School of Cities

Cities

Faculty of Music

Graduate Students

Subheadline

The graduate course uses hip-hop music and culture as a lens to explore urban issues

Shadrach Kabango and Kofi Hope grew up immersed in hip-hop culture in the late 1990s, making music in basements, freestyling and participating in cyphers.

Today, Shad, as he is best known, is a Juno-award winning artist and rapper, while Hope is an academic and community advocate working with Black youth – and they’ve teamed up to share their knowledge via a new course at the ��Ƶ called Hip-Hop and the City.

The graduate-level course is being offered by U of T’s School of Cities – a multidisciplinary hub at U of T for urban research, education and engagement – in collaboration with the Faculty of Music.

The course uses hip-hop music and culture as a lens to explore historical urban issues. It also examines how these issues shape cultural expression and how culture, in turn, shapes cities – all while providing a platform for students to develop innovative solutions to today’s urban challenges.

“We’re focused on giving folks the foundation,” says Hope about the course.

“So, what’s the origin of the culture? Where did it come from? How did it start to disseminate across the U.S.? And touching on how it went global. But there’s many parts of that story.”

Shad and Hope encourage students to bring their full selves to the class.

“The class will be a mix of music students and students from other disciplines – so this opportunity for mutual learning,” says Shad, who hosted Netflix's Peabody and Emmy Award-winning documentary series Hip-Hop Evolution. “If people participate fully, I think it’s going to be really rich and special.”

Hope says there’s always something new to learn about the global phenomenon that is hip-hop.

“I’m hoping to learn about sub-communities and sub-genres of the culture that I'm not familiar with,” says Hope, an urbanist-in-residence at the School of Cities. “We can really help to build a greater understanding of this thing that now is beyond just being South Bronx culture.”

U of T urban studies course explores wildfire response in Canada's North

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 19:57:57 +0000

U of T urban studies course explores wildfire response in Canada's North

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 08/12/2024 - 15:57

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Clouds of smoke billow into the air as forest fires burn in the Northwest Territories in 2015, leaving trees damaged and charred (photo by Sherry Galey via Getty Images)

Cynthia Macdonald

Topic

John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture

Geography and Planning

Graduate Students

Innis College

Subheadline

As part of a graduate seminar, students and professors visited Yellowknife to study the city's 2023 wildfire evacuation with an eye to informing future policy recommendations

Wildfires such as the one that devastated Jasper, Alta., in July are becoming ever more common in Canada due to increased record-high temperatures and drought conditions associated with climate change.

One year ago, it was Yellowknife that found itself under threat, forcing a near-complete evacuation of its 20,000 residents. Unlike Jasper, Yellowknife's homes and businesses were ultimately saved from destruction, but the Northwest Territories capital is nevertheless reviewing its wildfire response plans so it will be better prepared in the future.

And the city is receiving valuable assistance from the ��Ƶ.

Professors and graduate students from the urban studies program at Innis College recently visited the city to research disaster response policies and make suggestions on possible improvements.

“We ended up designing a course that provided a retrospective on the evacuation experience as it related to government officials and the non-profit sector,” says David Roberts, an associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of geography and planning in the Faculty of Arts & Science and director of the urban studies program.

“The students are now working on projects that will provide policy recommendations for the future.”

The view over Yellowknife’s Old Town (supplied image)

This seminar, which was also taught by Assistant Professor Aditi Mehta, is one of several Multidisciplinary Urban Graduate Seminars (MUGS) being offered by U of T’s School of Cities.

Roberts and Mehta created the class in consultation with Rebecca Alty, Yellowknife’s mayor and a visiting expert, or Canadian Urban Leader, at the School of Cities.

Mehta says that the seminar’s multidisciplinary nature was key to crafting a well-rounded response to the crisis.

“We were very deliberate in picking students from different disciplines so that we could create knowledge and think about what happened from different perspectives,” she says, adding that students who successfully applied came from backgrounds including geography and planning, forestry, anthropology, landscape architecture and public health.

The seminar’s participants pose for a group photo at the Bush Pilot’s Monument in Yellowknife (supplied image)

The 10 graduate students visited sites and interviewed government officials, community organizations, residents and Indigenous leaders. They explored how to build improved communication infrastructure in the city and investigated the connections between a local housing crisis and climate change.

They also studied how Indigenous Peoples, including members of the Dene Nation living in Yellowknife, suffer disproportionate harms due to wildfire. Research shows that while 12 per cent of the entire Canadian population is at risk, that number rises to 32 per cent for on-reserve First Nations communities.

Léo Jourdan, who is completing his master of science degree in forestry at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, says the seminar provided him with an opportunity to examine wildfire science from a different angle.

“The research we do in our lab has to do with wildfires, but from a scientific point of view – in the sense that we try to answer ecological questions about the origins of these fires. So this class was a great opportunity to broaden my perspective and learn more about the human side of wildfires, and I think it did an amazing job.”

