Anna Carter is a Research Fellow at Northumbria University she has extensive experience in designing technologies for local council regeneration programs, her work focuses on creating accessible digital experiences in a variety of contexts using human-centred methods and participatory design. She works on building Digital Civics research capacities of early career researchers as part of the EU funded DCitizens Programme and on digital civics, outdoor spaces and sense of place as part of the EPSRC funded Centre for Digital Citizens. 

Reem Talhouk is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design and Centre for International Development at Northumbria University. She is also the co-lead of the Design Feminisms Research Group that aims to explore the plurality of feminist research and design. Her research has explored ways through which participatory design and its outputs may generate decolonial counter-narratives within the humanitarian and global development technological space. She has led research, workshops and SIGs focused on Technology, Design and Migration.

Tetyana Vlasova is a project manager for DCitizens project. Her areas of interest are International Education, International Projects Activity, and the Bologna Process. She is an experienced project manager and having managed 12 Tempus/Erasmus funded by EU, 6 British Council projects, 1 academic project funded by the Office for Students, 1 educational project funded by the Department for Education, 2 HORIZON programme projects . She is currently employed at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle and managing HORIZON 2023 project (DCitizens) and coordinating activity of CCAI CDT project funded by UKRI.

Austin Toombs leads the Community-Computer Interaction Lab (C-CIL). He was previously an Assistant Professor at Purdue University and an external research collaborator with Facebook. His research interests center on the impact that digital technologies have on how communities are formed and maintained. He is particularly interested in how certain kinds of relationships between individuals within a community are encouraged while others are discouraged, and how various technologies are used to implicitly enforce these distinctions. How interpersonal relationships are sanctioned (in both senses of the word) plays a vital role in the inclusivity, welcomeness, and diversity of a community.

Colin M. Gray is an Associate Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington, where they are Director of the Human-Computer Interaction design (HCI/d) program. Their research focuses on the ways in which the pedagogy and practice of designers informs the development of design ability, particularly in relation to ethics, design knowledge, and learning experience. Colin's work crosses multiple disciplines, including human-computer interaction, instructional design and technology, law and policy, and design theory and education.

Paul Parsons is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University. His research is at the intersection of design, visualization, and cognition. He combines multiple human-centered approaches to investigate the nature of professional practice in sociotechnical settings and to design artifacts and experiences to improve such practice. Paul's current research projects focus on: design practice and design cognition relating to data visualization and user experience; macrocognition in complex sociotechnical settings, especially relating to data-driven decision making; and user experience for scientific cyberinfrastructure. 

Kyle Montague is an Associate Professor at Northumbria University and leads the NorSC Research Group. His research spans a breadth of topics and domains with the unifying vision - to address critical social problems and challenges by designing and configuring digital technologies that empower individuals and marginalised communities. More specifically, his work seeks to democratise access to the tools and processes by which we provision technologies and services that shape society.

Shaun is Professor of Social Computing and Head of the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at Northumbria University. His research lies at the boundaries between computing, design and the social sciences, and explores the use and significance of social media, and other collaborative and participatory digital services, in people’s lives. This includes a focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of new social platforms, applications and services as well as analysis of text, speech and image data. He was appointed the UK’s first Professor in Social Computing in 2011. He has conducted applied and cross-disciplinary work in areas including mental health and wellbeing, politics, activism, animal behaviour and sustainability. 

Pam Briggs work addresses issues of identity, trust and security in digital interaction and I’m particularly interested in exploring the experiences of those in more marginalised communities. I’m the Northumbria lead for the Centre for Digital Citizens, plus I’m a member of Northumbria’s Academic Centre for Excellence in Cybersecurity (ACE).

Hugo Nicolau is an Associate Professor in the University of Lisbon and researcher at the Interactive Technologies Institute / LARSyS. His research interests include HCI and Accessibility, focusing on the design, build, and study of computing technologies that enable positive social change. His work cuts across multiple technologies from mobile and IoT to social robots and artificial intelligence. His research methods extend mostly from the discipline of HCI and are informed by perspectives in Design Justice, Psychology, Sociology, and Disability Studies. Hugo is broadly interested in research that tackles ambitious interdisciplinary problems in areas such as education, health, and social inclusion.

