Opening Conference
Artificial intelligence is already transforming healthcare, and mental health care is no exception. From enabling preliminary screenings and providing round-the-clock conversational support to extending care into communities where clinicians are scarce, AI has a clear capacity to expand the reach of mental health professionals. Yet this potential is matched by equally significant risks. As these tools move from promise to practice, they raise fundamental ethical and technical questions that cannot be ignored.
This opening conference kicks off the hackathon Championing AI for Good: Building Safer AI for Youth Mental Health, a week-long initiative co-organized by Mila, Bell, Buzz HPC and Kids Help Phone (KHP) to develop and stress-test AI safety solutions for youth-facing conversational systems.
Before participants dive into the technical work, the Opening Conference sets the stage by bringing together leading AI researchers, clinical experts, and voices from the ground to discuss the frameworks necessary to build AI that is not only powerful, but safe.
The event will feature expert presentations examining the benefits and limitations of AI in mental health, as well as the safety risks posed by current systems and the mitigation strategies being developed to address them.
- When: March 16, 2026, from 9 AM to 12 PM
- Where: Mila's Agora
This conference is open to the general public and can be attended either in person or virtually. In-person attendance is limited.
Hackathon | Championing AI for good: Building safer AI for youth mental health
Join a groundbreaking collaboration between Mila, Bell, Buzz HPC and Kids Help Phone on Canada's most comprehensive AI ecosystem, Bell AI Fabric. From March 16 to 23, 2026, we're uniting top AI minds with deep expertise in youth mental health to build innovative AI solutions that empower young Canadians to interact safely with conversational AI tools.
While conversational AI offers immense promise, it also carries risks, potentially amplifying psychological distress. This hackathon challenges you to use your voice, skills and lived experience to fortify the future of AI safety. We’re inviting Canada's brightest minds in guardrail training, prompt engineering and synthetic data to stress test and develop systems and guidelines to strengthen AI support for youth mental wellness.
- Your mission: Identify vulnerabilities and engineer robust defences—build the armour that keeps our youth safe—by diving deep into three critical areas: Adversarial stress-testing, logic hardening, and synthetic data augmentation.
- Expert evaluation: Your solutions will be judged by a distinguished panel of AI safety experts, clinical psychologists and UX professionals. They'll assess your work based on safety, user experience and data quality.
- Win big: Do your part to help save lives, compete for a share of CAD 10,000 in monetary prizes and get the inside track to an exclusive internship with the Mila AI Safety Studio.
Participation guidelines
Participation is open for individual or team registrations. All participants need to meet the following criteria, which will be verified upon registration and prior to awarding prizes:
- Age: Due to the sensitive nature of the materials, participants will be required to show proof of age 18+.
- Residence: All participants must reside in Canada.
- Team composition: Great solutions are born from diverse perspectives. We'll run a team-matching session to ensure every group has a balanced mix of technical and clinical expertise.
- Inclusion: We're seeking solutions for the unique Canadian context that engineer inclusive, multilingual safety layers by enhancing performance in English and Canadian French – with a nuanced understanding of regional idioms – and recognizing diverse cultural expressions to proactively eliminate systemic bias.
- Well-being and ethics: We prioritize participant well-being. Given the sensitive nature of this hackathon’s focus on mental health, participants will be presented with a disclaimer regarding potential triggers.
- Privacy first: Use only synthetic data. No real-world PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is allowed.
- Terms and conditions: Additional details, including specific instructions for the hackathon, IP and terms and conditions, will be provided once your registration is confirmed.
- Participation: The hackathon will be held virtually with the option to participate in-person at the Mila office in Montreal on March 16 and 23. Participants attending either or both of the in-person events should be aware that there may be filming and interviews taking place. No participant is required to take part in interviews, but they should be aware that they might be visible in the background.