Jourdan explains that most wildfires are a natural – and necessary – phenomenon. “A lot of the forest in Canada co-evolved with fires, and their ecosystems would not function without them,” he says. “The issue we’re facing now, however, is that the wildfires are getting more intense and the communities closer.”

The seminar group enjoyed the city’s culinary and cultural offerings (supplied image)

For Lilian Dart, the course offered an opportunity to explore her twin interests in environmental justice and housing policy.

“One of the focuses was to look at how people experiencing homelessness were evacuated,” says Dart, a PhD student in the department of geography and planning.

She notes that in the wake of the wildfire evacuation, a team from professional services firm KPMG conducted an audit that revealed significant holes in the system that allowed vulnerable populations to fall through.

“People without housing, for example, did not have social safety supports that other people did,“ she says. “They also had comorbidities that affected their health, making them even more vulnerable.”

Dart’s final assignment for the course is a policy paper that examines this issue. “My recommendations are mostly to do with how the municipality can better support service organizations in their collaboration with one another. How can resources be co-ordinated? And how can people work together to ensure a more organized response?”

Jourdan, for his part, is proposing that Yellowknife adopt the principles of FireSmart, a national program that leads the development of programs and resources to help Canadians increase their resilience to wildfires.

Mehta says Yellowknife’s mayor provided the group from U of T with some recommendations of her own. “She gave an important critique of planning education in our country, noting that people rarely study the problems that cities in northern Canada are facing,” Mehta says. “Instead, we are overly focused on big cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.”

Roberts says that the policy recommendations written by Dart, Jourdan and the other students will be offered “not just to the mayor, but to everyone else we talked to – those working in the non-profit field and at the territorial level, as well as those who work with the Dene.

“We’re now thinking about other ways of presenting this information, such as returning to Yellowknife to ensure that the dialogue we’ve started is able to continue.”

Sustainable Future – Challenge Accepted! Equitable Communities Ep. 5

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 19:42:08 +0000

Sustainable Future – Challenge Accepted! Equitable Communities Ep. 5 Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 06/12/2023 - 15:42

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Sustainability

Subheadline

How can addressing climate change help us build a more equitable world?

The final instalment of the ��Ƶ’s five-part series, Sustainable Future – Challenge Accepted!, explores the intersection between equity, the environment and the economy.

Imara Rolston, assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and founder and director of the Community Climate Resilience Lab, talks about the importance of listening to leaders in the Black, racialized and marginalized communities most impacted by the effect of climate change.

“One of the ways to sort of stabilize a city, and I think that’s what a lot of folks don’t recognize, is to advance racial equity and racial justice,” he says. “When you advance that through policy, through sustained investment, through evidence and research and academia, then you can get ahead of what’s going to happen, and you can actually stabilize the whole city in ways it wouldn’t be if racial equity wasn’t centred.”

Karen Chapple, director of U of T’s School of Cities, an institutional strategic initiative, and professor in the department of geography and urban planning in the Faculty of Arts & Science, says students and researchers are coming up with new ways to address the challenges of affordable housing and energy efficiency – and the next step is to put those ideas into practice.

Ron Saporta – U of T’s acting vice-president, operations and the co-chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change and Sustainability – adds that U of T is leading by example through initiatives across the university’s three campuses, including the installation of Canada’s largest urban geoexchange field.

Watch Episode 5 of the Sustainable Future series

Add new story tags

Sustainable Future

Brave new tech: Experts say AI tools like ChatGPT – and the ethical questions they raise – are here to stay

siddiq22 — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 18:44:10 +0000

Brave new tech: Experts say AI tools like ChatGPT – and the ethical questions they raise – are here to stay

siddiq22 Wed, 04/05/2023 - 14:44

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(Clockwise from top left) Catherine Moore, Ashton Anderson, Karina Vold, Paul Bloom, Valérie Kindarji and Paolo Granata (supplied images, photo of Bloom by Greg Martin)

Chris Sasaki

Topic

Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

Artificial Intelligence

This image was created by directing Dall-e to produce an image of the ��Ƶ in the style of painter Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (Image by DALL-E/ directed by Chris Sasaki)

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to rapidly advance, there has been a surge in the development of AI-powered content creation tools like ChatGPT and Dall-e that offer users a range of personalized experiences. However, with this growth come concerns about the potential dangers and ramifications of such apps, from privacy concerns to the displacement of human workers.

For example, the previous paragraph was written by ChatGPT, illustrating the blurring of lines between AI- and human-generated content. And the image at right was created by directing Dall-e to produce an image of “the ��Ƶ in the style of van Gogh’s The Starry Night.”

In recent months, news headlines have outlined the issues relating to generative AI tools and content. Illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, musicians and writers have expressed concerns about losing income to generative AI and having their creations used as source material without permission or compensation.

