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Ouldooz Baghban Karimi, Program Director

Ouldooz Baghban Karimi teaches systems and networking and conducts research on data, systems, and networks. She is passionate about computing science education and facilitating progress towards equity, justice, and fair access in the computing science discipline, and through computing science in society. She is active in taking opportunities to serve the community towards diversity and inclusion.

She is currently a lecturer, a Rajan Family Scholar, and the chair of the Diversity Committee at the School of Computing Science, ´óÏó´«Ã½.

Sarah Louise Turner

I am an educational consultant with the Centre for Educational Excellence and have been with ´óÏó´«Ã½ for the past 14 years. I began my work with ´óÏó´«Ã½ as a teaching enhancement specialist, where I had the great pleasure of working with many ´óÏó´«Ã½ faculty, instructional staff and graduate students on voice and presentation skills. I currently co-facilitate the Certificate Program for University Teaching and Learning (CPUTL), am a facilitator for both the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) and Rethinking Course Design, and contribute to institutional, faculty and departmental initiatives that span curriculum planning, assessment and the creation of educational media.

I hold an MFA from Indiana University and am passionate about arts-based practices in higher education, which informs many collaborations here at ´óÏó´«Ã½, such as those with both the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (CIE) and ´óÏó´«Ã½â€™s Teaching and Learning Players. As a professional actor, I am an active member of the Vancouver Theatre community and find it particularly rewarding when my two worlds align.

Munzia Hashim

I am currently pursuing a Master’s in Computing Science at ´óÏó´«Ã½ (´óÏó´«Ã½), Vancouver, Canada, with a focus on Machine Learning, and SIMD. My academic journey builds on a strong foundation in Mathematics from Aga Khan Higher Secondary School, Hunza, Pakistan, and Computer Science from the University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan. Alongside my studies, I have served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for courses in the past semesters for computing science undergraduate programs. I am also passionate about inspiring research in computing science and work as a Research Assistant on the Parabix project—an advanced framework for high-performance text processing.

Keynote Speaker (Academia): Maleknaz Nayebi

Maleknaz Nayebi is an Associate Professor at York University in Toronto, where she leads a research lab focused on automated techniques that bridge the requirements gap—enhancing software development practices and deepening our understanding of user needs. She completed her PhD at the University of Calgary, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, before joining York as faculty in 2018.

Her research, particularly impactful in healthcare, is published in top-tier venues and has been supported by multiple funding agencies. In recognition of her contributions to software engineering, Nayebi received the prestigious IEEE TCSE Award at the 2023 Requirements Engineering Conference. She was also invited by NSERC to serve on the Computer Science Evaluation Group—a distinction reserved for select researchers across Canada.

Currently, she serves as the Application Chair for the NSERC Discovery Evaluation Group (1507 – Computer Science) and as Associate Director of CIFAL York. Her leadership extends to several interdisciplinary initiatives: she is a board member of the York Centre for Feminist Research (CFR), the Centre for Innovation in Computing at Lassonde (IC@L), and Y-EMERGE (York Emergency Mitigation, Engagement, Response, and Governance Institute), and an active member of Connected Minds and York’s Center of AI for Society. To date, Nayebi has secured 16 research grants as a principal investigator or co-investigator.

Keynote Speaker (Industry): Ameesh Makadia

Ameesh Makadia has been a Research Scientist at Google Research in NYC since 2007. Prior to joining Google Research, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on incorporating geometric priors and inductive biases into network design, improving data and model efficiency. This approach underlies his recent work in generative modeling for modalities including images, videos, and 3D.

His research has received a number of awards including, Best 12 papers of ECCV 2018, Best Paper Finalist for CVPR 2022, and the CIS PhD Thesis award in 2007. His research has been directly deployed in numerous products including Face Unlock on Pixel phones, YouTube related video recommendations, visual product search on Google Goggles, and ShapeSearch for 3D Warehouse.

Saba Alimadadi

Saba Alimadadi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing Science at ´óÏó´«Ã½. Her research lies in the area of human-centred software engineering, with a focus on program analysis, testing, and debugging for dynamic languages such as JavaScript and Python.

At the intersection of software engineering, programming languages, and human-computer interaction, her work aims to support and enhance developer performance in real-world, day-to-day tasks.

Matthew Amy

Matthew Amy is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing Science at ´óÏó´«Ã½ and the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Computing. He received his doctorate from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, where he developed circuit optimization and verification methods which are in widespread use across academia and industry.

His current research aims at improving the ease of implementation and the reliability of quantum programs through the development of formal methods for quantum software.