language processing and modeling and simulation of complex systems. Within the past six years, Vijay’s research lab has received over $2.5m fundings from NSERC, SSHRC, MITACS, Canada Revenue Agency, Ontario Council on Articulation & Transfer (ONCAT) as well as other industry partners. With his students and collaborators, he has published over 100 papers, many of which have been patented and implemented directly by industrial partners. Vijay serves as an Associate Editor for BMC Medical Informatics and PeerJ Computer Science journals and is an active member of IEEE, ACM and the American Medical Informatics Association.