On the academic front, instructors are having to cope with students submitting work written by ChatGPT and are re-evaluating how best to teach and assess courses as a result. Institutions such as U of T are examining the ramifications of this technology and providing guidelines for students and instructors.

Despite the challenges, many experts say that the technology is here to stay, and that our focus should be on establishing guidelines and safeguards for its use, while others look to its positive potential.

Faculty of Arts & Science writer Chris Sasaki spoke with six U of T experts about the impact of generative AI tools – and the ethical questions posed by the new technology.

Ashton Anderson

Assistant professor, department of computer science

We are increasingly seeing AI game-playing, text generation and artistic expression tools that are designed to simulate a specific person. For example, it is easy to imagine AI models that play in the style of chess champion Magnus Carlsen, write like a famous author, or interact with students like their favourite teacher’s assistant. My colleagues and I refer to these as mimetic models – they mimic specific individuals – and they raise important social and ethical issues across a variety of applications.

Will they be used to deceive others into thinking they are dealing with a real person – a business colleague, celebrity or political figure? What happens to an individual’s value or worth when a mimetic model performs well enough to replace that person? Conversely, what happens when the model exhibits bad behaviour – how does that affect the reputation of the person being modeled? And in all these scenarios, has consent been given by the person being modelled? It is vital to consider all of these questions as these tools increasingly become part of our everyday lives.

Paul Bloom

Professor, department of psychology

What ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are doing right now is very impressive and also very scary. There are many questions about their capabilities that we don’t know the answers to. We don’t know their limits – whether there will be some things that a text generator is fundamentally incapable of doing. They can write short pieces, or write in the style of a certain person, but could they write a longer book?

Some people don’t think they’ll be capable of a task like that, because these tools use deep-learning statistics – they produce sentences, then predict what comes next. But they lack the fundamentals of human thought. And until they possess those fundamentals, they’ll never come close to writing like we do. We have many things they don’t: we have a model of the world in our minds, mental representations of our homes, our friends. And we have memories. Machines don’t have those and until they do, they won’t be human – and they won’t be able to write, illustrate and create the way we do.

Paolo Granata

Associate professor, Media Ethics Lab; book and media studies, St. Michael’s College

AI literacy is key. Whether something is viewed as a threat or an opportunity, the wisest course of action is to comprehend it. For instance, since there are tasks that AI does more effectively than humans, let’s concentrate on tasks that humans do better than AI. The emergence of widely accessible generative AI technologies should also motivate educators to reconsider pedagogy, assignments and the whole learning process.

AI is an eye-opener. The function of educators in the age of AI has to be re-evaluated – educators should be experience-designers rather than content providers. In education, the context is more important than the content. Now that we have access to such powerful content producers, we can focus primarily on a proactive learning approach.

Valérie Kindarji

PhD candidate, department of political science

While public focus has been on the disruptive AI technologies themselves, we cannot forget about the people behind the screen using these tools. Our democracy requires informed citizens with access to high-quality information, and digital literacy is crucial for us to understand these technologies so we can best leverage them. It is empowering to have access to tools which can help spark our creativity and summarize information in a split second.

But while it is important to know what these tools can do to help us move forward, it is just as important to learn and recognize their limitations. In the age of information overload, digital literacy can provide us with pathways to exercise our critical thinking online, to understand the biases impacting the output of AI tools and to be discerning consumers of information. The meaning of literacy continues to evolve with technology, and we ought to encourage initiatives which help us learn how to navigate the online information ecosystem. Ultimately, we will be better citizens and neighbours for it.

Catherine Moore

Adjunct professor, School of Cities; Faculty of Music

Would seeing a credit at the end of a film, ‘Original score generated by Google Music,’ alter my appreciation of the score? I don't think so. Music in a film is meant to produce an emotional impact. That’s its purpose. And if a score created by AI was successful in doing that, then it’s done its job – regardless of how it was created.

What’s more, generative AI “composers” raise the questions: What is sound; what is music? What is natural sound; what is artificial sound? These questions go back decades, with people capturing mechanical sounds or sounds from nature. You speed them up, slow them down. You do all sorts of things to them. The whole electro-acoustic music movement was created by musicians using technology to manipulate acoustic sounds to create something new.

I see the advent of AI-generated music as part of a natural progression in the long line of music creators using new technologies with which to create and produce – in order to excite, intrigue, surprise, delight and mystify listeners the way they always have.

Karina Vold

Assistant professor, Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology; Centre for Ethics; Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society

The progress of these tools is exciting, but there are many risks. For example, there’s bias in these systems that reflects human bias. If you asked a tool like ChatGPT to name ten famous philosophers, it would respond with ten Western male philosophers. And when you then asked for female philosophers, it would still only name Western philosophers. So, GPT-4 is Open AI’s attempt to respond to these concerns, but unfortunately, they haven’t all been addressed.

