Welcome to SIA 2017. Salut à tout. My name is Greg Evans. I have the privilege of being the co-chair along with Lisa Romkey, who is...

Where's Lisa? There we go. ...for this conference, and I'm also going to emcee today's opening remarks. It's wonderful to see so many of you here, and I take this as a tribute to how much growth there is going on in engineering education in Canada. So it's really fantastic to have everybody with us.

Let's hear it for Canada 150. So this conference was made possible by the contributions of many people.

The organizers are fine sponsors, and we'll get back to the thanks, but really it's the participants. It's all of you taking the time to be here that makes the real difference to us. We will have a chance to recognize them later, but to start, we really should acknowledge that the conference is being held on the traditional land of the Huron-Wandat,

the Putan First Nations, the Seneca, and more recently, the Mississauga of the Credit. So we appreciate being able to share our land with them. We're fortunate this morning to have two speakers to help us open and welcome the conference. I'd now like to invite you to join me in welcoming our Vice-President and Provost, Cheryl Reger, to say some welcome remarks on behalf of U of T.

Thank you very much. It's an absolute delight to be here today. Welcome you to University of Toronto. Wonderful to see so many colleagues from across the country.

Thank you for being here. And I do want to thank Dean Kristin Almon and the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering for creating this opportunity, for sharing, convening, reflecting on pedagogy and pedagogical research here.

Given that engineering is a profession that drives innovation in design, in technology, and in processes, it should come as no surprise that engineering is also a leader in innovations in pedagogical education.

And that is certainly true here at University of Toronto. Greg Evans, your host here today, and MC, is a winner of the President's Teaching Award, which is the highest teaching honour here at University of Toronto. And as a result of being a President's Teaching Award winner, sits on the President's Teaching Academy, and he is also a 3M Teaching Award winner.

Professor Susan McCann, who you, probably many of you know, is also a 3M National Fellow.

She is an inaugural member of the President's Teaching Academy here at University of Toronto. And I'm very pleased that she agreed when I asked her to become the first Vice Provost Innovations in Undergraduate Education. And it really made sense, based on the kind of work that she and her colleagues were doing in engineering,

that they would lead the rest of the university in innovation in undergraduate education. Other faculty members in engineering, Jim Wallace, Yuling Chang, and Jonathan Rose are also members of the University of Toronto President's Teaching Academy.

And U of T's engineering developed new collaborative graduate programs here in terms of the kinds of innovation that have been happening here. U of T's engineering has joined with OISE, the Institute for

Studies in Education, to develop our first collaborative program in engineering education. And we now have 13 graduate students who are specializing in engineering education. The new Centre for Innovation in Engineering Education, which you see being built directly across the street behind all that boarding,

is hosting one of our newest types of classrooms, a teal classroom, that allows for a tiered classroom that also has tables for student interaction. And Dean Amon is facilitating in the innovative use of these classrooms through creating a new fund for educational innovation.

Doug Reeves, who I saw at the back, has led the Centre for Engineering Leadership in preparing a new generation of leaders. So I know that University of Toronto is not unique in having people who are leading pedagogical innovation coming from engineering.

And so I'm again delighted that we're here to welcome you so that you have an opportunity to talk about it. As a society, and as the workplace changes, we as educators are now tasked with a dual responsibility of preparing students for their first jobs,

and also preparing them for a lifetime of changing careers. And that, as you know, requires opportunities to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills that will take students throughout life.

And at the same time, providing real world, first hand, work-like opportunities for students. And I know that engineering has been at the forefront of this for many, many years, beginning with forefronting co-op education and professional experiences years through partnerships with industry,

by providing opportunities to solve real world problems. For example, this year our first year engineering students tackled 100 community-based problems, and contributed to improving our city and the world around us.

And engineering has been at the forefront of going beyond our campus and into the community. And our faculty of engineering students and faculty are engaged with potential future students through outreach programs and STEM-based educational opportunities.

So just two weeks ago, we had 1,200 students from the Toronto District School Board come here to the university to engage in hands-on learning. And it was an absolutely inspiring day. I was privileged to be a part of it.

Where students could learn about science, and these were primarily students from high needs neighborhoods in the city, many of whom would never have thought of themselves on a university campus. The large majority had never found themselves on a university campus before.

And it was really a reminder of the importance of engaged learning practices and teaching to students' strengths. So these are just some of the many, many examples where engineering educators are taking leadership on our campus and other campuses.

So, as Greg indicated, this year's conference is part of the University of Toronto's Canada 150 celebration. And I'm delighted to see that your conference incorporates celebration of the role of engineering, the role that engineering has played in building Canada.

And it's a fabulous metaphor for celebrating history, drawing on lessons from the past, and developing the innovators of tomorrow through your educational programs. So, again, thank you for all the innovative work that you've been doing. Thank you for leading pedagogical innovation in Canada.

