I am a Commonwealth Shared Scholar for Science and Technology for Development 2021-22 from Bangladesh. I have recently finished my master’s in Digital Media and Culture offered by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick under this scholarship scheme. At CIM, I have obtained various technical skills including practical Python and R applications for data crawling, wrangling, analysis, and visualizations and applied various digital methods including social network analysis, text, and image analysis and learnt the basics of critical data science, human-computer interaction, behavioral and participatory design, ethics and bias of AI, privacy and surveillance, digital labor and political economy, and other relevant issues to understand 'the digital' through my independent projects and research.

My dissertation at CIM critically evaluates the global AI for Climate Action practice and investigates how it responds to the Global South context and stakeholders by combining interdisciplinary methods such as network science and critical discourse analysis. By bringing the question of power in the forefront, this study argues that AI for Climate Action will not be a useful practice, rather it would be problematic if the countries from the Global South cannot access the critical digital infrastructures required for participating in AI innovation for climate action due to the manifestations of the Global North centric corporate interests.

For my PhD, I intend to have a deeper understanding around the AI imaginaries in the Global South contexts. To make myself research ready in this field, I have deliberately engaged myself in the AI policy-making landscape of the UK government and beyond. I had been selected through a blind-reviewing process for an intensive five-day training course to understand the ethical value of public engagement with data science and AI by The Alan Turing Institute. At the same time, I have also been participating in a weekly reading group of University of Toronto where we regularly discuss the recent global scholarship around critical digital issues. I co-organized a workshop at the Mozilla Festival on Decolonial AI from that group and presented my research at a workshop on 'Big Data and AI from the Global South' at FAccT conference this year. I have reviewed papers on explainable AI for CHI 2022 Late Breaking Works. I have also been engaging myself into the decolonizing and diversifying working group of my department and worked as an organizing committee member of the departmental academic conference on critical digital issues and chaired on a session titled 'AI, Machines and the Social'.

Before coming to Warwick, I worked as a Senior Research Associate at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, one of the largest development think tanks in Bangladesh. I developed a nationally important policy document, Strategy Primer for the Future of Digital in Bangladesh, under the supervision of my research fellow at BIGD with supports from Digital Pathways at Oxford. In April 2021, the State Minister of the ICT Division of Bangladesh launched the document in presence of Dr Stefan Dercon, the Oxford professor and Development Policy Advisor to the FCDO. The Strategy Primer carries concrete action plans to implement during the next five years for scaling up the IT industry and gig economy of Bangladesh, strengthening the startup ecosystem, and digitally linking the country’s informal and formal sector. At BIGD, I was also involved in multiple studies to understand the state and privately established technological infrastructures from a policy and governance point of view, including a SOAS-ACE and BIGD consortium project where we applied ACE's analytical framework to explain anomalies in digital media advertising in Bangladesh. I also co-led BIGD’s Covid-19 rapid research regarding Digital Finance situation in the country to facilitate Social Safety Net in 2020 and did some preliminary conceptual work for the International Conference on Digitalization, Institutions and Economics: New Frontiers in Service Delivery which was held on June 2022.

Starting from 2016 as an undergrad student, I have four years of ethnographic experience with the Internally Displaced Populations from Dhaka’s slums to hard to reach climate vulnerable areas in Bangladesh and the Rohingya Refugees of the world’s largest humanitarian camps at the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh. In 2019, for a short period, I worked as a Consultant at BRAC for its Rohingya Research and Advocacy team where I provided research, documentation and editorial support and contributed to building concepts to facilitate strong coordinated advocacy initiatives around the Rohingya Crisis. I have been collaborating with several academics and experts in Human-Computer Interaction and ICTs for Development field independently to publish in prestigious national and international venues. In 2020, I co-authored a paper in the ICT4D conference, in which we demonstrated how displaced populations in the global south infrastructure their hope and solidarity using the theories from development sociology and philosophy and argued that aspiration-based technology design is essential for their empowerment. In 2021, I co-authored another article for ACM’s Interaction magazine where we advocated for building sensitivity in human centered technology design around people's unique situations particularly considering the struggles of migrant people.

My bachelor’s degree is from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). I co-founded two digital media projects during my undergrad. First, Humans of BUET, one of the most influential social media platforms from Dhaka, which from its inception worked as a strong catalyst in setting the trend of positive storytelling in this digital age of preaching hate. Second, ItsOkay, a digital platform supported by UNDP and ICT Division that connected the urban youth struggling with mental health issues with the relevant experts. At BUET, my major was Civil Engineering with a concentration on Environmental Engineering. In my undergrad thesis, I proposed a framework for building up a model to improve accessibility to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and billing services in Dhaka’s slums by combining engineering solutions along with community involvement and a substantial shift in public policy. Six months later to my graduation in 2018, I joined WaterAid Bangladesh and worked in the landscape of policy and advocacy in WASH sector for national level influencing for a year. In my role as a focal for WaterAid’s SDG 6 and Climate Change advocacy, I supported communication activities and contributed to research design, project development and WaterAid's rapid COVID-19 Response. For detail of my development practice, experience click here.