Join us for the first Food for Thought event of the new year, featuring Nabeel Gillani (Art+Design / D’Amore-McKim School of Business) and Christopher Le Dantec (Art+Design). The theme of this month’s Food for Thought is “Using Data to Drive Pluralism and Shape Civic Participation.” Each Faculty member will share a short presentation about their research and lunch will be served! No rsvp required. Northeastern faculty, staff, and students are all welcome.

Nabeel Gillani is an Assistant Professor of Design and Data Analysis jointly appointed with the D’Amore-McKim School of Business and the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. His research interests involve using tools from computation and design to foster pluralism—an inclusive response to diversity in society—in ways that promote educational, economic, and social inclusion. More specifically, he seeks to apply methods from machine learning, data science, and design to build bridges across segregated spaces like: 1) echo chambers and empathy gaps on social media, and 2) educational inequalities stemming from segregated schools and neighborhoods. Read more about his research on his group’s webpage: pluralconnections.org.

Nabeel received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab. Prior to graduate school, he worked on the product and analytics teams at Khan Academy. He studied Applied Math and Computer Science at Brown University as an undergrad, and received master’s degrees in Education and Machine Learning at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Christopher Le Dantec is a Professor of Art + Design. He is a computer scientist and design researcher focused on the area of Digital Civics. He received his PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has long focused on how the social and organizational settings of civic work need to shape computing technologies that enable governance and advocacy. Dr. Le Dantec proposes that it is not just that civic work is a downstream application of research in computer science, but that the settings of public and community-based organizations necessarily shapes the kinds of questions computing research needs to address. He tackles these problems by employing qualitative and design research methods to understand current organizational practices in civic settings; and then through participatory design approaches to design and deploy test-bed systems that support collective action through the production and use of civic data. Through his research he seeks to understand how novel computing interfaces enable new forms of public participation and data-based governance within municipal institutions and agencies; He also works closely with community and grass-roots organizations to express local civic priorities through the design and strategic deployment of interactive computing systems to advance equity and address city-scale issues on transportation, food security, and climate resilience.

Dr. Le Dantec’s work in Human-Centered Computing challenges the assumptions we have about how interactive computing systems and data-intensive applications need to work to support collaboration within and between civic organizations. The outcomes of his research have real-world impact on issues of sustainability and community resilience through urban planning, policy development, and community organizing. His research regularly appears the ACM conferences CHI, CSCW, and DIS, and he is the author of Designing Publics (MIT Press, 2016).

Header Image above is from Nabeel’s Gillani’s Project w/ Plural Connections entitled Social Mirror.