news 2023

Popular virtual assistant technology reinforces stereotyped and sexist expectations of gendered labour, according to a new study University of Waterloo professor and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change Dr. Lai-Tze Fan analyzed hundreds of Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa's voice-driven skills.

AI breakthrough may lead to highly personalized medicine in the treatment of serious diseases Machine learning is now helping researchers analyze the makeup of unfamiliar cells, which could lead to more personalized medicine in the treatment of cancer and other serious diseases. Researchers at the University of Waterloo developed GraphNovo, a new program that provides a more accurate understanding of the peptide sequences in cells.

In business, leaders rarely want to take accountability for unfavourable company performance - but a new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business shows that when they do, they might actually boost the value of their companies. In the study titled " The role of CEO accounts and perceived integrity in analysts' forecasts ," researchers electronically combed through more than 35,000 CEO conference calls to investors that spanned 12 years (2002-2013), and looked at whether the companies performed favourably or unfavourably.

Using laser light, researchers have developed the most robust method currently known to control individual qubits made of the chemical element barium. The ability to reliably control a qubit is an important achievement for realizing future functional quantum computers. This new method, developed at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), uses a small glass waveguide to separate laser beams and focus them four microns apart, about four-hundredths of the width of a single human hair.

Researchers aim to bridge the gap between AI technology and human understanding University of Waterloo researchers have developed a new explainable artificial intelligence (AI) model to reduce bias and enhance trust and accuracy in machine learning-generated decision-making and knowledge organization.

Pierrich Plusquellec and his team at UdeM's School of Psychoeducation publish the results of a facial-expression study measuring 'emotional contagion' and the risk of depression. Repeatedly exposed to negative emotions, relationship professionals such as social workers, psychologists and psychoeducators are at high risk of experiencing "emotional contagion," an unconscious, automatic transmission of an emotion from one individual to another.

Attackers can break voice authentication with up to 99 per cent success within six tries Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo have discovered a method of attack that can successfully bypass voice authentication security systems with up to a 99% success rate after only six tries. Voice authentication - which allows companies to verify the identity of their clients via a supposedly unique "voiceprint" - has increasingly been used in remote banking, call centers and other security-critical scenarios.

May 15, 2023 Robots can help find objects you've lost, thanks to new 'artificial memory' Engineers at the University of Waterloo have discovered a new way to program robots to help people with dementia locate medicine, glasses, phones and other objects they need but have lost. And while the initial focus is on assisting a specific group of people, the technology could someday be used by anyone who has searched high and low for something they've misplaced.

Hate speech and misinformation on social media can have a devastating impact, particularly on marginalized communities. But what if we used artificial intelligence to combat such harmful content? That's the goal of a team of University of Toronto researchers who were awarded a  Catalyst Grant  by the Data Sciences Institute  (DSI) to develop an AI system to address the marginalization of communities in data-centric systems - including social media platforms such as Twitter.

April 13, 2023 The story of how a Waterloo computer science professor helped find the elusive einstein tile By Joe Petrik Cheriton School of Computer Science A nearly 60-year-old mathematical problem has finally been solved. The story began last fall when David Smith, a retired print technician from Yorkshire, England, came upon a shape with a tantalizing property.

Researchers say data science may eventually help predict a film's success From the sepia tones of a Coen brothers film set in the Dust Bowl to a child's red coat in Schindler's List, filmmakers have long known the power of colour in movies. Now, computer scientists have analyzed 60 years of films to paint a picture of the past six decades in film.

Are we alone in the universe? With the help of artificial intelligence, scientists may be one step closer to finding the answer. Led by researchers at the University of Toronto, an international team of scientists has streamlined the search for extraterrestrial life by using a new algorithm to organize the data from their telescopes into categories to distinguish between real signals and interference.

In less than a month, researchers have used AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered protein structure database, to design and synthesize a potential drug to treat hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of primary liver cancer. The researchers successfully applied AlphaFold to an end-to-end AI-powered drug discovery platform called Pharma.AI.

New authentication method helps protect data from privacy attacks Working closely with blind and low-vision (BLV) users, researchers at the University of Waterloo and the Rochester Institute of Technology have developed a new authentication method that could help BLV technology users more securely access their devices.

In a bid to reduce the time and cost associated with developing promising new medicines, University of Toronto scientists have successfully tested the use of artificial intelligence to guide the design of long-acting injectable drug formulations. The study, published this week in  Nature Communication , was led by Professor  Christine Allen  in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and  Alán Aspuru-Guzik  in the departments of chemistry and computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

Released in September during the Quebec provincial elections, the app analyzes people's lifestyles to give a better idea which party they'll cast their ballot for. CONTENU - People's everyday habits may not correlate perfectly with their voting behaviour. But the research team behind a made-in-Quebec app called Datagotchi has found a significant link between lifestyle and voting preference.