Social Sciences

As she describes it, Rita Orji designs technology “to promote social good.”

Some of the applications the Dalhousie University computer science professor and Canada Research Chair and her students have produced promote physical health and wellness, while others seek to improve one’s mental health. Generally, these applications help people achieve desired changes in their behaviour, whether that be discouraging risky sexual practices or binge drinking, promoting physical activity and healthy diet, or improving mental health. Each application starts with Orji studying the people who might use them — often by collaborating with academics in other faculties — and then making users part of the design process.

“We design persuasive technologies,” Orji says, adding that they integrate modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality into the apps they build to engage users and improve the apps’ effectiveness and user experience. “We need to keep the user in mind throughout the design process.”

One such app is a collaboration between Orji’s Persuasive Computing Lab in the faculty of computer science and the psychiatry department. Using information from a research study that aims to improve the mental well-being of youth, Orji and her colleague, Professor Sandra Meier, developed an app called PROSIT, which stands for “Predicting Risks and Outcomes of Social inTeractions.” The app passively collects information on the daily social interactions of youth, including how many calls they’re making, how many messages they’re sending and how often they’re using social media to interact with friends and family.

Another app Orji and her student, Oladapo Oyebode, developed is called TreeCare. The app simulates users’ physical activity to represent the growth of trees in a virtual garden. If they are physically active in the real world, their virtual trees will flourish. “If they are more sedentary or less physically active, their tree will start losing leaves, losing fruit and becoming unhealthy,” Oyebode says.

To be able to personalize the systems to individuals, Orji and her students collect behavioural and physiological data from their target audiences, and then analyze them to detect patterns or make predictions using AI techniques, including natural language processing and machine learning, all of which they do using the services of ACENET.

“For one project, we collected more than 47 million comments related to COVID-19,” Oyebode says. “We used ACENET’s resources to preprocess and analyze that data.” ACENET’s computing infrastructure helped the two to sift through the data, clean it up and prepare it for analysis, he says, adding that they performed keyphrase extraction and sentiment classification to uncover various issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“ACENET has been really, really helpful for being able to crunch, process and analyze this big data,” Oyebode says.

Oyebode also added that they have used ACENET resources, such as the GPU-enabled clusters, to train advanced machine learning models that inform adaptive mental health interventions.

As a kid growing up in Newfoundland, Kate Scarth loved Lucy Maude Montgomery’s books and now she gets to live that passion every day. The Chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies and Assistant Professor in Applied Communication, Leadership and Culture at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) in Charlottetown says her position is not a traditional academic one. This is primarily because it features a significant public-engagement component, something she explored earlier when she was doing post-doctoral work at Halifax’s Dalhousie University. That project was one that made her perfectly suited to the job she has now. Supported by the Nova Scotia Museum and the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, the project, which she worked on with ACENET’s Chris Geroux, features the literature of Halifax. The idea was to use her background in British literature, and her knowledge from having written her thesis on London’s suburbs, to continue that work — with a Canadian bent. “I wanted to do something local, with a public-engagement side,” she says, adding that her adviser had done a course focused on getting people to read literature and then getting them out to experience places mentioned in the books. A Compute Canada scholarship for the digital humanities helped her with the digital dimensions of her project. “They matched humanities scholars to a Compute Canada technical expert,” she says. “I was matched with Chris Geroux from Halifax and he really helped accelerate the project and possibilities.” Ultimately, the project is a soon-to-be-released map-focused website called Halifax Literary Landmarks. It features a map with popups about what literary happenings took place where. Text and audio versions of the same information are also available. “L.M. Montgomery is one of the writers we look at,” Scarth says. “She went to Dalhousie for a year and later worked as a reporter in Halifax. She also set an Anne of Green Gables novel in a fictional Halifax. Anne visits the old burial grounds, for example.” Scarth’s goal was to highlight the literary side of Halifax. “I want to show people there is rich literature about Halifax and help them learn more about where they live.” The website has been housed on a virtual machine on the Compute Canada cloud. “I can’t even begin to express how helpful it’s been to have Chris working with me,” she says of her ACENET experience. “When we were hiring computer science students, he helped draft the ad and sat in on interviews. It’s been so helpful for me not coming from that background.” Her interest in the digital humanities continues in her current position. She’ll soon launch an online journal of L.M. Montgomery studies, something she hopes will attract scholars, librarians, English academics and even independent researchers. “The journal will have a really wide audience,” she says. “I’ve also been sitting on an advisory committee with Parks Canada because they’re redeveloping the Anne of Green Gables interpretation centre and I’m developing an online course on the same subject.” At UPEI, she has taught digital humanities and digital literacy courses, and she teaches a series of courses called “putting arts to work” — the idea being to get students to think about the skills they’re building in their Arts studies. Scarth’s job seems custom-made to suit her strengths as she completes the mandate of the L. M. Montgomery Institute, which is “to forward the informed celebration of Montgomery’s work.”