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Harnessing Data for Social Impact: Empowering Communities through Visualization and Social Computing
Abstract:
Today’s world faces several complex problems, such as climate change, transportation, infrastructure, education, and healthcare. Technology, if designed right, can play an essential role in informing people, raising awareness, sharing data, and connecting communities and decision-makers to make data-informed actions. In this talk, I present examples of my recent work on building and studying community-centered tools to empower the general public to engage in real-world sociotechnical problems such as urban planning and climate change and bring their ideas and comments for shaping future policies. These examples demonstrate my multidisciplinary approach in combining HCI, social computing, information visualization, applied ML, and human-centered AI to design and build innovative tools and visualization technologies to address complex sociotechnical problems. I also briefly present my work on inclusive data visualization to empower the public to understand the data that is increasingly part of their lives and make better data-informed decisions. I then describe a vision for expanding my research to further advance democracy, equity, well-being, and sustainability by fostering the inclusion and empowerment of the general public.
Bio:
Narges Mahyar is an Associate Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was a Radcliffe Fellow for 2024-2025 at Harvard University. Narges’s research intersects Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization, Social Computing, and Design. She designs, develops, and evaluates novel social computing and visualization techniques that help people explore, understand, and make data-informed decisions. Over the past decade, she has focused on the emerging interdisciplinary area of “Digital Civics,” which explores new strategies for scaling and diversifying public engagement in massive decision-making processes related to civic issues such as sustainable urban design and climate change mitigation. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Victoria, an M.S. in Information Technology from the University of Malaya, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Tehran Azad University. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia from 2014 to 2016 and in the Design Lab at the University of California San Diego from 2016 to 2018. Her recognition in the field has been repeatedly confirmed through many accolades for her research, including five Best Paper Awards from CHI 2023, Eurovis 2022, CSCW 2020, the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture 2017, and VAST 2014, as well as three Best Paper Honorable Mention Awards from TiiS 2022, DIS 2021, and ISS 2016.