In his book On Bullshit, [moral philosopher] Harry Frankfurt argues that "bullshitters" are more dangerous than liars, because liars at least keep track of their lies and remember what’s true and what’s a lie. But bullshitters just don't care. Well, ChatGPT is a bullshitter – it doesn’t care about the truth of its statements. It makes up content and it makes up references. And the problem is that it gets some things right some of the time, so users start to trust it – and that’s a major concern.

Lawmakers need to catch up in terms of regulating these generative AI companies. There’s been internal review by some companies, but that’s not enough. My view is there should be ethics review boards and even laws regulating this new technology.

U of T Centre in India launches in Mumbai in partnership with Tata Trusts

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:22:16 +0000

U of T Centre in India launches in Mumbai in partnership with Tata Trusts

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 01/31/2023 - 19:22

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(Photo by Peter Adams/Getty Images)

Topic

Research & Innovation

The ��Ƶ launched The ��Ƶ Centre in India today in Mumbai in partnership with Tata Trusts, one of India’s largest philanthropic organizations.

Tata Trusts has been a longstanding collaborator with U of T, supporting researchers across the university to address health care, water, energy and poverty challenges. The centre will give focus to this collaboration with an emphasis on urban research and entrepreneurship, bringing together leading scholars and entrepreneurs from Canada and India to develop groundbreaking research and innovation to benefit people in India and around the world.

U of T President Meric Gertler and Vice-President, International Joseph Wong announced the launch at a roundtable on urban transitions that was held in Mumbai in partnership with Social Alpha, a social innovations accelerator supported by Tata Trusts. The discussion highlighted key challenges faced by Indian cities in their journey towards net-zero emissions, and outlined the role of research-backed deep science innovations in enabling cities to solve for the most pressing environmental challenges of our time.

“The ��Ƶ is one of the world’s top-ranked universities with one of the world’s most extensive global research networks – and our faculty are deeply engaged in partnerships with academic and industry leaders here in India and across the globe,” President Gertler said. “The ��Ƶ Centre in India will play a vital role in expanding and building on these collaborations, creating new opportunities for scholars and innovators from both Canada and India to share knowledge, collaborate on research and develop solutions to pressing social development and economic challenges. 

“We are delighted to partner with Tata Trusts, one of the world’s leading philanthropic organizations, to help further our commitment to growing our global network for learning and innovation.”

As part of the urban research centre, the ��Ƶ School of Cities will establish an alliance to build a network of Canadian and Indian researchers who will collaborate on addressing critical urban issues in India and around the world. The entrepreneurship hub, meanwhile, will help connect innovators and entrepreneurs from U of T and India, offering opportunities to share knowledge and resources and providing access to new markets. 

“Collaboration for development, and to magnify the effects of innovation has been at the heart of the Trusts’ strategy to bring about sustainable change for communities who need it the most,” said R Pavithra Kumar, Chief Programme Director, Tata Trusts. “This partnership with the ��Ƶ and the establishment of The ��Ƶ Centre in India will amalgamate new research and innovations with historical knowledge of community engagement to develop skills, address urban environmental and economic issues and develop a model for success that can be replicated across communities in India.”

The centre further deepens U of T’s engagement with India, which includes collaborative research partnerships and mutual opportunities for students, faculty and entrepreneurs.  While the centre will not be a satellite campus, Wong said, it will open doors and create opportunities for students, researchers and startups in both countries. 

The new centre will be working closely with Tata Trusts and Social Alpha to co-ordinate reciprocal student exchanges and competitions, support emerging startups and develop networks in both innovation ecosystems.   

“We look forward to increasing the university’s already strong connections to India,” Wong said. “In addition to our many partnerships and alumni engagement, U of T welcomed more than 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students from India last year, including high-achieving, low-income students through our collaboration with the Karta Initiative, also one of Tata Trusts’ partners. At the same time, more than 300 U of T students travelled to India for academic, research and professional experience over the past five years.

“The centre will help expand on this essential exchange of ideas and expertise.” 

“I am pleased to witness the launch of this collaboration between the ��Ƶ and Tata Trusts,” said Diedrah Kelly, Consul General of Canada in Mumbai. “The focus on urban research will provide great value to both Canada and India, which will grow into engagement between Indian and Canadian innovators, entrepreneurs and researchers. I look forward to following this initiative and the contributions it makes to the shared goal of sustainable economic growth with environmental consciousness.”

U of T also has an ongoing educational partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay that includes the Indo-Canadian Entrepreneurship Exchange, an exchange program that aims to develop a two-way innovation talent pipeline. IIT-Bombay’s Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas has partnered with U of T’s Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN) and the Centre for Technology Alternatives on a joint research effort to tackle pressing issues of sustainable development in India, such as sanitation, nutrition and water supply.

