Events

Book: Native American DNA — The DNA Dot-com: Selling Ancestry 

See CS Book Club website for more details and to RSVP.

What happens at the book club?

We read one book per month. Everyone reads in advance as much as they can (you can skip the boring parts). We discuss the book informally, sharing our thoughts, insights, and questions. A facilitator will guide the discussion, and everyone is encouraged to participate in a warm friendly atmosphere.

What type of books?

There should be some connection to computer science, although it can be somewhat tangential. Books can focus on culturally enriching areas that educate students to be well-rounded computer scientists, such as literature, poetry, popular science, history, biography, philosophy, ethics, spirituality, and professional development. We avoid extremely technical books (e.g., dense textbooks, papers) that would fit better in courses or journal club-style reading groups. 

Book: Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy — Chapter 6: Indigenous Self-Determination and Data Governance in the Canadian Policy Context, Robyn K. Rowe, Julie R. Bull, and Jennifer D. Walker

See CS Book Club website for more details and to RSVP.

What happens at the book club?

We read one book per month. Everyone reads in advance as much as they can (you can skip the boring parts). We discuss the book informally, sharing our thoughts, insights, and questions. A facilitator will guide the discussion, and everyone is encouraged to participate in a warm friendly atmosphere.

What type of books?

There should be some connection to computer science, although it can be somewhat tangential. Books can focus on culturally enriching areas that educate students to be well-rounded computer scientists, such as literature, poetry, popular science, history, biography, philosophy, ethics, spirituality, and professional development. We avoid extremely technical books (e.g., dense textbooks, papers) that would fit better in courses or journal club-style reading groups. 

Speaker: Dr. Lovedeep Gondara, Head of AI R&D, Vanguard

Host: Dr. Raymond Ng, Director, UBC Data Science Institute

RSVP: Please register below if you are interested in joining us

The deployment of AI systems in heavily regulated domains such as healthcare and finance presents unique challenges that extend beyond technical performance metrics to encompass fundamental questions of trust, accountability, and societal impact. Both sectors share critical characteristics: they involve high-stakes decisions with material consequences for individuals, operate under stringent regulatory oversight, and are fundamentally client-facing, requiring that end-users, whether patients or investors, place significant trust in system outputs that may influence their health outcomes or financial wellbeing. 

This talk examines the core pillars of trustworthy AI in these contexts, including transparency and explainability of model decisions, robustness to distribution shift and adversarial inputs, fairness across demographic groups, rigorous validation against domain-specific standards, and mechanisms for human oversight and intervention. 

We argue that trustworthiness is not merely an ethical desideratum but a practical necessity: systems that fail to earn stakeholder trust face regulatory barriers, adoption resistance, and reputational risk. By drawing parallels between both heavily regulated domains, we identify transferable lessons for building AI systems that meet the elevated standards these domains demand.

The UBC CS Student Research Conference (CSSRC) is running for the first time on February 27, 2026.

Our mission is to celebrate and advance graduate and undergraduate research in computer science by providing an inclusive, professional conference where UBC students can present their work, engage with academic and industry leaders, and build networks that foster innovation and career development. The CSSRC is fundamentally by students, for students, with the mission of empowering students to contribute to and partake in the research community early in their careers.

The event will host a poster and paper submission track, with faculty and senior graduate student reviewers, modelled after true conferences. Selected submissions will have the opportunity to showcase their work during the conference in a poster session, some winning posters/papers will earn awards!

The event will also host 3-Minute Thesis, a research career panel, research presentations, and opportunities for networking!

Our Computer Science department is joining the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition for the *second* time in UBC history! 3MT, an international competition founded in Australia in 2008, gained early traction at UBC back in 2011, when UBC became the first North American institution to participate. This competition invites MSc and PhD students to present their thesis (or a thesis chapter, or a single paper) in just three minutes, with only one static slide. While 3MT presentations are brief, the goal is for graduate researchers to communicate their complex research in an engaging, accessible, and impactful way for a general audience. 

The competition is a championship with multiple rounds that winners advance through: first at the department level, then the UBC-wide finals, followed by the regional province-wide competition, and finally the Canadian National 3MT Showcase, in November 2025. 

DIGITAL DREAMS HAVE BECOME NIGHTMARES: WHAT WE MUST DO - A CALL TO ACTION

For eighty years, digital technology visionaries have imagined and created systems to support human knowledge, learning, creativity, medicine, health, communications, community, and commerce. These developments have significantly enriched our lives.

Yet advances have been subverted by ill-advised uses and bad actors creating hate speech and disinformation, job loss and industry disruption, monopolistic abuse of market dominance, helplessness, mental distress, injustice, loss of privacy, and poor security and safety.

In addition, we are now faced with worldwide (especially in the U.S.) oligarchic authoritarianism leveraging surveillance technologies and removing the guardrails that were designed to protect us.

These nightmares seem overwhelming, but there is much that we can do, much that we must do.

We digital technology professionals can make a positive difference in at least six ways.

1) There are many career options that focus on computer science applications in the service of good.

2) We can anticipate how our creations may be subverted by poor design or bad actors and adjust our development processes accordingly.

3) We can educate people to better understand digital technologies and their uses and misuses.

4) We can ensure that the education of technologists is sufficiently broad and advance standards of responsibility and accountability.

5) We can assist governments with appropriate legislation and enforcement.

6) Finally, throughout our careers, we can work with citizen groups seeking to avoid adverse consequences of technology, and more generally, be guided by ethics and a moral compass.

I will pay particular attention to artificial intelligence, a technology of great potential for human betterment that may be negated by harms that arise when it is deployed before it is reliable and safe.

Bio Sketch

An internationally recognized innovator, author, speaker, teacher, and mentor, Ron is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-founded the Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP). He also founded the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) and the Technologies for Aging Gracefully lab (TAGlab). He now teaches Computers and Society at Columbia University each fall.

He has been named one of the 60 Pioneers of Computer Graphics by ACM SIGGRAPH, elected to the CHI (Computers and Human Interaction) Academy by ACM SIGCHI, named an ACM Fellow, and given a Canadian Digital Media Pioneer Award. He received the Social Impact Award at ACM CHI2020 and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker for 2022-8. He is also the founder of 5 software firms.

His five most recent books (see https://ronbaecker.com), are:

- Computers and Society: Modern Perspectives (2019, Oxford University Press)

- The Covid-19 Solutions Guide: Health, Wealth, Technology, and the Human Spirit (2020, 2nd Edition)

- Ethical Tech Startup Guide (2023, Springer Nature)

- Digital Dreams Have Become Nightmares: What We Must Do (2024, 2nd Ed., with Jonathan Grudin, ACM Press)

- Reinvention: Meaningful Ventures in Later Life (2025).