Articles from:May 2025

• Ontario wines set to shine at Cuvée Grand Tasting

  Wednesday, May 07, 2025 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE – MAY 7, 2025 – R0057

  Barb Tatarnic has been a champion of Ontario wines for decades, but this year, the organizer of the largest celebration of VQA products is feeling extra patriotic.

  “Ontario wines are amongst the best in the world, and we are going all in to prove it,” says Tatarnic, who is overseeing the Cuvée Grand Tasting on Saturday, May 24 at the Holiday Inn and Suites in St. Catharines.

  Hosted by Brock University’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute (CCOVI), the Grand Tasting offers industry professionals and wine enthusiasts a taste of local wine and culinary excellence.

  The evening will include a curated selection of vintages from Ontario’s top winemakers, 10 live cooking stations featuring gourmet foods and live music from AudioworX.

  Those wanting to explore the Niagara wine region can also take advantage of the Cuvée En Route Passport program that welcomes guests to visit select wineries for tastings from Friday, May 23 to Sunday, May 25.

  “Cuvée is a celebration of excellence in VQA winemaking, and it has been for years,” says Tatarnic, CCOVI’s Manager of Professional Studies and Outreach.

  She says events like Cuvée support Ontario’s world-class grape and wine industry and the hardworking individuals who have cultivated it over the years, which is critical given the current economic and political climate.

  “Now, more than ever, ‘Made in Canada’ and ‘Buy Local’ are top of mind, so we are shouting it from the rooftops to continue to support our local winemakers and wineries,” Tatarnic says.

  She points to a report by Wine Growers Ontario that states the grape and wine industry supports more than 22,300 full-time equivalent jobs in Ontario.

  “Those numbers are outstanding but imagine what we can do if we all focus on supporting local products,” she says. “We want to be part of a long-term effort that puts homegrown products front and centre and supports the people who live, go to school and work in Niagara’s wine region.”

  Proceeds from Cuvée support scholarships for students in Brock’s Applied Grape and Wine Science (OEVI) program as well as industry-driven grape and wine research.

  “Brock’s Applied Grape and Wine Science program is the only program of its kind in Canada, providing expert and dedicated professionals to wineries and vineyards from B.C. to Ontario’s growing regions and into the burgeoning scenes in Quebec and the Maritimes,” says CCOVI Director Debbie Inglis.

  Supporting the event means that people are directly supporting wineries and vineyards in Ontario and across the country, she says.

  Tickets to the Grand Tasting — with reduced pricing options available for groups of six or more — and Cuvée En Route are available through the Cuvée website.

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

   *Sarah Ackles, Communications Specialist, Brock University [email protected] or 289-241-548

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  Categories: Media releases

• AI expert aims to assess heart failure risk ‘at the click of a button’

  Thursday, May 01, 2025 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE – MAY 1, 2025 – R0056

  A moment of profound loss set Blessing Ogbuokiri on a research journey that could change, and perhaps even save, people’s lives.

  After his mother passed due to a heart issue, the Brock University Assistant Professor of Computer Science was inspired to research the use of artificial intelligence to support others facing similar health challenges.

  Ogbuokiri is developing and evaluating a machine learning model that could potentially assess whether older heart patients are likely to be admitted to hospital or die because of heart failure.

  “I’m not a medical doctor, but I feel I can contribute to proffering a solution that potentially prevents heart failure using my knowledge of artificial intelligence,” says the Director of Brock’s Responsible and Applied Machine Learning Laboratory (RAML Lab).

  He and his student research team have received funding from Brock University’s new Black Scholar Research Grant for their work.

  “It is particularly fitting that this grant is supporting Dr. Ogbuokiri in pursuing a project informed by his personal history and so incredibly valuable to Niagara’s aging population,” says Acting Vice-President, Research Michelle McGinn. “His enthusiasm for helping patients combined with his technical expertise and his commitment to honouring the memory of his mother embody the spirit of the Black Scholar Research Grant.”

  Ogbuokiri and his team are training a machine learning model to make associations between a range of variables based on health data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. These include medical history, smoking status, physical activity level, socioeconomic status and the presence of chronic conditions like diabetes.

  “When we have trained it and it’s smart enough to recognize all these patterns, the model can give us a prediction and say, for example, there’s a likelihood this person has a 50 per cent chance of suffering heart failure and being admitted to hospital,” says Ogbuokiri.

  He says the team aims to create a tool that patients and health-care professionals can use to assess heart failure risk “at the click of a button.”

  This knowledge could motivate patients to make healthy lifestyle changes, such as exercising or quitting smoking, he says, or help health-care professionals take proactive measures to prevent the health system from being overwhelmed with large numbers of admissions at once.

  Ogbuokiri says his model could also improve access to early interventions for patients from Black and equity-seeking communities, who are disproportionately affected by heart failure and can face biases and other barriers to receiving health care.

  In health-care models, this may take the form of systematically underpredicting risk for certain populations, such as Black or low-income patients, leading to disparities in access to timely interventions or treatments.

  These same stereotypes and harmful prejudices can be embedded into machine learning models during the training process, resulting in unequal opportunities, distorted information and other negative impacts.

  Ogbuokiri says the researchers are working to avoid and mitigate biases in their model by “applying bias mitigation techniques during data preprocessing and evaluating model fairness using metrics to ensure equitable performance across demographic groups.”

   

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  *Sarah Ackles, Communications Specialist, Brock University [email protected] or 289-241-5483

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  Categories: Media releases