Equitable Health Technologies: Overcoming Biases and False Inferences in AI Diagnostics and Drug Discovery
The outcomes of the National Inter-University Big Data Challenge — a student-led exploration of how AI and data science can shape better health and social futures.
2026
Inter-University Big Data Challenge™
IUBDC offers a rare and highly sought-after opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to use AI and advanced data analytics to conduct hands-on, student-driven research in biomedical sciences and health.
IUBDC™
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Program Statistics
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
IUBDC
63% / 50%
63% are women in STEM, 50% from underrepresented groups in STEM
94.5%
aim to publish their work in the Underline.io database with a unique DOI
89%
are competing in Inter-University Big Data Challenges for the first
TALENT POOL
IUBDC
68.8%
are students from the top 4 universities in Canada (UofT, UotA, UBC, McGill)
Culminating Events
Western Canada Finals
Calgary, AB, January 31, 2025
University of Calgary Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking
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Winners
Winners of Canada’s National Big Data and AI Challenge
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Saeed Nusri
Head of RBC Calgary Innovation Lab & Senior Director @RBC Borealis
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K.M. Tahsin Hassan Rahit
Postdoctoral Associate | Cumming School of Medicine, Department of Oncology
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Li Shu
Postdoctoral Scholar
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Dr. Ashkan Ebadi
Senior Research Officer @National Research Council of Canada (NRC) | Adj. Prof. @UWaterloo | Aff. Prof. @Concordia | PhD, SMIEEE, FIAP | Data-Driven Solutions Consultant
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Dr. Mohsen Selseleh
Professor, School of Management, Faculty of Business, Creative Industries, and Culinary Arts
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Felix Kaechel
Technical Leader at Cisco's Innovation Labs
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Vivek Saahil
Strategy & Analytics at Pratt & Whitney Canada | McGill MMA
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Special Guests
Provides expertise and fosters connections with government academia, and industry to guide initiatives.
Honourable Corey Hogan
MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources
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Maggie Chi
MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health
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Monica Reagan
Manager, Environmental and Social Impact | Royal Bank of Canada
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Jinoj Titus
Senior Director, Enterprise Data Architecture, RBC | Inventor Wayne Cuervo , Director of DIO Americas, CISCO
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estern Canada Finals
Toronto, ON, January 30, 2025
Hart House, University of Toronto
Quantitative Endometriosis Risk Assessment: Integrating Imaging and Biomarkers to Mitigate Clinical Bias
Areez Dhaliwal, Joy Oh, and Benjamin Nesan
Machine Learning Bias Using Globular Clusters
Ammar Mughal, Brianna Callisto, and Dr. Jeremy Webb
A Synthetic Data Approach to Tackling Racial Imbalance in Machine Learning Classification of Diabetes
Jennifer Tram Su, Angela Xiaomeng Zhu, and Hyerin Kim
Decomposing Subgroup Performance Gaps in Clinical Prediction Models: A Multi-Dataset Study
Zavash Ghorbanpourbaboli, Arina Afshar, Elham Jangravi, and Dr. Russell Butler
SAFER-Skin: Auditing AI Skin Advice Across Skin Tones
Khuzaymah Bin Haris and Dr. Bin Hu
Knowledge Distillation and Multi-Stage Transfer Learning to Address Breast Cancer Diagnostic Bias
Arjun Sharma, Dr. Gelan Ayana Zewdie, and Dr. Jude Kong
From Critique to Practice: A Literature Review of Human Evaluation in NLP
Aiman Bint Azam, Nina Dang, Sukaina Habib, Nandini Patel, and Dr. Ines Arous
Rank and Method Variance in ProAffinity-GNN Binding Affinity Estimates from AlphaFold Variants
Muhammad-Tameem Mughal, Mohammed Aban Qureshi, Mustafa Syed Quadri, Kevin Faheem, and Yan Yan
Performance of Commercial Large Multimodal Models in Mammographic Lesion Interpretation
As Wasti, Muneera Siddiqui, Amisa Mahamed, Mishel Tennakoon, Abdirahman Sheikh, Ronia Matthews, Eleanor Cloves, and Katerina Loizides
Bias in Depression Diagnosis Following Traumatic Brain Injury: Implications for Equitable AI Diagnostics in Canada
Amna Imran, Onisa Chowdhury, Madhurza Das, and Garrett Skakun
Two Ages, One Patient: Epigenetic Age and Equity in Cancer Survival Prediction
Ishika Rath, Claire Wang, Bella Ting, and Rubina Heng
How Ancestry Bias Impacts Genetic Risk Models
Anika Dhingra and Sarah Shaikh
Does Synthetic Data Fix or Hide Bias?
