CUIDS Distinguished Speaker Series
CUIDS Distinguished Lecture: AI Needs a Trust Layer: Is Blockchain the Answer?
The Carleton University Institute for Data Science (CUIDS) invites you to a Distinguished Lecture featuring Dr. Victoria Lemieux, Professor Emerita at The University of British Columbia.
Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Format: Hybrid
Location: Room 5345, Herzberg Laboratories
Online: Zoom (Join the lecture via Zoom)
AI Needs a Trust Layer: Is Blockchain the Answer?
Abstract
As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in research, government, and cultural institutions, urgent safety concerns are emerging around privacy, copyright, bias, opaque decision-making, data concentration, environmental sustainability, job precarity, and the loss of institutional control.
Archives offer a revealing setting in which to examine these tensions: they hold valuable information, yet much of it cannot be surrendered to external AI platforms. This talk explores whether blockchain technology can provide part of the missing trust infrastructure for AI.
Using Clio-X, a decentralized, privacy-preserving infrastructure for the ethical application of AI in archives, the talk will demonstrate how institutions can retain custody of sensitive data while enabling controlled computational analysis. The discussion maps blockchain capabilities—including provenance verification, immutable audit trails, access controls, smart contracts, decentralized governance, and community oversight—against five requirements for AI safety: robustness, transparency, controllability, alignment, and monitoring.
Rather than presenting blockchain as a cure-all, the talk critically examines where it adds value and where its limitations remain. Blockchain can strengthen accountability, auditability, provenance, trust, and coordinated governance. It cannot, by itself, solve hallucination, model interpretability, bias, semantic understanding, autonomous-system alignment, or frontier-AI containment.
The talk invites participants to reconsider AI safety not only as a problem of model design, but also as a challenge of infrastructure, institutional power, and governance. It argues that blockchain’s most credible contribution lies in enabling transparent rules, meaningful human control, and community participation across the AI lifecycle, making it one component of an architecture for trustworthy AI.
About the Speaker
Dr. Victoria Lemieux is Professor Emerita at The University of British Columbia’s Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems and an experienced academic, technology leader, and innovator whose work bridges archival science, artificial intelligence, blockchain, privacy, and data governance. She is the founder and co-lead of Blockchain@UBC, UBC’s multidisciplinary blockchain research cluster.
Her research examines risks to the availability of trustworthy records and the implications of those risks for transparency, financial stability, public accountability, and human rights. She contributes to international standards development through ISO Technical Committee 307 on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.
Dr. Lemieux earned her doctorate in Archival Studies from University College London in 2002 and has been a Certified Information Systems Security Professional since 2005. Her contributions have been recognized with the 2015 Emmett Leahy Award for outstanding contributions to records management, a 2015 World Bank Big Data Innovation Award, and the 2020 Blockchain Ecosystem Leadership Award. She was also named one of Canada’s Top 20 Women in IT Security in 2020 and has twice been recognized as a Sauder School of Business Distinguished Scholar.
She is the author and editor of award-winning articles and books, including Financial Analysis and Risk Management (2012), Building Trust in Information (2016), Building Decentralized Trust (2020), and Searching for Trust: Blockchain Technology in an Age of Disinformation (2022). Her scholarship brings archival science into conversation with information and AI governance, cybersecurity, blockchain, and risk management.
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- Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2026
- Time: 11:00 – 12:00 PM
- Format: Hybrid, In-Person Location: 5345 Herzberg Laboratories and Zoom (Join the lecture via Zoom)
- Moderator: Prof. Tracey Lauriault