📢 I am hiring a postdoc to work with me on human-AI interaction and health equity
@EmoryUniversity
. Exciting opportunity to work on community-centered research, and join Atlanta's vibrant health and HCI ecosystem!
📢 I am recruiting PhD students and postdocs starting Fall 2024!
Join me at the CARE Lab (Collective Action & Research for Equity)
@EmoryUniversity
where we study and design data/AI-driven systems for equity in care work.
Read more here:
Some more happy news! 📢
Excited to start as an Asst Professor in Biomedical Informatics
@EmoryUniversity
this Fall as part of the AI.Humanity initiative! 🎉🎊
Such a privilege to be at my dream place for doing public/global health work & to join the growing HCI group at Emory!
Excited to share that my paper with
@nehakumar
on analyzing discourse on AI for frontline health (and Social Good) has been conditionally accepted to
#CHI2021
! This was the fruit of many conversations and revisions ✍️✍️ - so grateful for the positive feedback ❤️
📢 I am hiring a postdoc to work with me on human-AI interaction and health equity
@EmoryUniversity
. Looking for folks passionate about community-centered research on AI systems in health settings!
📢 I am recruiting PhD students and postdocs starting Fall 2024!
Join me at the CARE Lab (Collective Action & Research for Equity)
@EmoryUniversity
where we study and design data/AI-driven systems for equity in care work.
Read more here:
My
#CHI2021
paper w/
@nehakumar
, "AI in Global Health: The View from the Front Lines," uncovers the 'streetlight effect' across AI initiatives in global health, with stakeholders centering data-driven approaches without regard for ground realities.
1/n
Citation practices are a form of power.
When you are talking about topics that have been extensively studied in the Global South by Global South researchers and don't cite any of that work or acknowledge those dialogues,
Hi folks, I will be at
#CSCW2023
this week! Looking forward to reconnecting, making new friends, and presenting our latest work.
I am also recruiting students and postdocs, so feel free to reach out if you are interested in
@emory_csi
. We are also hiring faculty at all levels.
Excited to be joining the crowd at
#CHI2022
! Would love to connect with folks interested in human-centered AI, the future of care work, and ruminating on it all from feminist and postcolonial perspectives!
HCI has long studied reproductive health & intimate wellbeing with women, but how do we engage *men* on this topic?💑
Come find out at our talk today with 3(!) copresenters at
#CHI2023
(9am in room X11). We promise fascinating media content on relationships, fertility, & humor!
Being an Indian Muslim immigrant scholar in the US, doing research/work in India, with family in the middle east, means constantly confronting hostile borders and dealing with a curious sense of an outsider looking in...
Opened twitter to this!
So excited and honored to be part of this wonderful group! Grateful to all the people who have been kind and generous to me over the years (esp
@nehakumar
, colleagues, friends, family, ASHAs in Delhi, and the
@MakerGhat
community!❤️)
Congratulations to the new Foley Scholars — Ceara Byrne,
@azraism
and
@kous2v
— and the GVU Distinguished Master’s Student, Georgianna “Blue” Lin. Read about the work of all the finalists in advancing computing technology for our daily lives.
Thrilled by this recognition, both for my research & nonprofit work! ❤️
This is really a collective result---with the incredible
@MakerGhat
team, the Tandem lab led by
@nehakumar
at
@GeorgiaTech
, & communities we've engaged with---health workers, educators, students, & more!!
Such a lovely Eid gift---to be featured by
@GeorgiaTech
, where it all started! So grateful to the
@MakerGhat
team, teachers, students, mentors, friends, and family for their love and support! ❤️❤️❤️
An amazing honor for
@azraism
being named to
@Forbes
30 Under 30 for Social Impact in Asia! Her nonprofit, MakerGhat, provides makerspaces and resources to prepare youth in India for the workforce. You make us proud Azra!
#WeCanDoThat
🐝
We are running a study at
@GeorgiaTech
and
@IIITDelhi
to understand how the portrayal of men's fertility in Hindi media has influenced men's association with their bodies and sexual health.
We invite Indian-origin men to fill out a 10-minute survey:
I will be at the Tuesday 4.30pm session on Health Information to talk about our paper on "Public Health Calls for/with AI: An Ethnographic Perspective," written with
@divy93t
Neha Madhiwalla and
@nehakumar
. This work also received an honorable mention award ❤️
@syardi
@nehakumar
does this at Georgia Tech in her course on ICTs and development---looking at tech designed for diverse domains and critically interrogating the "impact" that these have using diverse theoretical lenses.
