Join Continuing Education for a FREE series of bold conversations for people choosing hope and meeting the world’s challenges with purpose. With so many reasons for despair, where are we finding real cause for hope?
The Hope in Action Speaker Series from the University of St. Michael’s College Continuing Education brings together innovators, leaders, alumni, and faculty who are choosing courage over cynicism. Through dynamic conversations, this series explores how hope becomes action in sustainability, social impact, spirituality, leadership, education, the arts, and beyond.
Hope is not wishful thinking. It is the decision to engage with our world’s most urgent challenges and work toward meaningful change , from climate and culture to how we live our values in our workplaces and communities.
Join us for bold ideas, practical inspiration, and living examples of radical hope in our time. Come to be inspired. Leave ready to act.
Rethinking creativity, work, and agency in the age of generative artificial intelligence
We are living through a moment where tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and GitHub Copilot are no longer futuristic curiosities, they are genuine collaborators in our writing, coding, designing, and decision-making. This talk steps back from the hype to ask a more human question: what happens to creativity, work, and personal agency when machines can generate ideas, images, and solutions at scale?
Technology and privacy lawyer Maleeha Akhtar will explore how these systems blur lines we once took for granted between author and tool, employee and employer, automation and autonomy. We’ll consider what it means to create in an age of algorithmic assistance, how power shifts when data becomes raw material for intelligence, and how law can protect not just innovation, but dignity, fairness, and meaningful human choice.
Ultimately, this session is about ensuring that as AI grows more capable, we remain intentional about the kind of society, and the kind of human role within it, we want to build.
Maleeha Akhtar
Maleeha Akhtar is a technology and privacy legal counsel at Volkswagen Group of Canada, where she navigates the complex intersection of law, technology, and ethics. Over the past decade, she’s advised organizations from Manulife to high-growth tech companies on AI governance, privacy law, and responsible technology deployment. Her career began at the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic, contributing to Supreme Court interventions on digital rights and researching the legal implications of technology.
Anshula Chowdhury
Anshula Chowdhury is a technology founder and full-stack AI builder who designs production systems for complex, regulated environments where getting it wrong has real consequences. With 14 years of experience leading companies, raising capital, and shipping ML and data infrastructure tools, her work focuses on Ethical AI (including research on bias detection in Knowledge Augmented Generation architectures), social impact measurement, and innovation policy. She approaches AI with both technical depth and healthy skepticism, using it as a rigorous professional tool rather than unquestioned automation. Anshula is the Lead Instructor for the Social Impact Professional Certificate at the University of St. Michael’s College Continuing Education and also teaches and researches at the University of Toronto, while writing a science fiction trilogy exploring consciousness, colonialism, and AI.
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