Payal Arora
Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of FemLab, a feminist futures of work initiative and the InclusiveAI Lab, a debiasing data initiative. She is a leading digital anthropologist with two decades of user experiences in the Global South to help shape inclusive AI enabled designs and policies. She is the author of award-winning books including ‘The Next Billion Users’ with Harvard Press. Forbes called her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’ 150 international media outlets have covered her work including The BBC, Financial Times, WIRED, and The Economist. She sits on several advisory boards including for the UN EGOV, LIRNE-Asia, and UNICEF-UNESCO. Her new book ‘From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech” is out with MIT Press. She is Indian, American, and Irish, and currently lives in Amsterdam.
Read more about Payal Arora’s keynote: Building Inclusive Tech with the Global South
Rob Kitchin
Rob Kitchin is a professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. His research examines the production of digital geographies and his present ERC-funded project (2022-27) is ‘Data Stories: Telling Stories About and With Planning and Property Data’. Through the projects such as the All-Island Research Observatory and the Digital Repository of Ireland he has undertaken data projects with a wide variety of state, civil society and business organisations over the past 25 years. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 37 academic books and (co)author of over 200 articles and book chapters, and he has delivered over 300 invited talks at conferences and universities. He an editor of Dialogues on Digital Society and has been an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography, and Social and Cultural Geography, and co-editor-in-chief of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. He is a recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.
Read more about Rob Kitchin’s keynote: Performing Critical Data Studies from the Inside: Working with Government to Change Data Regimes