And the learning is frequently not to build :)
Great to see women taking the lead, but can we please move beyond tying a woman's worth to her contribution to her family? 😢
Radical idea - Let's invest in women and sexual and gender minorities because they are part of our society too?
Investing in women is good for everyone. Because when you invest in a woman, she invests back in her family, her children, and the society.
#WomenEmpowerment
So much food for thought from the conversations at
#CHI2022
! Grateful for comrades, old and new, working in solidarity to build more just futures for our communities! ❤️
A primer for white scholars looking for resources that are non-western:
Don't search for "non-western", you will find little save from a white perspective. Look for specific settings and cultures: Indian, Nigerian, Palestinian etc (and the diverse contexts within these).
I wish I had taken more pride in text and media I was exposed to in an Indian, Muslim, Urdu/Hindi-speaking household when in college. Instead, I was embarrassed that I had never read work by white men.
Being introduced to brown women writers was life changing in so many ways.
HIGHLY recommend listening to the recorded panel to anyone interested in decoloniality, and to all researchers from the Global South. The conversations were grounded in personal and professional experiences and absolutely 🔥.
If you are interested in a conversation about Decolonizing Learning Spaces for Sociotechnical Research & Design, come on and join our panel. It's happening in an hour :) in the context of
@ACM_CSCW
workshops' programming.
Eid Mubarak! Praying for strength to recover from the losses that we have suffered at home, peace and justice for the Palestinian people, and respite from the raging pandemic across the globe.
This is the most sombre Eid I've had, which is a reminder of my privilege.
Excited for this
#CSCW
Workshop on care work that I'm co-organizing with brilliant scholars! Events and movements in the last year have underscored the need to reimagine our systems to center care for ourselves and each other.
Join the conversation!
Join us at the
#CSCW2021
workshop to explore “The Future of Care Work” We welcome all types of submissions & perspectives on technology design and development, care practice, community organizing, and policy, using the form below. Submit by Sept 16th:
I recently interacted with someone who thought that getting students to make things for fun was not impactful. This was about students from rural or urban low-income households in India.
Here's why I think that is dismissive, and why 'fun' is important in education. (1/n)
At MakerGhat (shared by
@Adi_Vish
),
College guy: We should build an app for this and use sensors.
School girl: Why is your solution always an app?
Guy: You don't understand, tech is powerful.
Girl: Yes, but you don't need it to solve everything 🙄.
From the mouths of babes.
@math_rachel
@ruchowdh
Personally, not a fan of such surveillance tools. There are safer, cost-effective alternatives that don't alienate marginalized groups.
e.g. many HIV patients in India have stopped accessing ART therapy since their care was linked to their Aadhaar ID:
Grateful to have completed this milestone, and for my wonderful committee of
@nehakumar
,
@ZeguraEllen
, Rosa Arriaga, and Mike Best who gave me such encouraging and helpful feedback! ❤️❤️❤️
Congratulations to
@azraism
and
@_karthik_bhat
who successfully completed their PhD qualifiers this week, all in the midst of you-know-what (I confess I feel joyous and liberated as though it was me taking those exams😓)! Yay!!
As a tech worker, your volunteering does not have to utilize your tech skills. Tech does not define you!
There is so much more you can offer—your voice, care, shelter, resources, verified information...
If a girl wants to change the world and has the support and resources to do so, she will change the world.
Coding is merely a tool. Let's highlight the women leveraging this resource to create better futures, rather than talking about coding being "empowering."
This dialogue series by
@IndiaWgh
is excellent! Highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding frontline health work in India. It offers perspectives from multiple stakeholders, including grassroots ASHA unions, which are frequently left out of conversations.
Dialogue Series: Amplifying the engagement of Female Frontline Health Workers in India’s COVID-19 Response.
@IndiaWgh
will advocate more open policy dialogues on the challenges of women health workers and developing a collective action plan 🙌
#COVID5050
ICTD/HCI4D is one of the few fields in computing where there have been extensive conversations about doing 'good' and power differentials, analysis of failures, studying of 'marginality', and long-term community engagements which have resulted in sustainable organizations!
