Graduate Student Symposium

The Graduate Student Symposium will be held during the main conference, Thursday, 28 May 2026. It will provide an opportunity for Master’s and PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives with their peers and with a panel of established researchers in Artificial Intelligence. The symposium will allow the attendees to develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research.

This year's graduate symposium will have the following sessions:

A selection of four (4) oral presentations from the accepted submissions.
A poster session during the main conference for all accepted submissions.

Graduate Student Symposium Program

Thursday, 28 May 2026, 9:00-11:00

Poster Session

Room: James Douglas Area, Academic Quadrangle

306 Execution Aware A* for Cross Exchange Stablecoin Arbitrage Kevin Litvin (Simon Fraser University) ✉

331 On Efficient Computational Methods for Transformer-Based Symbolic Music Generation Felix Schön (TU Wien) ✉, Hans Tompits (TU Wien)

332 A Generalizable AI-Driven Decision Support System for Infectious Disease Modeling Marzieh Soltani (University of Guelph) ✉, Rozita Dara (University of Guelph), Shayan Sharif (University of Guelph)

336 Fed-Universe: A Semantic-Geometric-Topological-Human (S-G-T-H) Stack for Negotiated Alignment in Federated Systems Ting Xu (University of Calgary) ✉, Henry Leung (University of Calgary)

344 Clinical Trial Recommendation with LLM-Based Query Generation and Graph-Based Pairwise Re-ranking Mehrnaz Senobari-vayghan (University of Calgary) ✉

323 Bridging the Multilingual Emotion Gap: Unified Modeling and Evaluation of Transformers, Hybrid Architectures, and Large Language Models for Low-Resource African Languages Tewodros Achamaleh Bizuneh (Instituto Politécnico Nacional) ✉, Tolulope Abiola Olalekan (Instituto Politécnico Nacional)

328 Pure Leveled CKKS for CNN Inference: The Finite Limb Depth Bound and ResNet-20 Stress-Test Mohamed Khattab (Acadia University) ✉

335 Reclaiming the Loop: From the Consensus Trap to Pluralistic Data Annotation Sheza Munir (University of Toronto) ✉

175 Measuring and Closing the Retrieval Gap in Financial Question Answering Amine Kobeissi (Université de Montréal) ✉, Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal)

191 ASHC: Quantum-Inspired Hierarchical Clustering for Priority-Aware Coverage Path Planning Venkata Siva Kumar Margapuri (Villanova University) ✉, Garik Kazanjian (Villanova University)

246 Multi-Dimensional Model Integrity and Responsibility Assessment Index and Scoring Framework Phuc Truong Loc Nguyen (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) ✉, Thanh Hung Do (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen (University of New Brunswick), Hung Cao (University of New Brunswick)

271 RotIE: Rotary Informational Embeddings for Symbolic Music Generation Felix Schön (TU Wien) ✉, Hans Tompits (TU Wien)

308 Next-Generation AI Vegetation Analytics: Low-Cost PSRI Translation from RGB and NDVI for Precision Crop Monitoring Jacob Serafin (University of Guelph) ✉, Yuvraj Gill (University of Prince Edward Island), Lokesh Muthiah (University of Guelph), Dylan Lewis (University of Guelph), Gurjit Randhawa (University of Guelph), Aitazaz Farooque (University of Prince Edward Island)

130 STRIDE Moves Market Sentiment Sujay Rittikar (The University of Winnipeg) ✉, Sheela Ramanna (The University of Winnipeg)

185 Cluster-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hybrid Retrieval for Faithful Medical Report Summarization Kiarash Torabizadeh (Bishops University) ✉, Rachid Hedjam (Bishops University), Mebarka Allaoui (Bishops University), Bessam Abdulrazak (University of Sherbrooke)

74 Fairness Audits of Institutional Risk Models in Deployed ML Pipelines Kelly McConvey (University of Toronto) ✉, Dipto Das (University of Toronto), Maya Ghai (University of Toronto), Angelina Zhai (University of Toronto), Rosa Lee (University of Toronto), Shion Guha (University of Toronto)

Oral presentations, 14:00 - 15:00

Room: Diamond Family Auditorium

In addition to oral presentation, authors of the following five GSS papers also present their posters in the GSS poster session.