Other key initiatives have included: U of T’s partnership in IC-IMPACTS, the only Research Centre of Excellence dedicated to the development of scientific collaboration between the academic and corporate sectors in Canada and India; the India Innovation Institute at the Rotman School of Management, a hub for researchers focused on how India is using innovation to transform itself; CGEN: The Canada India Initiative on Sustainable Rural Development (CIISRD), a joint multidisciplinary research effort between U of T’s CGEN and the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA) at IIT-Bombay, which tackles pressing issues of sustainable development in India such as sanitation, nutrition, and water supply; a partnership between U of T, IIT-Bombay and the Pune Smart City Development Corporation Ltd. to find technology-based “smart solutions” for the city of approximately six million; and many more opportunities for collaboration between U of T’s students, faculty and entrepreneurs and those from India.

“As a leader in global engagement, U of T seeks to build bridges to help ensure that life-changing research, knowledge and innovation will have the widest possible impact,” President Gertler said. “The ��Ƶ Centre in India will enable the kind of collaboration that can make real change for the better in India and around the world.” 

With her podcast, Alexandra Lambropoulos tells the stories of urban innovation in Africa and beyond

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 14:52:29 +0000

With her podcast, Alexandra Lambropoulos tells the stories of urban innovation in Africa and beyond

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 10/13/2022 - 10:52

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A master's student in urban planning at U of T, Alexandra Lambropoulos created a podcast dedicated to researchers and community leaders driving projects that are transforming cities in Africa and elsewhere (photo courtesy of Alexandra Lambropoulos)

Tina Adamopoulos

Topic

Black Research Network

Geography and Planning

Global

Graduate Students

When Alexandra Lambropoulos conducts research, she also seeks out the stories behind it.

Lambropoulos, a master’s student pursuing urban planning at the ��Ƶ, picked up the idea during her first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo to see her family a few years ago.

There, she was inspired by the urban developments and creativity in her family’s hometown to further pursue urban planning.

“I was amazed to see the city and all these creative interventions being done by people to make their communities better in any way possible,” Lambropoulos says.

From there, she did some digging on different aspects of urban planning, finding groups, organizations and case studies in Africa dedicated to urban growth, art and sustainability across various countries. When she came back to Toronto, Lambropoulos discovered that Africa wasn’t a focus of study in her undergraduate courses.

So she decided to tell these stories herself.

Enter Urban Limitrophe, a podcast dedicated to researchers and community leaders driving projects that are transforming cities across Africa and the diaspora. Launched at the height of the pandemic, the podcast is nearing almost 20 episodes, with countless urban planning innovations – including initiatives in education, the arts and climate change – in countries ranging from Ghana and Kenya to Peru and France.

Urban Limitrophe is co-sponsored by the department of geography and planning in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the School of Cities, an Institutional Strategic Initiative (ISI) at U of T dedicated to building resilient and inclusive urban spaces.

For Lambropoulos, the podcast is a unique way to mobilize knowledge about urban planning in Africa for a Canadian audience, while securing its presence in academia.

Conversations with guests on Urban Limitrophe have even informed her U of T research, which spans the intersection of culture, community and economic development, as well as arts and urban planning. That includes featuring initiatives like Surf Ghana, a non-profit organization building skateparks in Accra, as well as Justice Defenders, an organization providing equitable access to justice across Africa. The project also includes CLUSTER, a non-profit in Cairo, Egypt whose work analyzes urban informality in the city, and the Abibiman Project’s efforts to celebrate African cuisine and tackle food insecurity in Toronto.

“The podcast has really shaped my approach with the way that I conduct research. It’s allowed me to take a different lens and look for the stories that are not being told,” Lambropoulos says.

As a project officer at the Infrastructure Institute at the School of Cities, Lambropoulos and a team of researchers examined the role of exhibitions to promote urban-related topics, focusing on mixed-use buildings to support community resilience. The project is part of the Creative Mixed-Use Initiative at the School of Cities, which has propelled partnerships to build mixed-use projects since 2019.

Mixed-use buildings are seen in city infrastructure, such as adding restaurants or other services to residences — and often facilitate partnerships between private, public and non-profit organizations to nurture deep community ties and vibrant neighbourhoods.

In July, the group launched its first exhibit, called +(Plus), at the World Urban Pavilion in Regent Park. The virtual and in-person exhibition traced the history of mixed-use buildings in Toronto, using examples like the North Toronto Collegiate Institute / Republic, a four-storey high school with two condominium towers situated above it. They also reimagined what the future of mixed-use buildings could look like in Toronto – such as adding housing above fire stations.

Earlier this year, Lambropoulos was one of several recipients of the Geography & Planning award for Black students, which recognizes outstanding academic and professional achievements within the department and recipients’ work to eliminate anti-Black racism and advance systemic change within the university and the field.

