Join us on 3/5 at the SI and IE research meetings for talks with Adam Siegal and Shaimaa Lazem

Adam Siegal, CEO and co-founder of Cultivate Labs, will speak at the Social Informatics meeting this Friday, March 5, at 10 am. Cultivate Labs builds crowdsourced forecasting and internal crowdfunding programs for private sector organizations, governments, and research institutions around the world. Adam has a degree in Political Science from Indiana University and before starting Cultivate, he founded Inkling, a Y Combinator (YC06) funded company, CityPosh, another Y Combinator (YC11) funded company, and worked at Accenture in the Accenture Technology Labs.

Shaimaa Lazem will speak at the Immersive Experiences meeting this Friday at 1 pm. Shaimaa Lazem is an Associate Research Professor at City for Scientific Research and Technological applications, Alexandria, Egypt. She earned her PhD in CS with a specialization in HCI at Virginia Tech, class of 2012. She then returned to her home country, Egypt. As HCI was not a well-known subject among Egyptian students, Shaimaa designed hands-on HCI short courses and trained 130+ students to create prototypes of technologies that serve the needs of rural Egyptian communities. Her research interests include participatory design, post-colonial computing, and decolonizing HCI. Her research projects include designing educational and heritage documentation technologies for the rural populations in Egypt. She is a Leaders-in-Innovation Fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering in London since 2018, and the co-founder of the ArabHCI community, which is an initiative that aims at recognising and promoting HCI research and education in Arab countries. She is the recipient of Google 2020 Award for Inclusion Research in partnership with Prof. Anicia Peters from the University of Namibia, where they are working to spark HCI education for African students and tech makers and focus on design for social justice.