Clara is a Reader in Digital social justice at the School of Computing’s Open Lab, with expertise in Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Civics, Human-Centre Design, Participatory Design, and co-creation. My research explores how the careful design of new and emergent technologies and socio-technical processes can help support democratic practices and advance equity and social justice in digital societies. Key research areas include, designing for social activism and social justice through co-production of digital services and digital social innovations; data-driven innovations to help explore systemic issues and shape policy; embedding social justice and public values in the design of socio-technical systems. I am also interested in the design of novel tools and processes to support Responsible Research and Innovation in Computing and civic-driven research commissioning processes. I am currently Co-Investigator on the EPSRC Centre for Digital Citizens – Next Stage Digital Economy Centre, where I contribute research on co-creation and algorithmic social justice.

Alessio Del Bue is a tenured senior researcher leading the PAVIS (Pattern Analysis and computer VISion) research line of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova, Italy. Previously, he was a researcher in the Institute for Systems and Robotics at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Lisbon, Portugal. Before that, he obtained my Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Lourdes Agapito in the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London.His current research interests are related to 3D scene understanding from multi-modal input (images, depth, audio) to support the development of assistive Artificial Intelligence systems. He is co-author of more than 100 scientific publications, in refereed journals and international conferences, member of the technical committees of important computer vision conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, BMVC, etc.), and he serves as an associate editor of Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision and Image Understanding journals. Finally, Dr. Del Bue is an IEEE and ELLIS member in the recently formed Genoa unit.

Sarah Rüller is a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 - Media of Cooperation and PhD candidate at the Chair of Information Systems and New Media, University of Siegen. Her interests lie broadly in ethnography in HCI, participatory action research, speculative design, and emerging technologies in non-urban areas. Sarah's current research addresses social media censorship in the context of Palestine and Israel.

Konstantin Aal studied Business Informatics at the University of Siegen, and is since 2012 an active employee at the department for Business Informatics and New Media of the University of Siegen. Earlier, he was an active student assistant at the come_IN project and wrote, in the mainframe of this project, his major dissertation about the social platform come_NET and its use by children. His focus points are actually the research of collapse prevention in elder people (iStoppFalls), as well as the use of social media during the Arabien Spring.

Ana Henriques is currently a junior researcher at the Interactive Technologies Institute / LARSyS, at the University of Lisbon. Ana has focused their research at the intersections of ethics, feminist HCI and digital civics. They are developing the concept of community-led ethics as a process of feminist ethical frameworking for digital civics in the context of the DCitizens project.

Débora is an activist, social designer, and Amazonian Decolonial thinker. She is currently a research associate at University of Siegen, where her research is about how communities experience and deal with economic and technological pressures in areas of post-conflict and social instability. Her PhD dissertation explored how peripheral communities in the Amazon rainforest make use of digital technology and connect to global supply chains and infrastructures of globalised capitalism. She is also interested in a critical perspective on technology production, which would include the entire technology “production chain” from its material origins like mining in the Amazon rainforest to the data centers where data is stored or manipulated.

Denise Lengyel is an Innovation Fellow at the Centre for Digital Citizens within Open Lab, exploring the 'Ageless' citizen. My work is centered around the exploration of arts-based and creative research methods including text-, image- and perfomance-based methods such as (visual) storytelling, drawing and dance. My interest is in arts as an embodied way of experiencing, reflecting, meaning-making, knowing and learning for both the researcher and participants over the course of the whole research process. I am keen on exploring how this can be supported through technology and how it can enrich our means of expression, our exchange with others and self-reflection.

Tiffany Knearem is a UXR at Google on the Material Design team. She is interested in AI applications for design tooling to support product designer-developer collaboration and unlock creativity. For her PhD her primary research focus was on understanding and enabling community innovation through information and communication technologies, with a dissertation focus on community-based care during COVID-19.

Lucy has a scientific background and 20 years’ experience of teaching and communicating science and impact to a wide variety of audiences and in many different formats. She offers an impact perspective on research work and provides support and advice on: planning impact into your research; explaining specialist topics to non-specialist audiences; and communicating to different internal and external stakeholders.