Stanford Seminar - Harnessing Data for Social Impact

Harnessing Data for Social Impact: Empowering Communities through Visualization and Social Computing January 12, 2024 Narges Mahyar of University of Massachusetts Amherst 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 take 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 socio-technical 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 information visualization, HCI, applied ML, and human-centered AI to design and build innovative tools and technologies to address complex socio-technical problems. 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 marginalized populations. 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 close with a discussion of how my work can be applied to other socio-technical problems, such as health informatics and learning sciences. About the speaker: Narges Mahyar is an Assistant Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Currently she holds a position as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. Narges s research falls at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization, Social Computing, and Design. She designs, develops, and evaluates novel social computing and visualization techniques tha