Discovered that my best friend from third grade is in a class with me (totally unplanned) and now we'll be working on the same team (totally planned!).
Life comes full circle ❤️
...you are either showing a lack of awareness of that research or a conscious decision to not align with those researchers. Both of which are problematic. Esp when Global South researchers have to do the labor of engaging with research in the Global North to get work accepted.
I've been thinking a lot recently about who we choose to show solidarity with, and have noticed how we tend to gravitate towards and support the same people.
Somewhat late resolution but my goal for the year: building more bridges through understanding and solidarity.
Helpful list of SOME topics extensively studied in HCI4D: access and infrastructure, agriculture, education, health, gender, entertainment, accessibility, politics, religion, finance...
@nehakumar
and
@nicki_dell
have a paper with more details:
Tomorrow is the deadline for submissions to the
#CSCW2021
workshop on "The Future of Care Work: Towards a Radical Politics of Care in CSCW Research and Practice."
Feel free to DM if you have questions or need an extension!
What would the world look like if we centered care and care workers in design? Join us at the
#CSCW2021
workshop on “The Future of Care Work” to explore! Fill out this form by Sept 16th to attend: [1/5]
For
#IWD2020
we are lifting up the women who came before, who stand beside us and who will come after us. We invite you to tell us who you celebrate. Keep this going by nominating a woman who inspires you because
#WeRiseByLiftingOthers
👭👭
Working with undergrads who are energetic and truly enthusiastic about research is such a refreshing change from the pervasive cynicism and exhaustion of academics 🙂😍 (esp during covid times...)
Powerful work. My movements in India tend to be highly functional and orchestrated to avoid the male gaze. But what if women just "hung around" public spaces like men do?
One of us, Shilpa Phadke has a paper looking at fun in feminist organising. Titled: Defending Frivolous Fun: Feminist Acts of Claiming Public Spaces in South Asia.
It engages with three movements
@BlankNoise
@girlsatdhabas
and the whyloiter movement
#Fun
We offer design considerations for AI systems designed for frontline health, and social good more broadly, contributing lessons learned for research/practice in HCI, ICTD, AI, and Global Health.
You can read our blog post summarizing the paper: 4/n
As surreal as it seeing a conference operate in the midst of COVID and violence, and one of the largest religious festivals in the world...
I can't describe how healing it has been to reconnect with people you haven't seen in a while but just...get it.
ASHA workers stage protest near Freedom Park in Bengaluru. They are demanding a monthly honorarium of Rs 12,000 over Rs 4,000 that they are currently being paid. Their other demands include regular health checkups, provision of face masks, sanitizers, gloves and PPE kits.
Sharing a job opening for a product designer at Plio, an edtech company based in India: . You'll get to work with a really great group of people who truly care about education and student experiences!
@dalmiaman
Please nominate, ESPECIALLY peers who are women, BIPOC, or identify as part of a minoritized group, and are less visible and/or less likely to self-promote.
(you can also self-nominate!)
.
@sigchi
friends, there's got to be ONE person you know who should be on this list: . Please do the kindness of putting in a nomination for that person (and maybe two). It's 2020 after all! Apply: . Deadline's this Friday!
The photos of the crowd at the Republic day celebrations in Shaheen Bagh are incredible! My uncle and aunt took their kids out, decked in saffron, green, and white. With the Indian flag like war paint on their cheeks! 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳
The last few months have been stressful, but also a huge learning opportunity. I've also been blown away by the outpouring of support & love throughout the process.
Grateful to so so many people—especially
@nehakumar
, the tandem lab, my committee, family, and partner
@Adi_Vish
.
After having quite the week, grateful for these delicate and gorgeous flowers that sprouted after six months of care. Reminding me that life can be beautiful ❤️🌺.
A feeling compounded by witnessing a whole lot of speaking for Indian Muslims (especially women) in academic and journalist circles while dealing with the pain of my own voice being policed by border control, but pushing myself to be grateful for others' activism.
Latest trigger: unsolicited remarks and advice in response to my (Hindu) friend's anonymous post for recommendations of Indian Muslim therapists, so I can get the help I need to deal with the pain that comes with border crossings.
Just being feels like a radical act some days.
Also - you do us a disservice when you make assumptions about this body of literature and the reflexivity of the researchers. Many of us grapple with our own complicity in reproducing structures of power.
