Edith Law

I am a professor, but also a technology builder at heart.

In the Augmented Intelligence Lab of University of Waterloo, my students and I work on designing new kinds of interactive systems that help the world in some way: a crowdsourcing platform that engages ctizien scientists to label herbarium records for understanding climate change, a deliberation system that helps clincians resolve disagreement in the annotation of sleep EEG data, a learning-by-teaching platform for children to learn by teaching an AI agent, to name a few.

Most research projects stay in academia - we experiment, learn from it, publish a paper or two, and close the case. There is something deeply unsatisfying to see systems with potential broad social impact be discarded. Such is the case with the Newcomer App, which I believe can get us all to think about what technology can do for health equity, social justice and our sense of humanity. Through our human-centered approach to development, the Newcomer App is also a demonstration of how we can do AI differently, by being inclusive, transparent and moving beyond purely technical concerns.

This was how ValuesFirst AI (VFAI) was started. Join us in this adventure.

- Edith

Biography: Edith Law is currently an Associate Professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at University of Waterloo, leads the Augmented Intelligence Lab and co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab. Previously, She was a CRCS postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, a Masters in Computer Science from McGill University and a B.Sc in Computer Science from University of British Columbia.