Simulation - Innovation - Action

Simuvaction© is an opportunity for 20-40 university students from across the world to actively engage, practice, and contribute to the ethical development of AI. Students, coming from different fields, universities, backgrounds, and countries, train for 6-8 weeks through a common course in which they receive guidance from academic and professional partners.

Specifically, students write, debate, and vote on one of the most challenging AI quandaries: How can we ensure that AI, designed to help address inequities does not, in fact, increase such disparities?

The project fuses graduate student minds, the world of academia, the private and non-profit sectors, and community organizations engaged in issues of equity and disparity. It provides an opportunity for all participants to meet, discuss, and act around a common goal and project. 

Simuvaction© AI 2025 Information

2025 PROGRAM TOPICS

SIMULATION: AI, the Universal Right to Work, and the “AI-enhanced worker”: an Equitable Future for All?

If AI devices and implants are to be used to boost productivity and create “AI-enhanced workers” in a context of uneven internet connectivity and resource scarcity, what actionable recommendations should be made to mitigate the economic and social disparities on the global job market?  

SYMPOSIUM: De/re-Skilling with AI – Why bother with learning if AI? What is the role, the point of humans?  

If AI can help us compute, plan and organize, predict, and prevent, read, take notes, synthesize, write emails or speeches, explain and translate, draw, create art and visuals, evaluate, and monitor activities, why bother learning?  What is the role, the point of humans?  What skills and characters for our next future workers?

Dates: January 20, 2025 - April 10, 2025

  • Virtual sessions begin January 20, 2025 at kick-off meeting via Zoom
  • In-person session April 6-10 at University Laval Quebec, Quebec City, Quebec, which includes coaching and awards.
  • Simuvaction D-Day on April 9
  • Conference on April 10 on "De/Re-skilling with AI"

Location: Via Zoom from January 20 to April 5 and in Quebec City from April 6 to April 10, 2025 

Cost: Students are responsible for their airfare to Quebec (Note: it is less expensive routed through Montreal) and meals, with the exception of D-Day and the conference (April 9 & 10). Accommodation is free (room shared for two or three students by gender). No tuition fees. 

Register For the Simuvaction D-Day and Conference Here

See more detailed information about the 2025 program  

The Simuvaction© Ecosystem

The Simuvaction© exercise creates its own organic ecosystem through multi-layered objectives. Beyond the academic exercise for the students, the program strengthens connections between academic, economic, institutional, and non-governmental organizations. AI and Healthcare expert-led conferences, contacts with the Embassies of assigned delegations, coaching with real businesses and NGOs (for the journalist and lobbyist teams), are integral parts of the course and therefore, an opportunity for the colleges and communities to cross their interests, develop their networks and foresee further collaboration.

 

This ecosystem empowers:

Students to practice active learning, which:

  • fills the gap between their studies and the professional world.
  • ​offers them an opportunity to discover themselves, out of their comfort zone, on a professional stage.
  • enhances the links between knowledge, know-how, and interpersonal skills, through multi-disciplinary teamwork.

Academic institutions to consider new pathways for collaboration, through:

  • the preparation and the simulation game between different academic partners.
  • strengthening and expanding such partnerships in Higher Education.

Communities to creativelyengage with each other, while:

  • strengthening connections between academic, economic, institutional, and non-profit actors.
  • providing an opportunity to work through the different facets of an issue by participating in conferences with experts in the field, by creating contacts with the Consulates of the represented delegation, and by coaching from lobbyists-teams with businesses, associations, and NGOs.

New ways to develop international thinking, and:

  • The project aims to reflect the Think Globally, Act Locally We consider that “local problems have global connections and implications, and these problems cannot be solved by individuals in a single country” (see NAIR Indira, WHITEHEAD Michele, Models of Global Learning, 2017, v).
  • Thinking globally requires both a sense of identification and enhanced creativity in problem-solving to truly think and engage in global problems.  

Highlights from the 2024 Simuvaction© Program

 A Student's Perspective

For more student testimonials please visit videos of Clara, Daphne, Michael, and Katie.