Thanks for coming together here at the University of Toronto. I know you've already been deeply engaged for the last couple of days, and I hope the remainder of your conference is equally rewarding. Thanks very much for being here.

Now it is my distinct pleasure to invite our Dean, Cristela Armand, to say some words of welcome on behalf of our Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering.

Thank you, Greg, and also thank you so much for your tremendous leadership in engineering education and pedagogical innovation. Good morning, everyone. On behalf of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering and the University of Toronto, I would like to extend a warm welcome to each of you for attending the 2017 Canadian Engineering Education Association Conference.

This annual conference is a terrific forum to share pedagogical innovations in

engineering education and to also discuss engineering research here in Canada and abroad. I would like first to offer our gratitude to the conference co-chairs, Greg Evans and Lisa Ronkin, and the entire organizing committee.

Their dedication and their vision is evident in every aspect of this conference. From the timely and exciting workshops that went on over the last two days, to the excellent

plenary sections with stellar keynote speakers, and the stimulating technical presentations planned for the next few days. I also would like to acknowledge all the engineering programs at the universities across the country whose sponsorship, and I think they are listed here, have made this conference possible.

So please, when you go back home, convey our thanks and appreciation to your respective institutions. Let me say that it is for me a great privilege to be here among so many passionate

and dedicated engineering educators, including the three of this year's awardees of the prestigious 3M National Teaching Fellows, which is interesting that three out of the ten are from engineering, Professor Greg

Evans from Toronto, Professor Gordon Stable from Waterloo, and Professor Alan Steele from Calton University. We, as engineering educators, are about 5-6% almost of the whole professorate in Canada.

And this year, three out of the ten, 3M, which is the highest award here for high post-secondary education in education, is given to engineering educators.

So it's quite something. So congratulations and thank you to all of you for your leadership in engineering education and innovation. So the theme of this year's conference is innovation and diversity in engineering education.

And it's such a great reflection, I would say, of our priorities here at the University of Toronto and of the tremendous diversity of the city of Toronto. It also reflects the many diverse ways that engineering education can take from incorporating multidisciplinary components and perspectives

to employing new technologies to deliver and to assess learning experiences that reflect a diverse number of desired outcomes.

This conference enables us to share and celebrate diverse approaches to innovation and to education with the common goal of strengthening engineering education in Canada and also around or beyond our borders.

This conference is also a powerful example of how we can apply the creativity and innovation, which is indeed at the heart of the engineering profession, and utilize this also to prepare the next generation of global engineering leaders.

Allow me to share with you very quickly four initiatives that we are currently undertaking here at the University of Toronto in engineering.

One of them was just mentioned by the provost is the graduate program in engineering education that we recently launched, which is the first of its kind in Canada, and brings faculty from engineering and from the faculty of education in this collaborative program.

And we just graduated the first two masters students, and we have several PhDs, I think a total of 13 students currently in the program. Coincidentally, the co-directors of the program are also the co-chairs of this conference, Greg and Lisa.

So the second initiative is that we are in the process of creating a new institute, most likely the name will be along the lines of Institute for Studies of Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice.

This new institute that we hope to go through governance in the fall will transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, will foster a rich community of practice in engineering education, and will generate knowledge to strengthen engineering education in our institutions.

The third initiative is regarding the design and the building of new learning spaces that are flexible in order to support more effectively innovative teaching and learning pedagogies.

Next January, we will start piloting courses in our faculty's newest building, the Center for Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The building will have a state-of-the-art lecture hall for collaborative learning. It will have the so-called teal rooms, technology-enhanced active learning classrooms.

It will have makerspaces and design studios, and will also have rapid prototyping and fabrication facilities so the students can come together, work on their ideas, and from there go into prototyping and fabrication.

I hope that you will take the opportunity to either tour the new building tomorrow afternoon, or also we have a video that can be accessed through the conference website, which displays the many exceptional educational spaces that this new building will offer.

I believe that these spaces also will provide an ideal environment for pedagogical research, and for evolving our understanding of engineering education and best practices for the current generation of

students and the future, not those characteristics that we had when we entered the engineering schools. And the fourth initiative is regarding providing our faculty member with opportunities

to dedicate time and to have some resources for developing education innovations. So we just announced last week six inaugural innovation teaching professors, which carries

the name of an alum, Donor, and also we created 23 Teal Fellows. So these professors, many of whom are here today, will develop pedagogical innovations and implement them,

and I believe they will be leading by example within our environment the other innovations in education. So they will be paving the way for all our faculty members to develop pedagogies and implement educational innovation.

My last comment that I want to make, some of you may be aware already, that a group of us from the Canadian Engineering Education Association, NCDS, which

is the National Council of Deans of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Engineers Canada, we have been working together to persuade our federal government that Canada needs a

program to fund research on both secondary STEM education, and in particular in engineering education. We need to enable more cross-disciplinarity between funding agencies, for instance in SERC and SHERC, in order to advance and promote research and scholarship in engineering education.

