U of A professors awarded Telus World of Science fellowship

This summer, two University of Alberta professors have won a science fellowship with the Telus World of Science.

The awardees Lauren Guillette, an associate professor of psychology, and Abram Hindle, an associate professor of Computing Science will each receive a $2500 of monetary award and the opportunity to participate in a science-related workshop or program valued at up to $3000.  The Telus World of Science will also help with promotion of the fellows’ research by facilitating community outreach activities for them to share their work as well as a 45-minute presentation and a short talk about their research.

Lauren Guillette hopes fellowship increases community engagement in sciences

Guillette is the principal investigator for a campus psychology animal cognition research group studying animal behaviour and how problem solving skills of animals are impacted by learning and cognitive abilities. 

Specifically, she studies the social learning behaviour among birds and how it impacts their collaborative nest building behaviour. As part of the fellowship, Guillette plans to construct a nest building exhibit to educate school children about bird behaviour. 

For Guillette, the flow of information in academics can be one-sided and she believes this fellowship will allow her to engage with the non-scientific community to bridge that information gap.

“I am excited about information flow in the other direction,” she said. “Namely, hearing from the non-scientific community about what questions they have about nest building in birds, and animal construction behaviour more generally.”

“I am excited to listen to people and potentially let their outstanding questions, interests and concerns influence where my team’s work might go in the future.”

Guillete is also a strong proponent of the community engagement aspect of the fellowship, viewing it as an opportunity to engage with voices usually unheard in science.

“Community engagement builds bridges between the university and local communities, including underprivileged communities, and will hopefully spark the next generation of curious minds,” she said. “I also hope that community engagement will lead to more diverse ideas being heard and considered which will lead to more equitable decisions about science and education.”

“Lastly, representation matters: as a female, I can serve as a role model to younger females. Me being here simply allows females to visualize themselves in a leadership role in the sciences.”

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Abram Hindle aims to highlight the creative side of computer science

Hindle’s research on machine learning and software engineering focuses on its applications in various fields such as the sociology of programmers, music, and medicine.

With this fellowship, Hindle hopes to encourage community members to learn more about computing science, especially its creative side. This involves mitigating some of the barriers to computer science, such as complex technical terminology. 

According to Hindle, the research related to machine learning can be quite technical and full of jargon, but he aims to highlight the implications machine learning actually has in various fields. Hindle wants to use this fellowship to better communicate his research to general audiences. He looks forward to collaborating with Telus World of Science to “ teach some basic machine learning in a really fun way” provided the conditions to host public events become safe due to COVID-19. 

Hindle has already been a speaker at Telus World of Science three times before, where he used interactive activities to demonstrate topics related to dark matter such as size of space, light year and computations issues. Previously, he created an interactive installation called Aria Da Cosmos through a spectrum of star emissions that the audience could play. 

“[It was] a confluence of astronomy, physics, music, and computer science,” he said. “It’s exactly that kind of interaction that interests me and it was nice to see how the audience interacted with the installation. It also provided a nice tool for emphasizing the size of space itself, how far a light year was, as well as highlighting computational issues.” 

It is this intersection between community interaction and the various aspects of his research that Hindle is looking forward to in the fellowship.

“I look forward to further interactions probably along the lines of scientific sonification whereby data is taken from another field of science and presented “artistically” in a music fashion to gain further insight into our universe.”