We’re looking forward to welcoming some excellent speakers to our workshop on Mapping Digitial Humanitarianism this week. You can find the workshop programme on the event page and details of workshop organisers here. Below you’ll find a list of the speakers and their biographies.
Data and Governance
Dr Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London; Co-Founder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam and the médialab at Sciences Po, Paris. More about his work can be found here. He is on Twitter at @jwyg.
Dr Caroline Compton is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Australian Research Council-funded project ‘Data Science in Humanitarianism: Confronting Novel Law and Policy Challenges’. Caroline takes an interdisciplinary approach to questions of humanitarian practice, property relations, natural disaster, and climate change and adaptation. She has received an Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship from the Australian Government, and a Fox Fellowship to Yale University, and has been a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute of Philippine Culture at Ateneo de Manila University, a Visiting Researcher at the University of Coimbra. Prior to moving into academia, Caroline spent a number of years working on development projects in Vietnam. Caroline holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from the University of New South Wales, a Master of Education from the University of Technology, Sydney and a Juris Doctor (Hons) from the Australian National University. She is presently awaiting her doctoral results from the Australian National University.
Prof Fleur Johns is Professor and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Law at UNSW Sydney. Fleur studies patterns of governance on the global plane, employing an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the social sciences and humanities. Her current research focuses on changing modes of global relation emerging in the context of technological change. She is leading a 3-year Australian Research Council-funded project entitled ‘Data Science in Humanitarianism: Confronting Novel Law and Policy Challenges’ (with co-CI Wayne Wobcke, UNSW Computer Science and Caroline Compton, UNSW Law). Fleur has held visiting appointments in Europe, the UK and Canada and is a graduate of Melbourne University (BA, LLB(Hons)) and Harvard University (LLM, SJD; Menzies Scholar; Laylin Prize). In 2019-20, she will be a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton in the School of Social Sciences. Before her academic career, Fleur practised as a corporate lawyer in New York, specialising in international project finance.
Dr Ana Paula Camelo is a researcher at Center for Teaching and Research in Innovation (CEPI) – FGV Direito SP. Her research interests cover energy policy, sociology of risk, governance of emerging technologies and public engagement in sociotechnical controversies in the Global South. Currently, she leads the design and conduction of academic research on topics on the interface of technology, law, innovation and society (e.g. data protection and privacy laws, innovation policy). From 2015-2018, she was engaged with the Virtual Institute for Responsible Innovation (VIRI), based in the Arizona State University and currently she is part of the Research Group on Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion organized by the Institute of Technology and Society (ITS) of Rio de Janeiro and participate in activities of the global Network of Internet & Society Centers (NoC). Ana also acts as an associated researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Department at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), same institution where she conducted her PhD studies in Science and Technology Policy.
Dr Mirca Madianou is Reader in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London where she works on the social uses of communication technologies in a transnational and comparative context. Her research focuses on migration and humanitarian emergencies and their intersection with digital technology. She has directed two ESRC grants: Humanitarian Technologies and Migration, ICTS and transnational families which have led to several publications on the social consequences of new communication technologies among marginalised and migrant populations. Her current project investigates the role of digital innovation and data in the humanitarian sector. She is the author of Mediating the Nation: News, Audiences and the Politics of Identity and Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia (with D. Miller) as well as editor of Ethics of Media (with N. Couldry and A. Pinchevski).
Vitor Henrique Pinto Ido is a PhD Candidate in Law at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a researcher at the Center of Education and Innovation, FGV/SP. He currently works as researcher at the Development, Innovation and Intellectual Property Programme (DIIP) at the South Centre, an intergovernmental organization in Geneva for developing countries. His research focuses on the intersection between intellectual property rights and development, with a focus on indigenous peoples´ traditional knowledge, access to medicines and innovation and technology policies in the Global South. He holds a research master´s degree in Human Rights (2017), bachelor in Law (2014) and a bachelor in Social Sciences (2018) from the University of São Paulo.”
Applied Data
Dr Derek Groen is a Lecturer in Simulation and Modelling at Brunel University London and a Visiting Lecturer at University College London. He has a background in astrophysics (PhD at University of Amsterdam, 2010), blood flow and materials modelling (both as post-doc at UCL 2010-2015), and has a central expertise in building very large simulations that require supercomputers (his PhD software required four of them at the same time). Since his start as a lecturer at Brunel, Derek has focused on trying to predict the destinations of escaping refugees through simulation. As a result, he published a major paper in Scientific Reports together with his PhD student Diana Suleimenova and colleague David Bell, and is assembling a group of four Research Fellows to take this research to the next level, thanks to EU funding (in fact, two positions are open at time of writing). Speaking of that EU funding, Derek is PI for Brunel in two large Horizon 2020 projects that focus in part on refugee modelling, HiDALGO (www.hidalgo-project.eu) and VECMA (www.vecma.eu).
Allan Davids is an Economics PhD student and a member of the Financial Innovation Lab, both at the University of Cape Town. Allan’s research focuses on housing and household finance in an emerging market setting. He has industry experience working as a data scientist and continues to be actively involved in the public sector in South Africa on projects related to the use of large-scale geographic administrative and housing data for policymaking. Allan has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford and the Center for Real Estate Finance Research at NYU Stern. He is currently a visiting researcher at Imperial College Business School.
Dr William Derban is the Acting Head and Market Engagement Director for the Mobile for Humanitarian Innovation programme at the GSMA. The role entails working with mobile network operators and humanitarian organisations to find commercially sustainable solutions in complex humanitarian situations. Before joining the GSMA, he worked as the Director for Strategic Partnerships and E banking for Fidelity Bank Ghana. He was responsible for driving the banks financial inclusion agenda by setting up the first agent banking network in the country and developed and deployed several mobile linked financial products with MNOs in Ghana. Before then, William was the Head of Community Investment for Barclays Bank, responsible for Africa, Asia and the Middle East responsible for the banks financial inclusion and sustainability agenda in the region. William obtained a PhD focusing on Financial Inclusion from Nottingham Trent Business School and an MBA from Birmingham City University and first degree in Economics and Mathematics from University of Cape Coast in Ghana.
Data and Resilience
Innocent Maholi holds a Bsc. in Urban and Regional Planning from Ardhi University located in Dar es Salaam Tanzania. Innocent is a Deputy Country Manager working with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) in Tanzania and is an open-mapping guru and trainer dedicated in community building and humanitarian work. He has heavily engaged with communities under the Ramani Huria – a community mapping project for flood resilience in Dar es Salaam to improve Disaster and Risk Management in the city. Through his career, Innocent has deeply been interested and engaged in Geo (Spatial) and Open Source data for humanitarian responses.
Ian Coady is the Geospatial Advisor for the Department for International Development and is coordinating a number of programmes that use geospatial data and earth observation to support development outcomes. As well as this, he is also a volunteer for the charity MapAction, providing in-field geospatial support to disaster response and helping to get aid to the right place. Prior to joining DFID, Ian lead the geospatial policy and research at the Office for National Statistics as well as working in GIS roles within local government and archaeology.
Dr Maud Borie is a post-doctoral researcher and teaching fellow at King’s College London. working at the intersection between Human Geography and Science and Technology Studies. Maud’s research looks at the roles of diverse forms of knowledge and expertise for environmental and risk governance. Having conducted her PhD research on biodiversity governance, she currently works on resilience and disaster risk reduction. In particular she has been working on the GCRF funded project WhyDAR (Why we Disagree About Resilience) and on the EU-funded project PEARL (Preparing for Extreme and Rare Events in Coastal Regions).