Postdoc Talk Event:
16 February 2016 (7 PM)
The Railway Club
All welcome
More details

Postdoc Talk Title:
“Liberalism as Utopia: Mexico in the Age of Revolution, 1820-1846”

Summary
Legal equality is a principle that Canadians – and citizens of many other constitutional democracies – tend to take for granted. But what does it take to create a legal system that treats people as equals? This talk will describe efforts to introduce egalitarian legal institutions in Mexico after its independence from Spain and the strategies of opposition adopted by adherents of the hierarchical social relations of the old regime.

Biography
Timo Schaefer received his Ph.D. from Indiana University at Bloomington and is now a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow in the UBC Department of History. His dissertation, “The Social Origins of Justice: Mexico in the Age of Utopian Failure, 1821-1870,” won the 2015 Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Category Humanities and Fine Arts.

Postdoc Talk Event:
17 November 2015 (7 PM), The Railway Club
(all welcome, more details)

Postdoc Talk Title:
Why we haven’t cured Alzheimer’s disease

Summary:
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of severe memory loss in the elderly. As people are living longer and the median age of the global population is increasing, Alzheimer’s disease is becoming one of the greatest public health challenges facing societies around the world. Although Alzheimer’s disease has been studied for over 100 years, we are still without effective treatments for this devastating and costly disease. This talk will briefly describe what we know about Alzheimer’s disease and why it is such a difficult disease to effectively treat.

Biography:
Brianne Kent is a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health. She completed her PhD as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, after completing her Masters research at Yale University. Her research takes a translational approach to studying Alzheimer’s disease, bridging pre-clinical research to human patient clinical studies.

Postdoc Talk Event:
17 November 2015 (7 PM)
The Railway Club
(all welcome, more details)

Postdoc Talk Title:
Engineering the Rise of the Machines

Summary:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has received a lot of attention in the popular press recently, with concerns raised about super-intelligent self-aware AI taking over the planet and spelling the end of the human race. In this talk, I will explain some of the concepts underlying AI in general and machine learning in particular, a set of techniques that allows computers to learn new concepts on their own. I will de-mystify what AI researchers do and to what extent this is actually a threat to humanity at the moment. Finally, I will give my personal views on why reports on the demise of the human race have been exaggerated.

Biography:
Lars Kotthoff received a PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and moved to UBC after a stint as a postdoc at UCC, Cork, Ireland. He works at the intersection of two subfields of AI and believes that eventually, computers will cause the end of the human race by frustrating them to death. He’s also been known to excavate Maya sites in Central America, looking for ancient computers.