We far too often romanticize the agriculture sector in India. Almost half of those laboring in the fields are unpaid and underpaid women. Yet, "many women are not officially recognised as farmers."
Scholars from backgrounds that have been systemically excluded from academia (across race, gender, caste, class, ability, and more) are especially encouraged to apply. Please reach out if the mission of the lab strongly resonates with you!
Reaching this point took a village! So grateful for friends and family who remained patient and supportive, wonderful collaborators across India and the US, and health workers and organizations doing essential care work that I get to witness.
Very excited for what comes next! 😊
If you're an undergrad, grad
#student
in
#India
stressed about exams, applications, online classrooms or literally anything else & need someone to talk to, run your ideas by — I'd be happy to help.
Pls DM.
I'm a PhD scholar. I work on AI Ethics. My major is Philosophy. (1/2)
The deadline for applying to this
#CSCW
workshop on care work is coming up on Thursday (Sept 16)! Fill out this Google form to join us!
More details on submissions:
Submissions for this
#CSCW21
workshop are due Sept 16, in just a few days! Please join us in reimagining systems to center caring labor. Submission formats are flexible:
The "mobile phones lead to poverty alleviation/empowerment" discourse (esp for women and those on the margins) is so problematic. Our lab's extensive work in this space (
@nehakumar
,
@avakaya_annam
, my own), and that of many others in ICTD highlights the complexities.
“It’s quite obvious that we should stop training radiologists,”
- Geoffrey Hinton, 2016.
“radiologists should be worried about their jobs”
- Andrew Ng, 2018.
2019: "... Clinically Meaningful Failures in Machine Learning for Medical Imaging"
lol
Over the next few months, I look forward to recharging and (re)connecting with folks to see how we can work together, in a world where our care infrastructures are crumbling even as data work and "AI" become pervasive.
DM/email me if you'd like to chat!
We may not always be vocal about it (beyond a section on reflexivity in a paper).
And for some of us, what matters is that we 'do the work' from whatever position of power we occupy.
#CallForProposals
We are excited to announce our National
#Gender
#Fellowships
on Gender & the Digital Economy!
If you're a researcher from India wanting to explore the challenges & future of women's work in the
#DigitalEconomy
, apply NOW!
Details:
And as we think of alternatives, here's a shout out to the incredible work on community networks/platforms taking place in the global south - e.g.
@GramVaani
@CGNet_Swara
@awaazde
The producers of The Social Dilemma brought some serious and valid concerns about the impact of social media platforms to a broad Netflix audience. BUT… 🧵
(this is just my narrow POV as someone in this field, I'm sure there are other perspectives! Was prompted by yet another paper that doesn't cite any research from the Global South. 🙃)
Yes! I am so fortunate to have been patiently guided during my undergrad at
@GeorgiaTech
. Never had a professor refuse to engage with me, even if they were from a completely different field or were super busy. It makes a huge difference!
I overheard PhD folk subtly mocking undergraduate students, please don't do this. Don't forget that we all started somewhere. Undergraduates are the future, so treat them like it. Bring them into the conversation, help them feel respected & valued as people & as researchers.
"“When we look at data we must remember that we are also looking at people. And when we manipulate data we think about the fact that we could be manipulating people.”
"
#data
are the reflections of ... people’s lives, not disembodied things... We have to treat data with the kind of moral care that is appropriate for something so intimate and personal" well said,
@ShannonVallor
#AIethics
#privacy
"Mispronunciation is a matter of limited tongues. Dispronunciation is a matter of limited hearts. For as long as I can remember, I have had to navigate around the shortcomings of both organs."
I can definitely relate,
@AnandWrites
.
So excited to share that
@MakerGhat
is now hiring! We are looking for people passionate about transforming how we view learning in India, and nurturing a culture of hands-on learning and making among youth.
JDs:
Apply now:
Watched
@kentarotoyama
's talk from the
#ML4D
workshop at NeurIPS 2019, and I'm blown away by how he so simply breaks down what it means to be doing (and more often, not doing) "development" for a tech audience.
I will be at the Tuesday 4.30pm session on Health Information to talk about our paper on "Public Health Calls for/with AI: An Ethnographic Perspective," written with
@divy93t
Neha Madhiwalla and
@nehakumar
. This work also received an honorable mention award ❤️
Eid Mubarak!
