The epigenetics of early life adversity and trauma inheritance: an interview with Moshe Szyf

In this interview, Professor Moshe Szyf speaks with Storm Johnson, Commissioning Editor for Epigenomics, on his work to date in the field of social epigenetics. Szyf received his PhD from the Hebrew University and did his postdoctoral fellowship in genetics at Harvard Medical School, joined the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill University in Montreal in 1989 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Academy of Health Sciences of Canada. He is the founding codirector of the Sackler Institute for Epigenetics and Psychobiology at McGill and is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Experience-Based Brain and Biological Development program. Szyf was the founder of the first pharma to develop epigenetic pharmacology, Methylgene Inc., and the journal Epigenetics. The Szyf lab proposed two decades ago that DNA methylation is a prime therapeutic target in cancer and other diseases and postulated and provided the first set of evidence that the social environment early in life can alter DNA methylation, launching the emerging field of social epigenetics.

Fieldwork of the Canadian Institute in Greece in 2018

The archaeological fieldwork conducted in Greece in 2018 under the aegis of the Canadian Institute in Greece (CIG) is summarized based on the presentation given by the director at the Institute’s annual Open Meeting in Athens in May 2019.

The centrality of ethical utterances within professional narratives

This study examines the centrality of ethics within editorials published in the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants’ professional journal, CA Magazine, over the 1912 to 2010 period. Starting from the twin assumptions that editorials speak about appropriate professional behavior using a variety of words such as ‘ethics,’ ‘conduct,’ and ‘codes,’ and that appropriate professional behavior is situational, we use topic modeling techniques to identify these dimensions of ethical discourse. We then use social network analysis methods to map the position and centrality of ethics within the editorials across time. The results show that enunciations about appropriate professional conduct are broader than simply enunciations using the word ‘ethics’. The results also highlight that ethical utterances become more central, not less central, over time.

A Decision Tree-Aware Genetic Algorithm for Botnet Detection

In this paper, the botnet detection problem is defined as a feature selection problem and the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to search for the best significant combination of features from the entire search space of set of features. Furthermore, the Decision Tree (DT) classifier is used as an objective function to direct the ability of the proposed GA to locate the combination of features that can correctly classify the activities into normal traffics and botnet attacks. Two datasets namely the UNSW-NB15 and the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity Intrusion Detection System 2017 (CICIDS2017), are used as evaluation datasets. The results reveal that the proposed DT-aware GA can effectively find the relevant features from the whole features set. Thus, it obtains efficient botnet detection results in terms of F-score, precision, detection rate, and number of relevant features, when compared with DT alone.

“You have the right to love and be loved”: participatory theatre for disability justice with self-advocates

Individuals with intellectual disability are often left out of and overlooked in discussions on sexual health and sexuality. Given this, we undertook a participatory theatre research project to better respond to the needs of the individuals with intellectual and developmental disability regarding their sexual agency and sexual citizenship. The project, entitled Romance, Relationships, and Rights arose when the executive director of a community living agency approached researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship to learn about how they, as an agency, could better support their community. To disrupt sexual ableism and traditional theatre hierarchies, we collaboratively turned to participatory and disability theatre with the aim to advance and promote the sexual citizenship of individuals with intellectual and developmental disability, who refer to themselves as self-advocates - those who speak and act with agency. The challenges of equitable co-creation arose throughout the theatre process; the themes of deconstruction/co-construction and uncertainty and liminality reveal the iterative process of centering self-advocate voices.

Communication Failure Resilient Distributed Neural Network for Edge Devices

Recently, the necessity to run high-performance neural networks (NN) is increasing even in resource-constrained embedded systems such as wearable devices. However, due to the high computational and memory requirements of the NN applications, it is typically infeasible to execute them on a single device. Instead, it has been proposed to run a single NN application cooperatively on top of multiple devices, a so-called distributed neural network. In the distributed neural network, workloads of a single big NN application are distributed over multiple tiny devices. While the computation overhead could effectively be alleviated by this approach, the existing distributed NN techniques, such as MoDNN, still suffer from large traffics between the devices and vulnerability to communication failures. In order to get rid of such big communication overheads, a knowledge distillation based distributed NN, called Network of Neural Networks (NoNN), was proposed, which partitions the filters in the final convolutional layer of the original NN into multiple independent subsets and derives smaller NNs out of each subset. However, NoNN also has limitations in that the partitioning result may be unbalanced and it considerably compromises the correlation between filters in the original NN, which may result in an unacceptable accuracy degradation in case of communication failure. In this paper, in order to overcome these issues, we propose to enhance the partitioning strategy of NoNN in two aspects. First, we enhance the redundancy of the filters that are used to derive multiple smaller NNs by means of averaging to increase the immunity of the distributed NN to communication failure. Second, we propose a novel partitioning technique, modified from Eigenvector-based partitioning, to preserve the correlation between filters as much as possible while keeping the consistent number of filters distributed to each device. Throughout extensive experiments with the CIFAR-100 (Canadian Institute For Advanced Research-100) dataset, it has been observed that the proposed approach maintains high inference accuracy (over 70%, 1.53× improvement over the state-of-the-art approach), on average, even when a half of eight devices in a distributed NN fail to deliver their partial inference results.

Competing in the Planning Marketplace: An Analysis of Qualifications Demanded by Municipal Planning Recruiters

This study sought to understand the knowledge, skills, qualities, and tasks that municipal employers expect from planners and to assess how well they align with those identified as important by academic scholars and accreditation bodies. Through a content analysis of 150 municipal planning employment advertisements collected from across Canada, the study identified the planning-relevant qualifications demanded by municipal governments. The analysis revealed that the municipal planning sector prefers prospective employees with a planning degree, the skills demanded by municipalities generally align with the competencies identified by the Canadian Institute of Planners, and municipalities mainly target well-rounded planners.

"Too White": Model Minority counter-stories in Canadian institute of higher education

The Model Minority Myth (MMM) is a discursive trait of Asianness in the North American context. It defines East Asian identity as a hardworking and a resilient group despite experiencing discrimination. Marginality in a positive stereotype seems like an oxymoron, however when the MMM is the only representation of the Asian community, it robs individuality of Asians who are excluded from this representation. Historically, the monolithic representation of the Asian diaspora with the MMM was used as a hegemonic tool to oppress racialized groups, including other Asians to legitimize whiteness. In this MRP, narratives of three participants provided counter stories to erode monolithic stories of Asians. Furthermore, it provided the discursive space to have conversations about Asianness with the participants. Keywords : model minority, Asianness, race, gender, narrative approach, counter-story