Leveraging AI to Improve Health Care in Canada

This executive sprint offers multiple modes of learning that will allow you to get up-to-speed quickly on how AI is radically transforming Canada's health care sector. This includes:

• Four 90-minute virtual live sessions comprised of presentations, peer interactions, and guided discussions.
• One, full-day, in-person session designed to showcase the human-centric implications of AI in health care.
  
  

Receive a certificate from the University of Waterloo

Upon successful completion of this program, you will receive a professional education certificate from the University of Waterloo.

Dr. John Hirdes is a professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo, and recently appointed member of the Order of Canada for his contributions to evidence-based health care practice and policy, notably through the research and development of standardized assessment and decision support tools. In addition, he is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. His primary areas of interest include geriatric assessment, mental health, health care and service delivery, case mix systems, quality measurement, health information management, and quantitative research methods. He has written over 300 publications in peer reviewed journals and academic book chapters. Working as the senior Canadian fellow and board member of interRAI, an international consortium of researchers from over 45 countries, Dr. Hirdes also chairs interRAI’s Network for Mental Health and the interRAI Network of Canada. 

Dr. Jimmy Lin is a professor and holds the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He also serves as the co-director of the Waterloo AI Institute, which has the mission to promote cross-disciplinary research at the frontiers of artificial intelligence and its applications across the entire campus. His research lies at the intersection between natural language processing and information retrieval. In addition to being one of the most cited artificial intelligence scholars in the world, he has been frequently and deeply engaged with both the private and public sectors throughout his career, including an extended sabbatical at Twitter and visiting positions at the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dr. Plinio Morita is an associate professor at the School of Public Health Sciences in the Faculty of Health at the University of Waterloo and a former J.W. Graham information technology emerging leader chair in applied health informatics (2016-2021). He is currently the director of the Network for Aging Research at the University of Waterloo. He holds appointments as an affiliated scientist at eHealth Innovation, University Health Network, as a research scientist at the Research Institute for Aging, and as an assistant professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Dr. Morita is a leading researcher in the use of AI and IoT for public health, global health, and technology for supporting independent living. At the UbiLab, his research team focuses on the use of IoT technologies, big data, and AI to improve current public health surveillance mechanisms and support countries in the monitoring of health indicators (e.g., physical activity, sleep, sedentary behavior), as well as environmental factors (e.g., heatwaves, extreme air pollution). 

Dr. J. Mark Weber is special advisor to the Provost on Leadership Strategy and Development at the University of Waterloo. Prior to his current role, Mark was the Eyton director of the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business at Waterloo, the inaugural director of Waterloo's Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation, and a former faculty member at the Rotman School of Management and UTM at the University of Toronto. He also taught courses at Northwestern University, INSEAD, and the Ross School of Business at University of Michigan.

Dr. Weber is an award-winning teacher and researcher, and his research focuses on leadership, cooperation, negotiations, decision-making, and trust. He consults extensively and has provided training to executives and professionals in the automotive, education, healthcare, pharmaceutical, broadcast media, entertainment, telecommunications, professional services, and financial services industries, and in government at all levels.

Dr. Maura R. Grossman is a research professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, and an affiliate faculty member of the Vector Institute, all in Ontario, Canada, as well as an eDiscovery attorney and consultant in Buffalo, New York.  Previously, she was of counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz, where for 17 years, she represented Fortune 100 companies and major financial institutions in civil litigation and white-collar criminal and regulatory investigations, and advised the firm’s lawyers and clients on legal, technical, and strategic issues involving eDiscovery and information governance, both domestically and abroad. 

Dr. Samantha B. Meyer is an associate professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo, and adjunct professor at Torrens University in Adelaide, Australia. Dr. Meyer completed her graduate and early career research in Australia before returning to Canada and maintains an international research program focused on investigating critical and timely public health problems. Her research investigates the social and structural factors that shape population health, and the health of vulnerable populations specifically. The concept of trust in government and health policy is central to her work and she has contributed to our understanding of how a lack of public of trust in health officials and government shapes health behaviours and can exacerbate health inequities for marginalized Canadians. Most recently, she has led the development of measures of trust in government and health care that will be used in forthcoming interventions to (re)build trust in the interest of population health. She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the TRuST scholarly network at the University of Waterloo. 

Dr. Lili Liu is the dean of the Faculty of Health at the University of Waterloo. Her research examines ways technologies can help older adults and family caregivers. As an investigator with Age-Well NCE, she has three ongoing funded projects under development, which are designing an app that uses predicted risk levels to recommend personalized strategies for people with dementia and who are at-risk of going missing; developing a scale to measure the usability of technologies to locate missing persons with dementia; and crafting a national strategy for collecting data on persons with dementia who go missing. Dr. Liu also collaborates with researchers at Toronto Metropolitan University on initiatives designed to develop and evaluate algorithms for drones that find cognitively impaired people who become lost.