306 Execution Aware A* for Cross Exchange Stablecoin Arbitrage Kevin Litvin (Simon Fraser University) ✉

331 On Efficient Computational Methods for Transformer-Based Symbolic Music Generation Felix Schön (TU Wien) ✉, Hans Tompits (TU Wien)

336 Fed-Universe: A Semantic-Geometric-Topological-Human (S-G-T-H) Stack for Negotiated Alignment in Federated Systems Ting Xu (University of Calgary) ✉, Henry Leung (University of Calgary)

344 Clinical Trial Recommendation with LLM-Based Query Generation and Graph-Based Pairwise Re-ranking Mehrnaz Senobari-vayghan (University of Calgary) ✉

Call for abstracts

The 39^th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence invites graduate students to submit their research on ongoing thesis work from all areas of Artificial Intelligence for possible inclusion in the AI 2026 Graduate Student Symposium (GSS) and the AI 2026 proceedings published in PMLR open access online format. We welcome the following types of submissions based on unpublished or previously published work related to your thesis.

Abstract (2 pages)
Extended abstracts (4 pages)

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: March 3^rd, 2026 (11:59 pm PT)

Author notification: April 6^th, 2026

Final papers due: April 20^th, 2026

Graduate Student Symposium: Date to be announced shortly

Submission guidelines

All submissions must be written in English and should clearly state the research problem, the proposed solution and approach and the description of the progress to date, including significant results. Program committee members will review each submission. Extended abstract submissions will be considered for oral presentations and will be selected based on clarity of the submission, difficulty of the problem, novelty of the solution, and quality of the research.

We welcome the following types of submissions based on unpublished or previously published work related to your thesis.

Abstract (2 pages) – poster presentation
Extended abstracts (4 pages) – considered for an oral presentation

The references can use an additional 2 pages. Only extended abstracts will be considered for an oral presentation. The authors should use the provided proceedings template for LaTeX to prepare their submissions. The “abstract” section can be omitted for the two-page abstract submission. All submissions should be anonymized.

The lead author of each accepted submission is required to present the work in-person at the symposium. The authors must agree to this requirement prior to submitting their work for review. Upon acceptance, the authors and their thesis supervisor(s) should sign a copyright form to publish the work in the Canadian AI proceedings. Program committee members will review each submission. Acceptance to symposium is based on clarity of the submission, significance of the problem, novelty of the solution, and quality of the research, and evidence of promise such as peer-reviewed papers or technical reports.

All students are encouraged to attend and participate in the Symposium, whether or not they are the first author or if they have accepted papers in the symposium.

The link to submit your paper is https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CanadianAI2026/Track/3/Submission/Create

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

Poster Presentation

The poster should be printed. The poster size should be 24x36 inches, landscape orientation. Download the template here.

Program chairs

Tara Azin

Department of Cognitive Science, Carleton University

Ritu Chaturvedi

School of Computer Science, University of Guelph

Program committee

Borna Tavasoli, Purdue University

Christie Ezeife, University of Windsor

Jeremy Foxcroft, University of Guelph

Kruthika Shantha Murthy, University of Windsor

Mahreen Nasir, Algoma University

Masih Zaamari, Carleton University

Mohammad Havaledar, University of Guelph

Mosab Rezaei, Northern Illinois University

Ricardo Jarrin, University of Guelph

Sonal Allana, University of Guelph

FAQ

Q1. Do I have to be a graduate student to submit an abstract?

A1. The first author, or a solo author, has to be a graduate student. An undergraduate student can be a co-author if he/she has helped with experiments. Note that the abstract has to be presented by the graduate student.

Q2. Can I submit an abstract of my completed dissertation?

A2. Yes, this is an acceptable submission. The symposium aims to help students to define and make progress on their thesis. Therefore, work-in-progress with experimental validations can also be submitted.

Q3. We are two graduate students and want to submit one abstract for our two research projects. Is this OK?

A3. We encourage you to submit separate abstracts. If a joint project is better explained via one abstract, then you can try to make the case in your cover letter.

Q4. I have an abstract accepted by GSS. Can I have some financial support to attend GSS?

A4. We encourage you to apply for GSS funding in your cover letter. Presenting students will compete for (partial) funding of their GSS expenses. You can also apply for financial support for the conference volunteers. Depending on how much funding we can secure, we will try to provide (partial) travel funding for selected accepted abstracts. There is no need to apply for this directly and all accepted abstract will be automatically considered. You can also apply for financial support to serve as Canadian AI volunteers.

Q5. I do not have an abstract accepted by GSS. Can I apply for financial support to attend?

A5. We are working to keep the cost of attending the GSS as low as possible (see the Canadian AI conference website). Financial support is designed for students whose abstracts have been accepted. You can also apply for financial support for the conference volunteers.

Graduate Student Symposium