Profiles 2018

Interview by Diana Kuprel Jesse Wente (Cinema Studies, 1996) is one of Canada’s highest-profile Indigenous voices—director of Telefilm Canada’s new Indigenous Screen Office, long-time CBC Radio film critic, and formerly a programmer and curator at the Toronto International Film Festival. Since he arrived at the University of Toronto in 1992, his life has been a […]

GOOGLE PHD FELLOWSHIP “MY PhD RESEARCH in computer science is on reinforcement learning—how to train machines using reward and punishment. We reward the machine when it succeeds, and punish it when it fails. No, we don’t beat the machine. If it understands the command, it gets points, and if it fails to understand, it loses […]

JOANNA DEMONE AWARD “MY STAY at the University of Toronto has given me a fresh perspective on how to read and analyze literary texts. It has encouraged me to re-think my approach to my doctoral dissertation on the representation of animals in contemporary Polish literature, which I am undertaking at the University of Warsaw. Auditing […]

JACKMAN HUMANITIES INSTITUTE UNDERGRADUATE FELLOWSHIP “My parents fled the civil war in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Canada, where I was born. My uncle had been disappeared. Was it by the government or the rebel forces for alleged involvement in the war? My family never found out. I spent the last year at the Jackman […]