The BC Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills (PSFS) is seeking to enhance the impact of the Digital Learning Strategy (DLS) by exploring innovative solutions through generative artificial intelligence (AI). The Digital Learning Strategy (DLS) is a collaborative effort between PSFS and the post-secondary sector to enhance the use of digital technologies in post-secondary education in BC and to expand access to high-quality, flexible learning opportunities through in-person, hybrid, and remote formats.

In this session, we will provide an overview and progress update on the Ministry's collaboration with the UBC Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC) to develop a prototype AI-powered chat assistant. This tool is designed to support educators, administrators, and others in the post-secondary sector by providing a user-friendly interface where they can post queries related to digital learning and receive curated responses that align with the principles and recommendations of the Digital Learning Strategy (DLS), the Guidelines for Technology-Enhanced Learning, and the Digital Literacy Framework.

This presentation will help you learn about the Digital Learning Strategy, the prototype chat assistant, and explore how the UBC CIC is enabling student teams to showcase innovation through AWS technologies.

Liana Leung 2024 Summit_Speaker

Liana Leung

Director, Cloud Innovation Centre, University of British Columbia

Liana Leung is Director of the University of British Columbia's Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC), a public-private collaboration between UBC and Amazon Web Services Canada. Harnessing the power of Generative AI and AWS cloud technology, the UBC CIC addresses real-world issues faced by the not-for-profit, educational and public sector. Under her leadership, the UBC CIC team accelerates innovation by empowering students to develop cutting-edge skills through co-op and work-integrated learning opportunities, and building repeatable, and sustainable cloud solutions that are published open-source, enabling reuse and collaboration.

Summit Speaker

Harshinee Sriram

Graduate Student Researcher, Applied Scientist Intern, The UBC Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC)

Harshinee Sriram is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, specializing in multimodal learning, self-supervised learning, signal processing, and explainable AI, with a focus on neurodegenerative diseases. Her research aims to advance the early diagnosis and progression modeling of conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease using deep learning and multimodal data sources.

She has been recognized with multiple prestigious awards, including the UBC Advanced Machine Learning Training Network (AML-TN) Funded Fellowship, the 2024 BPOC Graduate Excellence Award, and the President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award (2021-2024). Her work has been published in leading conferences such as ML4H, IJCAI, ICMI, and UMAP, where she has also presented research on Alzheimer’s disease classification using deep learning on eye-tracking data and the role of personalized AI explanations in intelligent tutoring systems.

Harshinee has extensive experience in applied AI research through her role at the UBC-AWS Cloud Innovation Centre, where she has developed classical and generative AI solutions, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, and machine learning-based analytics tools to address community-facing challenges.

Summit Speaker

Keleigh Annau

Director, Policy and Engagement, Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills

Keleigh Annau is the Director of Policy & Engagement in Digital Policy & Business Transformation branch in the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills. In this role, Keleigh supports digital learning in the post-secondary system and brings experience in several different policy areas to the role. Keleigh completed a Master of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and applies a public policy analysis lens to her work.

Kanish

Kanish Khanna

Student Developer - Co-op, The UBC Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC)

Kanish Khanna is a 4th year Computer Science student at the University of British Columbia and is a Student Developer at the UBC Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC). As a developer at the UBC CIC, he has worked on the Digital Learning Assistant project, and utilized multiple AWS services to create solutions to the challenges.

Technology Track