The Speakers

Anicia Peters is one of the field's leaders spearheading bringing women into HCI in African computer science programs and decolonizing HCI methods around the world. Based in Namibia, and until most recently, an academic teaching HCI, Peters received her Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology at the Polytechnic of Namibia and her MSc in Human Computer Interaction from Iowa State University. She was awarded an International Fulbright Science and Technology Award, a Schlumberger Faculty for the Future Women in Science fellowship and a Google Anita Borg Scholarship to continue her studies and she received her PhD in HCI in 2014.

She has been a lecturer at the School of Information Technology, Software Engineering Department at Polytechnic of Namibia as well as working for the government implementing integrated financial management systems and interning in Silicon Valley at Intuit. She was the first Namibian to serve as Design of the Faculty at the Namibia University of Science and Technology[1] and has served as both an Associate Professor and as the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research Innovation and Development at the University of Namibia. She is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the National Commission on Research, Science and Technology (NCRST) of Namibia.

Kush R. Varshney was born in Syracuse, New York in 1982. He received the B.S. degree (magna cum laude) in electrical and computer engineering with honors from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 2004. He received the S.M. degree in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in 2010, both in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. While at MIT, he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

Dr. Varshney is an IBM Fellow based at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he directs Human-Centered Trustworthy AI research. He was a visiting scientist at IBM Research - Africa, Nairobi, Kenya in 2019. He was the founding co-director of the IBM Science for Social Good initiative from 2015-2023. He applies data science and predictive analytics to human capital management, healthcare, olfaction, computational creativity, public affairs, international development, and algorithmic fairness, which has led to the Extraordinary IBM Research Technical Accomplishment for contributions to workforce innovation and enterprise transformation, and IBM Corporate Technical Awards for Trustworthy AI and for AI-Powered Employee Journey.

He and his team created several well-known open-source toolkits, including AI Fairness 360, AI Explainability 360, Uncertainty Quantification 360, and AI FactSheets 360, as well as the Granite Guardian model family. AI Fairness 360 has been recognized by the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center as a tech spotlight runner-up and by the Falling Walls Science Symposium as a winning science and innovation management breakthrough.

He conducts academic research on the theory and methods of trustworthy machine learning. His work has been recognized through paper awards at the Fusion 2009, SOLI 2013, KDD 2014, and SDM 2015 conferences and the 2019 Computing Community Consortium / Schmidt Futures Computer Science for Social Good White Paper Competition. He independently-published a book entitled 'Trustworthy Machine Learning' in 2022, available at http://www.trustworthymachinelearning.com. He is a fellow of the IEEE.

Personal website: https://krvarshney.github.io