Three StFX students each receive $27,000 Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s awards

StFX students Meaghan Amaral, Cole MacDonald, and Caelen Mattie have each received a $27,000 Canada Graduate Scholarship - Master's (CGRS M), awarded to students who demonstrate a high standard of achievement in undergraduate and early graduate studies.

The objective of the CGRS M program is to help develop research skills and assist in the training of highly qualified personnel. This support allows these scholars to concentrate more fully on their studies in their chosen fields.

The three StFX students will be working on master's projects that include quantifying landfill methane emissions, investigating how bias shows up in news articles, and exploring AI transparency,

More details on each project follow.

Meaghan Amaral, Earth and Environmental Studies, "Quantifying Landfill Methane Emissions from the Active Working Face." Supervisor: Dr. Dave Risk.
Landfills are a major source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to climate change. "My research focuses specifically on measuring and quantifying methane emissions from landfill active working face areas, which is the area where waste is being deposited," Ms. Amaral says. "The active working face can contribute over half of total site emissions and therefore needs to be better understood to be able to manage and mitigate emissions from this area. The scholarship will enable me to measure landfills across Canada to able to understand the role of climate, weather, waste composition, and site operation practices on landfill active working face emissions."

Cole MacDonald, Computer Science, "Can we measure the biases that occur in organizations/social media news?" Supervisor Dr. Milton King.
Mr. MacDonald says this scholarship will support his research into how bias shows up in news articles. "With the rise of digital news and social media, it's become easier for organizations to subtly influence how stories are told. I'll be using tools from Natural Language Processing (NLP) to study patterns in language across different news sources and see how similar topics are framed in different ways - and how that might change over time," he says. "Thanks to this scholarship, I'll be able to focus more deeply on collecting data, building analysis tools, and hopefully creating something that helps people better understand the information they're reading. It will also give me the freedom to grow as a researcher and contribute to making media more transparent and trustworthy."

Caelen Mattie, Computer Science, "AI Transparency Using Verifiable Explanations." Supervisor Dr. Milton King.
Mr. Mattie's research aims to answer the question: "How can we design and build a framework that enables the creation of true human consumable explanations of the AI decision-making process and what are the social implications of such a
framework on trust, transparency and accountability?" "I plan to go about this by combining existing tools in a novel way so that AI models, which would typically be difficult to interpret the reasoning of, can be made more transparent by providing visualizations and accurate explanations of how a particular AI model came to a decision," he says. "This scholarship will enable me to do work in the increasingly important field of AI transparency. My hope for this is to make AI tools more accessible and open for those who want to use them and to provide a useful contribution to the field."