Caroline Kabaria

(African Population and Health Research Center)

Dr Kabaria is a Research Scientist with expertise in Geoinformatics (GIS), Remote Sensing, Spatial Modelling and will be working with other researchers at the APHRC to develop methodological frameworks to integrate spatial evaluation in estimating the impacts of interventions, policy regulations and social trends with a spatial dimension.

Dr Kabaria holds a PhD (2016) specializing in Spatial Epidemiology from the Open University, UK. Her research focused on mapping and understanding changing malaria transmission patterns within urban settings in Africa. Prior to joining APHRC, Dr Kabaria was a Post-Doctoral researcher at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme evaluating within spatial frameworks, the factors that influence disease transmission, the application of population and urbanization mapping for disease burden estimation as well as evaluating the impact of control interventions on transmission.

Joao Porto De Albuquerque

(University of Glasgow)

Professor Porto de Albuquerque is Professor in Urban Analytics at Urban Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow and Deputy Director of the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC), where he leads the theme on "Urban Sustainability and Participation". Professor Porto de Albuquerque has a dual background in Computer Science and Social Sciences (University of Campinas, Brazil and Technical University of Dortmund, Germany) and works interdisciplinary as a digital human geographer combining geographic information science, human-centric computing, and development/sustainability studies. He is currently leading a research programme centred around the empowerment of vulnerable and deprived communities with citizen-generated data to improve resilience to health and environmental risks, including the Waterproofing Data Project (funded through the Belmont Forum/NORFACE by ESRC, FAPESP and BMBF) on citizen science for flood resilience, and the IDEAMAPS Ecosystem project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, combining AI and satellite imagery analysis with community-based research for mapping urban deprivation.

Linda See

(International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis)

Dr See, who holds a PhD from the School of Geography, University of Leeds, has research interests include artificial intelligence-based methods, geographic information systems (GIS), land cover, crowdsourcing and citizen science. As part of the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability (NODES) group in the Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA) program, she works with the Geo-Wiki team on crowdsourcing of land cover, quality assurance of crowdsourced data, and community building. She has supported several crowdsourcing campaigns to gather reference data on human impact, land cover including cropland and crop types, agricultural field sizes, forest management, and the drivers of deforestation. She was recently the IIASA lead of the European Space Agency funded CAMALIOT project and led a successful crowdsourcing campaign to collect satellite navigation data using a mobile app. She is an editor of the journal Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science.

Sarah Williams

(MIT)

Dr Williams is an Associate Professor of Technology and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she is also Director of the Civic Data Design Lab and the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Williams’ combines her training in computation and design to create communication strategies that expose urban policy issues to broad audiences and create civic change. She calls the process Data Action, which is also the name of her recent book published by MIT Press. Williams is co-founder and developer of Envelope.city, a web-based software product that visualizes and allows users to modify zoning in New York City. Before coming to MIT, Williams was Co-Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Her design work has been widely exhibited including work in the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Venice Biennale, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Williams has won numerous awards including being named one of the top 25 technology planners and Game Changer by Metropolis Magazine. Her latest exhibition, currently being shown at the Venice Biennale, Distance Uknown, explores the risks and opportunities of migration to the Americas and helped to influence recent US migration policies.