“It was so great to be recognized. I appreciate the support that comes from the Black Research Network and my department to help me fulfill this dream to work in this sector,” Lambropoulos says.

“Sometimes things like this are a reminder that you’re on the right path.”

With her sights set on completing her degree, Lambropoulos will continue to work at the Infrastructure Institute to help curate more exhibitions. As for the podcast, Lambropoulos has received invitations to visit cities across Africa from people she’s interviewed — and hopes to travel and bring the podcast to them one day.

Listen to the podcast:

From mapping stars to helping youth escape poverty, student researchers break new ground

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 20:26:54 +0000

From mapping stars to helping youth escape poverty, student researchers break new ground

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 10/04/2022 - 16:26

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(Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Tina Adamopoulos

Topic

Black Research Network

Data Sciences Institute

Groundbreakers

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Research & Innovation

Grace Yu remembers marvelling at the night sky as a child. Today, that childhood memory lives on as she studies the stars that make up the Milky Way.

Grace Yu

Working with Ting Li and Joshua Speagle, assistant professors in the ��Ƶ’s David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Yu is working on a new project, titled “Mapping the Milky Way a Million Light Years.”

The team will characterize and track blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars, which, because of their brightness, can be detected when they are located at the periphery of our own galaxy to measure the density profile of the Milky Way – especially at its periphery.

“The end goal is to detect BHB stars, all the way down to 300 kiloparsecs, roughly a million light-years away, and characterize their density to distance,” Yu says. “Then we will use these BHB to understand more about the Milky Way.”

Yu is one of 36 undergraduate students from across Canada to be selected for the 2022 SUDS Scholars program at U of T’s Data Science Institute’s (DSI). The program pairs students interested in a data science career with DSI researchers to conduct interdisciplinary, hands-on research. It is one of several opportunities that the DSI hosts to foster data science innovation and collaboration.

At present, little is known about the galaxy beyond 100 kiloparsecs, a measure of distance in astronomy, where 1 kiloparsec equals 3.6 light-years, a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year.

Although BHB stars are ideal tracers for mapping our own Milky Way, there is another type of star, the so-called “blue straggler” (BS) stars, which lie in a similar colour space as the BHB stars. But BS stars are generally closer to Earth and cannot travel as far as BHB stars do, making BHB stars ideal to study the periphery of the Milky Way. A goal of this research project is to develop a tool to separate the distant BHB stars from nearby BS stars.

Using publicly available data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) – one of the largest astronomical cameras that has surveyed the dark sky – the team found a clear indicator of separate patterns between BHB and BS stars thanks to the unprecedentedly high precision data from DES that measures the brightness and colours of the stars better than 0.5 per cent.

In particular, using a machine learning method called the support-vector machine, a supervised learning model associated with learning algorithms that analyze data for classification, Yu has made great progress in identifying clear, separable boundaries between the stars. Yu is also planning to continue this research under the supervision of Li and Speagle.

With first-hand experience blending statistics, machine learning and astronomy for research thanks to the DSI, Yu hopes to explore how computer science is shaping other fields in the future.

Using poetry to elevate the voices of African, Caribbean and Black women with HIV

Yu’s work is just one of several student-led projects supported by U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI) portfolio, which facilitates tri-campus interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers at U of T and partner institutions.

Lori Chambers

Lori Chambers, a former post-doctoral researcher at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, is using poetry, prose and spoken word performance to offer safe spaces for women to share their experiences living with HIV.

Launched in 2018, the Because She Cares project amplifies the voices of African, Caribbean and Black (ACB) women with HIV who describe the challenges they encounter working for the Canadian AIDS service and allied organizations. The project aims to develop, promote and design approaches that honour community-based, knowledge-sharing methods – and to decolonize Western ideologies in academia.

Chambers is one of nine researchers supported by the Black Research Network (BRN), an ISI that seeks to promote Black research excellence at the university through mentorship, collaboration, investment and community.

With $7,000 in seed funding through the BRN’s IGNITE grant, Chambers and five spoken word artists travelled to Quebec for the International AIDS Conference, one of the largest AIDS conferences in the world, to perform stories from the Because She Cares project.

Listen to a segment of an interview with Lori Chambers.

Chambers explains that while plays and spoken word performances are commonly used in west and south Africa for knowledge mobilization, it is an emerging space in Canada.

“Using arts-based approaches like spoken word, which is grounded in Black performance, in a Canadian space is still very new,” Chambers says.

"Storytelling is an approach that we all know, so why not bring it to the space of academia? We should develop ways of knowing that are concurrent in the communities we work with.”

Last winter, Chambers launched Because She Cares' first spoken word film series. The collection of 12 short films outlined the challenges that African and Caribbean immigrant women who live with HIV face while working in Canadian AIDS service and allied organizations.

