The Canadian Engineering Education Association’s 2026 conference opens next week in Moncton, New Brunswick, bringing Canada’s engineering education community to l’Université de Moncton at a moment when universities are being forced to rethink not only what future engineers should know, but how they should learn.
Running June 13 to 17, CEEA-ACÉG 2026 is organized under the theme “Shaping the Future: Creativity and Innovation in Engineering Education.” The annual conference brings together professors, educators, researchers, industry professionals, students, and institutional leaders focused on the future of engineering teaching, curriculum design, accreditation, professional skills, sustainability, ethics, equity, and emerging technologies.
This year’s location is also notable. Canada’s engineering education community will gather in New Brunswick, with the main conference hosted at l’Université de Moncton and related events taking place in the city. For a national conference focused on creativity, innovation, and the training of tomorrow’s engineers, Moncton offers a different setting from the country’s larger engineering hubs — one that puts smaller institutions, regional capacity, bilingual education, and Atlantic Canada’s role in the national skills conversation closer to the centre of the discussion.
Artificial intelligence is clearly part of that conversation.
One of the keynote speakers is Moulay Akhloufi, a professor of computer science at the Université de Moncton, where he leads the Perception, Robotics and Intelligent Machines research group and holds the Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare. His work spans artificial intelligence, computer vision, and intelligent robotic systems, and he has authored more than 200 scientific papers.
The second listed keynote speaker is Kyle Tousignant, an associate professor in civil and resource engineering at Dalhousie University whose work focuses on steel structures. Tousignant also brings a teaching profile to the event, having received Dalhousie’s Sexton Award for Teaching Excellence in 2023.
AI is also built directly into the professional development agenda. The CEEA-ACÉG Institute for Engineering Teaching is offering focused workshops on generative AI in engineering education, including sessions on AI workflows for engineering educators and on designing courses and assessments that are strengthened rather than defeated by AI. Topics include course design, assessment, critical evaluation of AI outputs, academic integrity, equity, privacy, ethics, and the move from basic AI literacy toward AI fluency.
That framing matters. Engineering schools are not simply deciding whether students may use generative AI tools. They are being pushed to decide what counts as authentic engineering learning in a world where drafting, coding, modelling, documentation, tutoring, feedback, and assessment can all be mediated by AI systems.
For Canadian engineering programs, the stakes are practical. Engineering education is tied to accreditation, public safety, professional licensure, industry readiness, and national innovation capacity. If AI changes how engineers learn, it may also change how institutions evaluate competence, how instructors design assignments, and how graduates enter workplaces where AI-enabled tools are becoming part of the technical environment.
CEEA-ACÉG 2026 appears positioned around that transition: not as a standalone AI conference, but as a teaching and engineering education gathering where AI has become one of the central pressures reshaping the field.
The broader conference program also includes themes such as creativity and innovation, small engineering schools, student assessment, accreditation, curriculum design, sustainability, equity and inclusion, professional skills, industry engagement, and research methods. Sponsors listed for the event include Engineers Canada, the University of Manitoba, UBC, McGill Engineering, Western Engineering, and the University of Calgary.
The result is a conference that reflects a larger shift in Canadian post-secondary education. AI is no longer an external technology issue arriving from the software sector. It is now a classroom issue, an assessment issue, a workforce issue, and an institutional strategy issue. In Moncton next week, Canada’s engineering educators will be discussing what that means for the engineers they are preparing now.
