We're excited to welcome three new Amii Fellows this month — Bailey Kacsmar, Xingyu Li and Geoffrey Rockwell. All three additions to the Amii team are affiliated with the University of Alberta and their work spans topics from human-centred privacy in AI, computing in the humanities, textual visualization and analysis, AI for health, computer vision and more. Here's more information about our new researchers:

Bailey Kacsmar

Bailey Kacsmar is an Assistant Professor at the U of A and a current PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo.

Kacsmar focuses on the importance of privacy and it's importance in a field such as AI, which often involves massive quantities of sometimes sensitive personal data.

Much of her research centres on developing and evaluating technical privacy solutions, including the limitations and potential of privacy in machine learning. Her work aims to develop privacy technology that remains human-centred: research that requires both technical solutions, as well as addressing user perception, concerns and understanding of data privacy.

Xingyu Li

Xingyu Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta. Li received her MSc in electrical and computer engineering from the U of A and her PhD in the same subject from the University of Toronto.

Li's research focuses on computer vision, data analytics and health informatics. Her research outcomes have contributed to projects involving computational medical imaging, cranial implant design, genomes for COVID-19, and security in deep learning.

In addition to her work with the U of A and Amii, Li is a member of AI4Society, the Cancer Research Institute of Northern Alberta, and The Women and Children’s Health Research Institute.

Geoffrey Rockwell

Geoffrey Rockwell is a professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities and the Director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study at the U of A. He received a MA and PhD in Philosophy, both from the University of Toronto, and served as the Director of the Humanities Media and Computing Centre at McMaster University for a decade.

Rockwell's research includes work on textual visualization, text analysis, computing in the humanities and the ethics of technology. He's the author of a book on digital humanities: Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities. Rockwell is also the co-developer of Voyant Tools, an open-source platform for text analysis in the humanities and leads the Text Analysis Portal for Research project.