Sachleen Parmar
Uncovering Metabolic/Inflammatory Bias in AI Screening Models for Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
Tahreem Sheikh, Alissa Zaman, Areesha Baig, Isra Akhter, and Jenna Ayyash
Mitigating Bias in Medical AI Diagnostics: Data Filtering Vs. Adversarial Training
Anum Jafri, Kaavya Nagarajan, Dhakshanya Anand Babhu Mahalakshmi, Caroline Cooper
Evaluating Diagnostic Performance Across Fitzpatrick Skin Tone Groups Using Deep Learning
Raya Hussain
Demographic Representation and Reporting in Clinical Trials Across Major Disease Areas
Ziyaad Kazi, Mehar Dhaliwal, Krisha Shah, Kavya Angel, Ayesha Arora
Fairness in AI-Assisted Medical Diagnostics: A Systematic Review
Nhat Minh Phan, Hasti Moradi, Mikael Mukhtar, Srikruti Davuluri Rajeswari, and Elmira Onagh
Evidence Sensitive Drug Repurposing for DLBCL
Riya Jetly and Jasman Chatha
The External Validation Gap in AI-Based Sepsis Prediction: A Review of the Epic Sepsis Model
Keana Yazdanni, Tryphena Amapakabo, Dana Kim, Victoria Lanni, Jessica Mergelas, Sarah VanLandschoot, and Zimeng Megan Li
Auditing Surveillance Bias in Genomic Antimicrobial Resistance Prediction
Afaq Virk, Cindy Cheng, Thomas Lenh
Early Prediction and Clinical Decision Support for Septic Shock in Intensive Care Unit Patients Using Relational Reasoning with Large Language Models
Simran Virk and Dr. Enas AlTarawneh
Bias, Dataset Representativeness, and False Inference in AI Policies Across Canadian Healthcare
Serilda D'Mello, George Gerges, Gayatri Gangakhedkar, Brice Huynh, Nabihah Khan, Tomas Salloum, and Brenda Zai
Sex-Based Diagnostic Bias in Emergency Abdominal and Pelvic Pain
Zach Segui and Serkan Nur
Skin-Tone Fairness in Dermatology AI: Limits of Pretraining and Harmonization
Fayiz Sakhi Zada, Aryan Kansagara, Mohammad Areeb, Seung Yeon Hong, and Dr. Hicham Hallal
Subgroup False-Negative Rates and Overall Calibration in NHANES Chronic Disease Screening
Qiyu Luo and Zheyu Su
Hormone-Aware Prediction of Pain Medication Use in Women of Reproductive Age
Hadil Amleh, Olivia Burke, and Amal Siddiqi
Effects of Medical Image Anonymization on Fairness in Chest X-ray Classification
Andreea Bogdan, Anna Bogdan, Harkin Porter, and Dr. Rongxing Lu
Evaluating Bias in Machine Learning for Schizophrenia Diagnosis
Bhavleen Bansal, Aleena Ummad, Sameer Ahmad, and Hassaan Ahmed
Limits of Computational Modelling for Behavioural Neuroscience: Challenges for Animal Research
Anna Szoka, Christina Tran, Emma Dibra, Esther Kim, Faith Croskery, Jazmin Toor, and Jessica Karlovcec
Algorithmic Analysis of South Asian Visibility in Ribociclib Breast Cancer Trials
Sanika Chitre and Aditi Srinivas
Class Imbalance and False Inferences in Breast Cancer Spatial Transcriptomic Classification
Rabia Ahmed, Romina Daraei Baf, and Sabera Khan
Sleeping Beauty Misdiagnosed: Correcting Sex-Biased Inferences in AI Narcolepsy Type 1 Diagnosis
Emily Ma
Predicting and Classifying Older Adult Mobility Using Artificial Intelligence
Suheera Siddiqui, Sawdah Siddiqi, Lauren El Solakhy, Sania Khoso, and Chukwuebuka Prince Onyekere
Bias-Aware AMP Discovery: Mitigating False Positives in Generative Antimicrobial Models
Steven Hoang, Fatima Farhan, Gabriel Masutti, Jumana Al Khudhairy, Natalie Beshay, Sirine Jarrah, and Dr. Spandana Chereddy
Modelling Socioeconomic Bias and False Inferences in Mental Health Risk Prediction
Saba Halabisaz and Saba Rasooli
Winners
Winners of Canada’s National Big Data and AI Challenge
Quantitative Endometriosis Risk Assessment: Integrating Imaging and Biomarkers to Mitigate Clinical Bias
Areez Dhaliwal, Joy Oh, and Benjamin Nesan
Machine Learning Bias Using Globular Clusters
Ammar Mughal, Brianna Callisto, and Dr. Jeremy Webb
Two Ages, One Patient: Epigenetic Age and Equity in Cancer Survival Prediction
Ishika Rath, Claire Wang, Bella Ting, and Rubina Heng
Hormone-Aware Prediction of Pain Medication Use in Women of Reproductive Age
Hadil Amleh, Olivia Burke, and Amal Siddiqi
Sleeping Beauty Misdiagnosed: Correcting Sex-Biased Inferences in AI Narcolepsy Type 1 Diagnosis
Emily Ma
member profile image
Saeed Nusri
Head of RBC Calgary Innovation Lab & Senior Director @RBC Borealis
LinkedIn Icon
member profile image
K.M. Tahsin Hassan Rahit
Postdoctoral Associate | Cumming School of Medicine, Department of Oncology
LinkedIn Icon
member profile image
Li Shu
Postdoctoral Scholar
LinkedIn Icon
member profile image
Dr. Ashkan Ebadi
Senior Research Officer @National Research Council of Canada (NRC) | Adj. Prof. @UWaterloo | Aff. Prof. @Concordia | PhD, SMIEEE, FIAP | Data-Driven Solutions Consultant
LinkedIn Icon
member profile image
Dr. Mohsen Selseleh
Professor, School of Management, Faculty of Business, Creative Industries, and Culinary Arts
LinkedIn Icon
member profile image
Felix Kaechel
Technical Leader at Cisco's Innovation Labs
LinkedIn Icon
member profile image
Vivek Saahil
Strategy & Analytics at Pratt & Whitney Canada | McGill MMA
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Special Guests
Provides expertise and fosters connections with government academia, and industry to guide initiatives.
Honourable Corey Hogan
MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources
LinkedIn Icon
Maggie Chi
MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health
LinkedIn Icon
Monica Reagan
Manager, Environmental and Social Impact | Royal Bank of Canada
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Jinoj Titus
Senior Director, Enterprise Data Architecture, RBC | Inventor Wayne Cuervo , Director of DIO Americas, CISCO
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