Narges Mahyar & Ali Sarvghad

Seminar - Narges Mahyar & Ali Sarvghad,

University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst

Designing and Building Tools for Fostering Equity and Inclusion in Civic Decision-Making

Thurs 8th December, 16:00 - 17:30, ELG04 (Drysdale)

RisingEMOTIONS - capturing public emotion in response to seal level rise and flooding.

Narges Mahyar and Ali Sarvghad are doing exciting work in building tools that help communities solve real-world sociotechnical problems at the HCI-VIS Lab at UMass Amherst. They have received Best paper and Hon Mention awards at many of the major conferences in the last year or two. They will be heading here from their trip to INRIA Paris to give a talk and start a discussion on Visualization for Equity, Inclusion and Civic Decision-Making.

Please come along. Details and Bios here!

Abstract

Inclusive community engagement is paramount for fair and impartial civic decision-making. However, traditional methods rarely provide opportunities for inclusive public participation. While advances in digital civics have broadened public participation, these technologies still face several challenges in promoting inclusive participation and integrating data analysis into civic decision-making processes.

In this talk, Narges and Ali present examples of their recent work on building and studying community-centered tools for fostering equity and inclusion in civic decision-making by :

  1. lowering barriers for public participation,

  2. enriching data collection, and

  3. facilitating more inclusive public input analysis.

They describe their vision for expanding our research on democratizing civic decision-making processes and outcomes by building, deploying, and studying socially impactful technologies that integrate data visualization, social computing, and artificial intelligence.