Organizers List
Laleh Nourian is a third-year PhD student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research centers on the intersection of accessible design and culture, with a particular focus on non-Western cultures. She aims to support designers from non-Western cultural backgrounds by examining how accessibility guidelines may contrast with designers’ cultural preferences as well as, uncovering solutions for improving the process of accessible design more culturally friendly for designers from different cultures.
Yulia Goldenberg is a Ph.D. researcher in the Software and Information Systems Engineering Department at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her PhD study aims to build a framework to help define the optimal direction of User Interface elements in BiDirectional (e.g., Arabic or Hebrew) interfaces. She was included in a Google PhD fellowship for her innovative research. Yulia is a member of the Standards Institution of Israel, where she works on making Bidirectional interfaces more intuitive and accessible for their users. She has vast experience in user experience design across various industries and teaching numerous courses on HCI topics. Her work was published in key HCI venues, including CHI 21, 22, and 23 conferences.
Muhammad Adamu is a Senior Research Associate for Imagination Lancaster Digital Good SIG at Lancaster University, UK. He is strongly associated with the “African perspective” in Human-computer interaction research and innovation. His current research focuses on establishing the “AI in/from Africa” theme via a sociotechnical analysis of the AI alignment problem. He received his PhD from Lancaster University, UK.
Vikram Kamath Cannanure is a postdoctoral researcher from Saarland University. He finished his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on building and evaluating appropriate systems for Global South contexts. He has led "HCI across borders," HCIxB, a regular CHI workshop supporting early career researchers' from different parts of the world foray into HCI for the past five years.
Catherine Holloway is the Academic Director of Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub) and a Professor of Interaction Design and Innovation at UCL’s Interactions Centre (UCLIC).
Cathy also co-leads the £50m UKAid’s flagship assistive technology program AT2030, which has been 100\% match-funded, reaching 29 million people across 41 countries. Within AT2030, she has led innovation ecosystem development for assistive technology, including establishing Africa’s first assistive technology accelerator (innovate Now), developing an impact fund, and supporting ventures to enter global markets. Cathy leads work for the Asian Development Bank on financial inclusion and has previously worked with the World Bank on inclusive education whilst maintaining a technical research portfolio developing novel assistive technologies and researching innovation strategies and approaches. Cathy contributed to the WHO and UNICEF’s first Global Report on Assistive Technology as an author and via the Expert Advisory Panel and sits on the WHO Technical Advisory Group for Assistive Technology. Cathy has co-led GDI Hub at UCL to be the first WHO Collaborating Centre on Assistive Technology. Cathy’s team at UCL also develops novel technologies for disabled people in the UK and globally.
Neha Kumar is an Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where she works at the intersection of human-centered computing and global development. Her research focuses on the investigation and design of infrastructures of care, looking at topics around health care, care work, and planetary care. Much of her research has been located in the Global South. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and holds Master’s degrees in both Computer Science and Education from Stanford University.
Katharina Reinecke is a Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science \& Engineering at the University of Washington where she researches how people's interaction with digital technology varies depending on their cultural, geographic, or demographic background and how technology can be biased against people who are unlike the small groups of people that created it. Katharina is co-founder of LabintheWild, a virtual lab for conducting large-scale behavioral studies with diverse participants. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Zurich and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
Garreth W. Tigwell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His research primarily focuses on making digital content, services, and systems more accessible to disabled people by understanding and addressing challenges faced by novice and expert digital creators (e.g., mobile app and website designers). Recently, he has been exploring the role of culture in accessible design, as well as adaptable design for customized experiences to improve specific accessibility and usability user needs in both common scenarios (e.g., when using mobile apps) and novel scenarios (e.g., interaction on everyday textured surfaces when using mixed reality). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Dundee.