One of the films, HIV Stays at Home, explored the ethics around disclosing HIV status in the workplace, a prominent challenge for people who wish to leave the HIV sector. Another, Living This Kind of Life, navigates working poverty and its effect on family dynamics. Other films addressed setting boundaries between the professional and personal – something that can be especially difficult for women who have been hired to work in the HIV services space because of their lived experience with the condition. Chambers says that professional boundaries have the potential to separate HIV-positive health and social work professionals from their own support systems, often within the HIV community.

With interest from other AIDS organizations, Chambers hopes to share the films as an educational tool and develop strategic partnerships with AIDS organizations in Ontario and across Canada.

Would free, unlimited transit provide youth experiencing homelessness with more opportunities?

Emma Blewett

Noah Kelly, a U of T graduate, and Emma Blewett, a third-year civil engineering student, are researching how free, unlimited transit access can improve the quality of life for Toronto youth who are experiencing homelessness.

TAP (Transit Access Project) for Youth is a student-led transit equity research project that seeks to reduce barriers to transit access. It was founded by five undergraduate students as part of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) at U of T, the largest student chapter of the Canadian non-governmental organization that takes strategic action to tackle global poverty in local communities.

Working with two Toronto-based homeless shelters and one transitional youth home, the team gave free PRESTO cards to 36 participants between the ages of 16 to 24 earlier this year. Each one came pre-loaded with a monthly pass. From there, the TAP team documented participants’ experiences with transit before and after receiving the card. This included interactions with transit authorities and riders, safety and social inclusion.

“Transit equity ensures the right to mobility,” says Kelly, co-founder of TAP. “Public transit access in Toronto is vital in exiting the cycle of homelessness because it enables youth to have job opportunities in the urban landscape, which would otherwise be limited to walkable areas.”

With $2,000 support from the Small Grants Program awarded by the School of Cities – an ISI which brings interdisciplinary urban-focused researchers, students, institutions and the public together to build equitable and sustainable cities – the group was able to hire a social worker to attend the interviews to inform youth of any programs or supports to help with their needs.

Guided by Steven Farber, an associate professor in the department of human geography at U of T Scarborough, and Stephanie Begun, an assistant professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, TAP is funded in partnership with Metrolinx, the City of Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Office and the Toronto Shelter Network, along with other stakeholders.

With a final report set to be published early next year, TAP’s data aims to fill a gap in scholarship and inform City of Toronto and TTC policy frameworks on conversations surrounding transit equity.

The project is a replication of a similar initiative that brought free transit to all people experiencing homelessness in Edmonton, Alta, in 2013. While transit discount programs do exist in Toronto, several hurdles make them insufficient, the group says.

In Toronto, the Fair Pass Transit Discount Program offers a 21 per cent discount on an adult monthly pass, which costs approximately $123 instead of the regular price of $156. To be eligible, applicants must be 20 years old or more and prove enrollment in Ontario Works, the Ontario Disability Support Program, a Child Care Fee Subsidy (through Toronto Children’s Services) or the Rent-Geared-to-Income Subsidy – programs that researchers say aren’t by themselves enough to help youth experiencing homelessness access job opportunities.

“We have to think about setting youth up for success after they enter a shelter or transitional home,” says Blewett, financial lead at TAP for Youth. “What keeps me going in this project is being a part of research that will help young people live their lives as they should be.”

This article is part of a multimedia series about U of T's Institutional Strategic Initiatives program – which seeks to make life-changing advancements in everything from infectious diseases to social justice – and the research community that's driving it.

Study finds Toronto's economic recovery from the pandemic lags other cities': Toronto Star

rahul.kalvapalle — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 15:38:22 +0000

Study finds Toronto's economic recovery from the pandemic lags other cities': Toronto Star

rahul.kalvapalle Wed, 07/27/2022 - 11:38

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(Photo by Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Topic

Global Lens

COVID-19

Cities

Research & Innovation

Downtown Toronto trails behind most other North American cities in its recovery from the economic impacts of COVID-19, according to a new study by the ��Ƶ’s School of Cities and the University of California, Berkeley, the Toronto Star reports.

The “Death of Downtown?” study assessed the economic recovery of 62 North American cities using cellphone activity data, the Star reported, with Toronto ranked 49^th. Mobile activity in downtown Toronto between March and May 2022 was at 46 per cent compared to 2019 levels. By comparison, top-ranked Salt Lake City, Utah was at 155 per cent while Halifax was the top-ranked Canadian city, placing 20^th with a recovery level of 72 per cent.

Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities and co-author of the study, said there was a clear correlation between the sluggishness of a city’s economic recovery and the strictness and duration of lockdown measures. “You look at that ranking chart and you look at the red cities, which are the Canadian ones, and Canada had much stricter lockdown policies than almost anywhere in the United States, with a couple of exceptions,” Chapple, a professor in the department of geography and planning in the Faculty of Arts & Science, told the Star.

