PhD Student Augustine Farinola wins award for AI Innovation in ‘Build A Bridge' TMU competition

Image credit: Bridging Divides, Toronto Metropolitan University

We are pleased to share that Philosophy PhD student, Augustine Farinola, has received the Place, Infrastructure, Citizenship and Participation Award in the 2025/2026 Build a Bridge/Bridging Divides programme.

The award recognizes Augustine’s work on BridgeQuest, a RAG-powered (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) multi-chatbot application developed through a cross-institutional collaboration. Augustine shares this honour with team members Sean Nguyen and Shreya Dasoju who are both undergraduate students from Toronto Metropolitan University.

The project was developed during Augustine’s Bridging Divides Scholar Exchange Fellowship at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is now back at the University of Alberta, where he continues his doctoral research under the supervision of Professor Geoffrey Rockwell. His current work examines the ethical implications of artificial intelligence technologies and the algorithmic assessment of AI deployment, reflecting the department’s growing engagement with interdisciplinary research at the intersection of philosophy and technology.