2025 IEEE Southern Alberta Section AGM
IEEE Southern Alberta Section Presents our 2025 Annual General Meeting (AGM)
We are happy to announce that we will be hosting the IEEE Southern Alberta Section AGM once again!
This is a fantastic opportunity for all IEEE members to reconnect, get updates on our section's achievements, and look forward to the future. The meeting will provide an update on the activities of the Section, the Technical Chapters, and the Affinity Groups over the past year, and provide an outlook for activities planned in 2026.
Let's come together, celebrate our achievements, and set the stage for a year of excellence. We look forward to seeing you there!
Keynote Speaker: Professor Randy Connolly on Public Computing Intellectuals in the Age of AI Crisis
This keynote explores how the current sense of crisis surrounding AI and digital innovation offers a unique opportunity for academic computing to reflect on its epistemological foundations. It advocates for a more reflexive, interdisciplinary approach to computing education—one that embraces liberal arts and envisions the emergence of the Public Computer Intellectual.
Dinner:
- 2 complimentary drink tickets
- Wedge salad with buttermilk herb dressing, beamster cheese, tomato and crispy onion
- Choice of:
- Alberta beef tenderloin, local carrot purée, roasted fingerling potatoes, smoked rosemary jus
- Chicken supreme, dauphinoise potato, Tuscan kale, maple brown butter jus
- Vegetarian Option, Meal TBD
- Chocolate crémeux tart, Chantilly, chocolate soil, berries
Please indicate any food allergies or special dietary requirements (including Vegan/Vegetarian meal) under "Special Requests" when registering. We will do our best to accommodate to the extent that the venue can offer.
Registration consists of two parts - vTools and PayPal. Follow the "Register Now" link below, and complete the information. The system will then take you to a PayPal page to enter your payment information. When you have successfully registered and paid, you will receive 2 confirmation emails, 1 from IEEE and 1 from PayPal. Your registration is not complete until your payment has been received, and you have received both confirmation emails. Note, you do not need to create a PayPal account to complete payment, the payment can be navigated and completed through PayPal without signing in. If you have any issues with registration, please reach out and someone will be able to provide assistance.
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
-
Add Event to Calendar
- 320 4 Ave SW
- Calgary, Alberta
- Canada AB T2P 2S6
- Building: The Westin Calgary Downtown
- Room Number: Nakiska
- Click here for Map
- Starts 28 October 2025 06:00 AM UTC
- Ends 24 November 2025 06:55 AM UTC
- Admission fee ?
- Menu: Alberta Beef Tenderloin, Chicken Supreme, Vegetarian
Speakers
Randy
Public Computing Intellectuals in the Age of AI Crisis
The belief that AI technology is on the cusp of engendering a generalized social crisis has become a popular one. While there is an element of hype and exaggeration to some of these accounts, they did bring heightened awareness of troubling ramifications of not only this technology but of digital innovation in general. This sense of crisis and worry was also felt within academic computing. Yet crisis (or a sense of crisis) can also be productive. It can act as a potential turning point, a critical moment that allows us (our academic discipline, our society) to question the trajectory of its current path. This rare conjunction of shared concern about social, political, and personal futures presaged by current developments in machine learning and data science not only among the wider community but also within computing itself, presents the academic discipline of computing with a rare opportunity to interrogate the nature of the discipline and to expand what counts as “normal” computing education.
To that end, this presentation presents a novel categorization of academic computing’s epistemological field, one which includes not only the discipline’s usual instrumental forms of knowledge but reflexive knowledge as well. This reflexive dimension can expand the types of knowledge and practice that constitutes academic computing. Reflexivity includes both internal critique and a broader concern for the public interest and raises them as equal intellectual partners to the usual technical topics within computing. This reflexive dimension is also reliant on the theoretic models and analytic approaches of the humanities and social sciences; as such, liberal education must be a necessary component of future computing education. The paper will then advocate for a conceptual archetype—the Public Computer Intellectual and the (Almost) Public Computer Intellectual—as a way of practically imagining the expanded, liberal education-oriented reflexive possibilities of academic practice within computing.
Peer Review Comments of the Related Paper
- "It masterfully uses classic works from sociology, STS and many other related fields and demonstrates a rare skill in weaving many disciplines into a very persuasive narrative."
- "One of the things that this paper does well is how it effectively grounds its arguments with an interdisciplinary lens, creating a narrative that pulls in critical pieces of information, findings, frameworks, and theories across disciplines such as political science, social science, computing, education, and many others."
- "The article's message is inspiring and I feel it has an important message to be delivered to the computing community. It reminds us about our duty to not only to our field. It is written with clarity and it shows excellent command of many academic traditions and fields of research. "
Biography:
Randy Connolly is a Professor of Mathematics & Computing at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. His teaching specialties are web development and technology and society studies. His research has oscillated between his two backgrounds of computer science and political science, and includes the teaching of web development, the general pedagogy of computing education, and the social effects of computing. He is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Fundamentals of Web Development, Third Edition, used by thousands of students annually at hundreds of universities worldwide, and Computing Careers & Disciplines: A Quick Guide for Prospective Students and Career Advisors, which has been downloaded over 200000 times. He is a long-time editorial board member for ACM Transactions on Computing Education and is the current editor-in-chief for ACM Inroads magazine. He has authored over 50 peer-reviewed papers and given 10 international invited or keynote addresses.
Agenda
5:30pm: Doors open
5:30-6:15pm: Cash Bar and Networking (2 complimentary drink tickets included)
6:15-6:30pm: Chair’s and Treasurer’s Reports
6:30-7:15pm: Dinner
7:15-7:30pm: Award Presentations
7:30-8:30pm: Technical Chapters, Affinity Groups, and Student Branch Reports
8:30-9:30pm: Keynote Speaker: Professor Randy Connolly