Congratulations to Dr. Steve Liang — Upper Bound 2026

We are so glad to share some good news: Dr. Steve Liang, co-director of the UbiSensing & AI Lab, spoke at Upper Bound 2026 — one of Canada’s premier AI conferences and a completely sold-out, four-day gathering in Edmonton, hosted by the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii).

Canada’s Premier AI Gathering

Upper Bound has grown into the country’s flagship AI event. Amii designed and produces the conference, which began five years ago as a celebration of Alberta’s research legacy and now draws 8,000+ attendees, 250+ speakers, and 200+ sessions across four days (May 19–22, 2026). Amii announced the 2026 edition sold out ahead of its milestone fifth year — a sign of how much appetite there is to connect research, industry, policy, and the wider public around what AI can do next.

The program spans agentic AI, generative AI for business, governance, literacy, health, energy and the environment, and more. For our lab, it is especially meaningful to see geospatial and environmental intelligence represented on that national stage.

On Stage: Agentic AI for Near-Zero Methane Emissions

Steve presented on Stage 1 with the talk “Automating the Path to Near-Zero Methane Emissions with Agentic AI,” drawing on his work as Founder and Chief Science Officer at SensorUp and on the open standards research our group pursues at the University of Calgary.

The session framed typical methane operations as labor-intensive, expensive, slow to respond, and prone to costly mistakes — with pain points that included multiple data silos, no real-time visibility, no early warnings, no automation, complicated processes, ad hoc communication, and human errors. Steve’s core focus was shifting from static, passive monitoring toward proactive agentic workflows: autonomous agents that can work over real-time spatial and IoT sensor data to help teams track emissions-related events, narrow down what needs attention, and coordinate faster operational response — not only another dashboard.

Why this matters for our lab

At the UbiSensing & AI Lab, we care about moving AI out of the sandbox and into the physical world — where geospatial and sensor-web foundations meet real deployments. Steve’s talk was a public-facing example of that thread: agentic workflows over live spatial and IoT data, aimed at methane operations, not a slide-deck-only AI demo.

The standards side of the same story is EmissionML (Emission Event Modeling Language) — the open OGC ontology and data model for interoperable emissions data that Steve chairs and our group helps advance. EmissionML is still evolving and not yet finalized; draft materials stay on GitHub. That foundation is what makes agentic methane workflows trustworthy rather than brittle.

Closer to home, our DGGS-Q project is lab work in the same spirit: multi-agent, natural-language access to methane emission inventories indexed on a discrete global grid — the kind of geospatial AI orchestration the Upper Bound session pointed toward.

Proud of Steve

Taking the stage at Upper Bound means speaking to a packed room in a conference that has become where Canada imagines and builds its AI future. Steve brings the same clarity and conviction there that we see in the lab every day — linking standards, sensors, and AI to problems that matter on the ground.

Congratulations, Steve. We are proud of you and grateful to see this work shared with such a wide national audience.