Ultimately, we need our federal government to understand that how we educate engineers today is vitally important to Canada's innovation of tomorrow and to our future prosperity.

And I'm very pleased that Kim Goodhouse, who has served as the chair of NCDS, is also with us here. So I'm very confident that soon, hopefully, we will have federal funding to develop engineering innovations.

And that is the case, as some of you may know, in the United States through the grants that the National Science Foundation, the equivalent of NSERC provides. Even research-oriented grants require a statement of the educational mission and goals

that that given faculty member that is applying for the research grant is proposing. So let me say that this is why it's so wonderful to have with us,

all of you, so many who also share the same commitment and passion for engineering education. Over the next several days, we will be energized and inspired as we hear new insights in engineering education from our colleagues across the country.

So let me ask that when you return back to your home institutions, you share with your colleagues one or two things that you learned or you realized about its importance during this conference.

Together, we will enrich our educational programs, we will enhance the students' learning experience, and we'll prepare the next generation of global engineering leaders. Thank you again for joining us in this conference and for giving us, the University

of Toronto and our faculty, the privilege to host this conference and all of you. I wish you a most rewarding conference and now I'm back to Greg for introducing the remaining of the program. Thank you.

Well, thank you Cristina and I think it's no great surprise for you to hear that myself and I'm sure everybody in the room couldn't agree with you more. Now is the time to push, now is the time to push our governments to help fund something that we

see vitally important, now is the time to push our colleagues as well to get on board with the engineering education. So your message should go back and spread the word, I couldn't agree more and it's on all of us to try to do that. This conference theme is innovation and diversity and with that I think we would be amiss if we didn't

recognize our colleagues here who are celebrating Ramadan and also those who have come to Toronto to celebrate Pride Month. So we have huge diversity in our community and it really adds. We also have people who have come from far away, further than Kingston, people who have

come from Thailand, Australia, Europe and it's wonderful to have you here with us as well. This conference we have over 180 presentations, it includes podium talks, late in talks, two special symposia, two

very exciting plenary talks, a share in circle, a poster session and a keynote workshop on Wednesday morning. So there's lots of different things.

So when we set up this conference we changed some of the formats to try to give you as much time as possible to talk with each other and to interact because that's what bringing the community together is about. We have a huge turnout this year and it's fabulous, we have 270 people attending which I think is a record for SIA and it's so great to see so many of you here.

We also have a large number who are attending for the first time and I encourage you if you're attending for the first time, it's great to have you here, welcome, welcome, welcome. Please reach out, try to meet as many as you can and on our side we will do the same. I suggest at lunch, try to have lunch with someone that you don't know, the more that we can build the community the stronger we'll become.

We have to do some administration, almost there to the exciting talk. This room has three doors, two at the back, one at the front.

You've seen the passwords so you have access, EDRome will work as well, we have our hashtag, people tell me a hashtag is something, I'm not sure what I do with it. But there it is, SIA has put out a survey, so you should have all received an email and they're

looking for feedback and they're hoping to get that by tomorrow night so that they can incorporate in the AGM. So I encourage you to go online and fill out that survey but also talk to the board members, you'll see a number of board members. Board members if you could put up your hands, there we go. So if you have visions for what you think SIA should be, try to catch one of them and share it, they would love to hear from you.

Visit the conference website regularly, there's three excellent student videos, we'll show some of them tomorrow. Where there's a chance to sign up for tours of the new building, so it's a 20 minute tour, it's getting pretty full but there's still some spots so please do go online and sign up for that, that's tomorrow at 2 o'clock between 2 and 3.30.

There's the graphic renderings which some of you saw last night at the social, they're also on a bulletin board, they're also online. This is the set up for the workshop on Wednesday morning so take a look at them and see if you can figure out what they mean to you. The banquet tonight, we have Vancouver weather this year in Toronto.

So we've arranged some buses to go up to Casa Loma, there will be some of us walking but it is about a 40 minute walk and if it's raining we're going to try to do it otherwise but we have buses leaving here from the main exit to the building at 5.20, 5.40, 6 o'clock and 6.20.

So there will be enough space to get everyone up there and the banquet tonight is at Casa Loma and there's a chance to tour the castle between 6 and 7 and the dinner will start at 7. The poster session is tomorrow at 3.30, if you have a poster drop it off at the reception or you can put it up tomorrow at lunch.

Tuesday after the poster session is open so if there's a special topic you'd like to meet people to talk about, set up a group and go out for dinner and some drinks or you could use apparently this hashtag thing, you can do something in ways that somebody else will explain to you somehow.

Le mal des soins c'est ouvert, si vous avez une sujet d'interre par quillement pour vous, assemblée vous une group pour elle prendre de boisson du dinner et pour santir ensemble. With those administrative comments and no time to spare, I declare the conference open and I'll pass it over to Jason who will introduce our keynote speaker.