The makeup of a city’s economy was also a key factor, Chapple added, with Toronto’s reliance on sectors that embraced remote work – such as finance, technology and professional services – contributing to the city’s slow pace of recovery.

Read the story in the Toronto Star

U of T's Urban Data Centre to help 'wrangle' the data needed to build smarter cities

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 13:21:11 +0000

U of T's Urban Data Centre to help 'wrangle' the data needed to build smarter cities

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 07/07/2022 - 09:21

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(Photo by ravphotographix/iStockphoto via Getty Images)

Peter Boisseau

Topic

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Smart Cities

With the advent of the Internet of Things and other technologies, Toronto and other urban areas are looking to be “smarter cities” when tackling critical issues – from climate change to affordable housing.

There's just one problem.

“Smart cities are only smart if they have relevant data,” says Mark Fox, a professor of industrial engineering in the ��Ƶ’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and a distinguished professor of urban systems engineering.

Enter the Urban Data Centre at U of T's School of Cities. Created last fall, the centre seeks to enable smarter cities by providing awareness and access to relevant urban data. “We're creating a Canadian catalogue of urban data sets to allow people to discover relevant data, where it's located and any restrictions on use,” says Fox, who holds a cross-appointment to the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

The centre is being supported by a commitment from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of $1 million over five years to add core staff and expand operations.

One of the main challenges of achieving awareness is that datasets are spread across repositories, created by municipalities, provincial and federal agencies, NGOs and universities, making it difficult to find what is relevant.

“Getting data is hard work and it requires a lot of discipline,” says Raju Goteti, global vice-president of the TCS Co-Innovation Network.

“It requires innovation from multiple stakeholders and specific elements like the Urban Data Centre. The idea is to create new knowledge in the ecosystem, and we believe the School of Cities is a wonderful partner for this.”

Fox, for his part, says the TCS contribution will advance the centre’s work.

“We already have funding for some work streams within the centre, such as urban ontologies and standards, but this provides us with the funds to focus on core elements of our research program, such as the Urban Data Catalogue and Repository,” he says.

Urban Data Centre Director Mark Fox says relevant urban data enables smarter cities (photo courtesy of Pat Doherty)

The school is building the capacity of urban communities to collect, analyze and visualize data to make cities more efficient and equitable.

“The TCS support will give our Urban Data Centre a jump-start in creating a data ecosystem for universities and cities around Canada,” says Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities.

For all the buzz about using machine learning to build and operate smarter cities, not many people appreciate how much effort goes into pulling relevant data together, according to Fox.

“About 80 per cent of the time it takes to build a smarter-city application is spent on what's called data wrangling, which is finding the data, cleaning it and integrating it, as opposed to actually building machine learning models.”

Creating the Canadian urban data catalogue is an enormous but crucial first step for the centre’s mission, providing a means for urban researchers, developers and planners to find the data they need, says Fox.

He says the centre is working to create standards for the catalogue system that will provide detailed information on each dataset listed.

“Once we have that standard, we're creating the appropriate software so anybody who has a dataset can go to the web page, fill in the metadata for the set they are submitting, and then it goes into our catalogue.”

The next step will be creating a data repository. Fox says they will focus primarily on data from academic research. One potential treasure trove of smart city data is graduate student research on urban environments, which, at present, is often lost upon graduation. “It either sits on their laptop or gets wiped out,” Fox says. “We’ll make it known to academe that not only can they provide us with the metadata associated with their dataset for the catalogue, they can also download their dataset into our repository.”

The Urban Data Centre is also an integral part of the upcoming School of Cities node in India that is being set up in collaboration with Tata Trusts – a philanthropic organization associated with TCS.

Fox says the centre will work with the School of Cities Alliance in India – a network of Canadian and Indian researchers – to create an Indian catalogue and data repository.

“TCS has been focusing on several smart city initiatives for more than a decade,” says K Ananth Krishnan, executive vice-president and chief technology officer at TCS. “We believe the interplay between smart cities and industries will generate ‘innovation at the intersection,’ a core TCS philosophy. I am excited about the Urban Data Centre at the School of Cities, close to our collaboration hub, TCS Pace Port Toronto. I am sure this will offer deep insights for better citizen and customer experiences.”

“It's all about making good decisions,” adds Fox. “And to make good decisions, you need to be aware of what data exists and where.”

Safety, mobility and local services key for residents in Toronto's inner suburbs – regardless of income: Study

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 15:45:24 +0000

Safety, mobility and local services key for residents in Toronto's inner suburbs – regardless of income: Study

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 07/05/2022 - 11:45

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Researchers surveyed more than 700 homes across Toronto to find out what residents value most in a neighbourhood (photo via Community Voices study)

Alexa Battler

Topic