The Peter Lewis AI chair at Ontario Tech University has been renewed for five years, bringing $500,000 in federal support to research on how people decide whether artificial intelligence can be trusted.
The Oshawa university announced the renewal on October 26. Lewis, a researcher in its Faculty of Business and Information Technology, holds the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.
The federal program’s fall 2026 recipient list independently confirms his renewal and records $500,000 for Ontario Tech. The appointment will support a second term running from 2026 to 2031.
Research asks when reliance on AI is justified
Lewis studies the relationship between intelligent systems and the people and communities using them. His work brings together computer science, psychology, sociology and ethics to examine both how AI behaves and how that behaviour affects trust.
The university says the next term will focus on three connected areas: helping people make informed trust decisions, enabling AI systems to assess their own limitations, and understanding how social context should influence automated decisions.
The first theme, described as trust empowerment, centres on clearer information about what a system can do, where it might fail and the circumstances in which relying on it makes sense. The second, reflective AI, concerns a system’s ability to assess its capabilities and the possible consequences of its actions.
The third theme examines social intelligence: how learned norms and changing circumstances can help an AI system select behaviour suited to the people and situation involved.
First term built research capacity in Durham
Lewis joined Ontario Tech as a Canada Research Chair in 2021. During his first term, he founded the university’s Trustworthy AI Lab and led the creation of the Mindful AI Research Institute, according to the university.
Ontario Tech reports that he secured approximately $2.5 million in research funding, trained 21 highly qualified personnel and produced 24 peer-reviewed publications during that period. These figures describe his first-term research record, not additional money included in the newly announced chair renewal.
His collaborators have included the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences, The Pamoja Institute and Meta. The university says those partnerships have supported work on accessible AI, fairness in mental-health applications, community connections and food insecurity.
Ontario Tech also credits his research with helping inform a federal standard on accessible and equitable AI. The renewal continues that research agenda; it is not an announcement of a new commercial product or an assurance that existing AI systems are free from bias.
Accessibility and uncertainty remain priorities
The Peter Lewis AI chair will continue to emphasize accessibility, fairness and the needs of equity-deserving groups, the university says. A central question is how people can make decisions about technology whose behaviour may not always be easy to understand, verify or predict.
Lewis said in the university announcement that evidence, transparency and frank discussion of failures and uncertainty are needed to help people decide when and how AI should be used.
