ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Andy Dearden (point of contact for communication) is a participatory designer with a background in
human computer interaction. His recent work has investigated tools to support distributed forms of
participation in design and the design of ICT systems to support ‘social action’ in voluntary and
community groups, NGOs and ‘civil society’.
Michael L. Best is Assistant Professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and Adjunct Assistant Professor with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech where he also is a faculty of the GVU Center. He is also a Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Michael is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Information Technologies and International Development published by the MIT Press. Michael is a frequent consultant to the World Bank, ITU, and USAID. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has served as Director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab..
Susan Dray is a consultant with Dray & Associates, Inc. and has worked with HCI professionals in so called
“developing” countries to help them build their own communities, as well as to help them to adapt
user-centered design approaches to make them useful in economic development projects. In addition,
she works with clients to help them understand the conditions in these countries so they can design
more appropriate ICT systems and products for the “developing” world.
Ann Light is chair of trustees for The Fiankoma Project (www.fiankoma.org), a charity promoting cultural exchange through ICT by linking people in the UK and Ghana and establishing collaborative media projects. She is a research fellow at Queen Mary University of London, exploring people's understanding of and response to digital networks to inform interactive systems design, in Chile and India as well as the UK. Ann is also editor of usabilityNews.com.
John Thomas is a Research Staff Member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center. He has worked in the general area of Human-Computer Interaction for 30 years and has over 150 papers, book chapters, and invited presentations. He has also served as Workshop Chair and general Co-Chair for CHI and co-organized and co-led more than a dozen workshops at CHI, CSCW, and ECSCW including two on cross-cultural issues in HCI.
Marshini Chetty is a PhD student in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She received her Masters and Bachelors degrees in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2005 and 2002. Her general research interest is to study and design technologies in ways that take into account the broader socio-technical and cultural context of use. Domains of interest include technologies for the home and design methods for international development.
Mathew Kam is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) affiliated with the Berkeley Institute of Design. His dissertation focuses on mobile games on cellphones that aim to make English language learning more accessible to underprivileged children in the developing world. His previous work in "technology and international development" includes microfinance, computer donations and literacy-related issues.
Andrew Maunder is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His research interests include designing mobile interactive systems for users in the developing world, exploring 'UCD4Dev' and tackling developing world design challenges.
Nithya Sambasivan is a PhD. student at the University of California, Irvine in the department of Information and Computer Sciences. She earned her master's in Human-computer Interaction from Georgia Tech and her bachelor's in E.C.E. from Anna University in India. She is broadly interested in the intersection of mobile and ubiquitous systems and human-centered computing, in the developing region context.
Nuray Arkin
Celeste Buckhalter
Shanks Krishnan
Andrew Maunder