Today is Eid-ul-Adha, the Big Eid, Bakrid, the Islamic festival of sacrifice.
Today we not only celebrate what we have but remember and support those who don't.
Why is it that we constantly need to be reminded of the risk to "us" to think about the "developing world"?
Even with the regulatory issues, glad that many countries are relying on their own infrastructures than a flawed global supply chain.
A failure to vaccinate the developing world won’t just lead to more deaths. It will cause a raft of economic, social, and health effects—not just in the nations affected, but throughout the rest of the world.
2019 has been inspiring for all its activism.
But for me, the most powerful movement has been the anti-NRC & CAA protests led by women at Jamia and AMU, which have been simultaneously heartbreaking and healing.
(1/n)
When designing with vulnerable groups, what are the implications of centering on their strengths rather than on their needs? To explore this question, join us at our
#CSCW2020
workshop! Just send us a 300-word abstract or a position paper here [] by 10/01
Underpaid, undervalued, and overworked. Only posed to become worse as we move towards data-driven systems. I wonder what the value is of the data they collect/provide? I imagine it's a lot 🙂.
The poorest women in the world subsidize global health to the tune of $1 trillion dollars with their underpaid & unpaid work — including as community health workers. On Tuesday join us online for this important global conversation with colleagues who are fighting to change this.
Looking for a mentor for a college student in Mumbai interested in pursuing a career in animation. He has had a difficult but fascinating life, and is incredibly resilient and entrepreneurial. I promise that you will learn as much as him through your interactions!
These kinds of comparisons of oppression make me really uncomfortable. Why are we trying to define who is more oppressed?
You can have different kinds of marginalization exist simultaneously. Black ≠ Muslim ≠ Dalit.
Who are India's 'blacks'? For decades Hindu Dalits held an indisputable claim to be that group. But it is time to acknowledge that Muslims have taken their place.
My latest column:
Ravish Kumar of NDTV takes up the issue of
#ASHA
workers, based on our 16 state survey with
@article14
which talks of how states are cutting their incentives and delayed pay.
reports here:
1.
2.
3.
I will also be co-presenting with
@divy93t
on the development of machine learning datasets in public health, and the conflicts that emerge across actors in trying to make data "good" for ML.
w/
@nehakumar
@alexhanna
Pratyush (IITM) & Nithya (Google).
Sometimes I type out a tweet that says what I really think, and then delete it because I'm not ready to share it with the world (or the world isn't ready for it!).
@MakerGhat
and collaborators are looking to hire a Research Associate proficient in written Kannada on a two-month contract basis, to support with the monitoring and evaluation of an education program. To apply, please send your CV to makerghat
@gmail
.com
The first deadline for our workshop at
#CSCW2020
on operationalizing assets-based design is coming up tomorrow! We have a stellar list of organizers from academia and industry, led by
@marisolv
and
@gautamaakash
.
How can we design technology from a vision of strengths (or assets) rather than needs? What are the implications of this approach? We'll explore these questions at our
#CSCW2020
workshop on operationalizing an assets-based design. This Sunday, Aug, 23 is our first deadline.
Yes! My own research with
@nehakumar
has uncovered the burden posed by such opaque data collection systems on frontline workers, who would rather spend that time on care provision.
An important piece for public policy.
Frontline workers have often raised the issues of excessive bureaucratic paper work- collection of various identifying documents, etc. that often prevent women from availing timely benefits.
Low-tech doesn't have to mean poor design! High-tech can also mean high costs, high energy consumption, and a distraction from core UX/UI principles. Meet users where they're at :)
After releasing Gameboy, my staff came to me with a grim expression: "There’s a new handheld on the market similar to ours." The first thing I asked was: "Is it a color screen or monochrome?" He said it was color, and I reassured him, Then we’re fine.
Heartbreaking. This happens frequently when working with underserved communities in the Global South.
Do not fool yourself into thinking that you are doing participatory work, until you engage with what the community is saying and going through, and respond to their struggles.
Indigenous elder slams ‘hollow and tokenistic’ consultation by Sidewalk Labs—“It was just shocking that there was kind of a blatant disregard for all of the work that we did..They just wanted to check off a box that says, ‘We did Indigenous consultation.’”