From therapy robots to a one-of-a-kind research lab: why two world renowned computer scientists moved their work to Canada

Seven years after the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program (C150) recruited two world-renowned computer scientists, Margo Seltzer and Kerstin Dautenhahn, to come to Canada, they have not only made their marks on the country’s research landscape—they have become Canadian citizens.

Seltzer spent the first 25 years of her career at Harvard University, but moved to Vancouver in 2018 to become the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems at The University of British Columbia. She now co-heads the university’s Computer Science department. In 2023, she took her oath of Canadian citizenship online, where she and nearly 100 other people on Zoom tried their best to sing “O Canada” in unison.

“That was special,” she laughs.

When the University of Waterloo reached out to Dautenhahn about a possible C150 chair position, she had never even been to Canada. She was a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom and not actively looking for a new role. Nevertheless, the offer stood out: she’d be joining a very highly regarded faculty in a great, tech-friendly city, at a time when research funding in Britain had been destabilized by the Brexit vote.

“To the surprise of everyone, the first time I entered Canada was for my job interview in January 2018,” she says. “It was a complicated but also a fast decision. My husband and I decided, let’s go.”

As the Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics, Dautenhahn established a new lab at the university, the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory.

The C150 program was designed to usher in a “brain gain” exactly like this, to enhance Canada’s reputation as a global centre for science, research and innovation excellence, in celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary. In the 2017 federal budget, the Government of Canada invested $117.6 million to launch the competition, enabling the country’s universities to attract top-tier, internationally based scholars and researchers (including Canadian expatriates) to Canada. Over 60% of the chairs selected were women.

For Seltzer, becoming a C150 chair represented an exciting opportunity to put down roots in a city she loved, Vancouver, and to build the kind of collaborative research environment she’d always dreamed of, from the ground up.

“I feel like now, looking back over six years, that is exactly what I’ve done,” she says. “We have weekly lab get-togethers where we read papers and also give students an opportunity to do practice talks and celebrate them as a lab.”

Seltzer takes a holistic approach to the study of computer systems, and wanted to create a place where different people, with different passions, could work across disciplines and thrive. The lab, called Systopia, has nearly 50 researchers from undergraduate students up to postdoctoral researchers and faculty working together to push operating systems, online privacy, data management, security and machine learning to new heights.

“We are an incredibly internationally diverse group,” she adds. “We celebrate all the holidays.”

At UBC, Seltzer also finds she has the support to do more “high-risk, high-reward” research, and build partnerships in unexpected places, like between machine learning systems and chemistry. She describes a robotic arm in the university’s chemistry lab that can move around to conduct experiments, and the cross-department training opportunity it represents.

“How do you prevent the system from doing something wrong, like whacking the researcher in the head or heating the hot plate up too high? We’ve been working with them to build safety mechanisms around systems like that,” she says. “It’s been super fun.”

Now that Vancouver is officially home, Seltzer is interested in developing relationships with industry in the years ahead to build products that resonate in the field.

Dautenhahn shares the same passion for collaborative, relationship-based research as Seltzer. Her team is working toward making robots more socially intelligent, so they can make more positive contributions to human society.

“I do basic research into social robotics and human-robot interaction, but I'm particularly fond of the application-oriented projects,” she says. 

Dautenhahn did pioneering work in the UK to develop robot-assisted therapy for children on the autism spectrum, a technique that went on to gain popularity around the world. At the University of Waterloo, she has expanded her research to include more children with speech and language difficulties. She has launched projects with local organizations such as the KidsAbility Centre for Child Development in Waterloo and Kick Start Therapy in Brampton. The goal is to use robots to make therapy and education fun for children who have difficulties with, for example, stuttering.

She is also collaborating with a diverse group of Waterloo researchers, who have backgrounds in optometry, engineering and psychology, to develop a social robot to help children with the medical condition amblyopia, sometimes called “lazy eye”.

“Children and robots, it’s a match made in heaven,” Dautenhahn says. “Nearly all children love robots.”

In the next year or two, two projects she has high hopes for taking from the lab into the real world are a robot as a public speaking coach, and another as a mental health support for students at the university.

“It’s very difficult to get into the University of Waterloo, and our students are working really, really hard,” says Dautenhahn. “So I want to do something where my research can give back and help them.”

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Keywords

• Computer Science
• Computer Systems
• Privacy
• Security
• Data Management
• Machine Learning
• Robotics
• Therapy
• Education