Sub-Saharan Africa

Dr. Ejikemeuwa J. O. Ndubisi

Dr. Ejikemeuwa J. O. Ndubisi is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Tansian University, Umunya, Nigeria and Pope John Paul II Major Seminary, Awka, Nigeria, where he is transforming young minds towards personal development and nation building. His qualifications include: Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (2014), Master of Arts in Philosophy (2010), Bachelor of Philosophy (2005), Postgraduate Diploma in Education (2013) and Diploma in Latin Language (1999). As an enterprising and vibrant scholar, Dr. Ndubisi has manifested the stuff he was made of through his numerous and quality publications. He is the Editor-in-Chief, Oracle of Wisdom Journal of Philosophy and Public Affairs (OWIJOPPA) and the pioneer Editor-in-Chief, Tansian University Journal of Arts, Management and Social Sciences (TUJAMSS). He is also an editorial member of some reputable journals. He has served in various administrative capacities in Tansian University, Umunya, Nigeria, namely, Head of Department of Philosophy; Coordinator, General Studies Unit; Director, Continuing Education Programme. Dr. Ndubisi’s research interests include Philosophy (Metaphysics, Epistemology, African Philosophy and Logic), Religion, Gender Studies and Peace Studies.

Professor Keith Breckenridge

Keith is a Professor and Deputy Director at Wiser. He writes about the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, the state and the development of information systems. His book -- Biometric State: the Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge, 2014) -- shows how the South African obsession with Francis Galton's universal fingerprint identity registration served as a 20th century incubator for the current systems of biometric citizenship being developed throughout the South. In 2017 the book was awarded the inaugural Humanities Book Award by the Academy of Science of South Africa. With Simon Szreter, he edited Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History published by OUP and the British Academy in 2012, a volume of essays which examines the workings and failures of civil registration in twenty different regions and periods around the world. He is currently working on Biometric Capitalism, a book on the politics and implications of automated biographical credit systems on the African continent. Offprints of his studies of these different schemes are available on the WISER web site.

Elf Getachew

Elefelious Getachew Belay is an Assistant Professor and Dean of School of Information Technology and Engineering at Addis Ababa University. He has more than fifteen years of experience in both industry and academia in the field of Information Technology. He worked in various capacities including Director for eGovernment Information system projects. He was also worked as a research fellow at University of Milan, Italy and visiting researcher at Virginia Tech, USA. 

RALPH BORLAND

Ralph Borland is an artist, curator and interdisciplinary knowledge worker based in Cape Town, South Africa. His projects African Robots and SPACECRAFT are collaborations with street wire artists in Southern Africa to introduce electronics and mechanics to their practice. Their monumental electro-mechanical music-making spaceship sculpture Dubship I – Black Starliner was launched at the Zeitz MOCAA in 2019. In 2020, Ralph Borland Studio completed two public artworks for the City of Cape Town. Ralph has a degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town, and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. His PhD from Trinity College Dublin is a critique of first world design interventions in the developing world. His art-design piece Suited for Subversion (2002), a protective and performance suit for street protest, is in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. He co-curated the exhibition FUTUREPRESENT: Design in a Time of Urgency which opened at Science Gallery Detroit in September 2020. Across his work, Ralph pursues an interdisciplinary approach to teasing out issues of power, activism, and social engagement via designed objects, often through collaborative artistic practice. His work plays on the aesthetics of make-do and ad hoc design, and the pleasures of pop culture, using sculpture, found objects, image, sound and music, and interactive media.

BUHLE KHANYILE

Dr. Buhle Khanyile has a PhD from the University of Cape Town in psychology and currently works at the Impact Centre at the Human Sciences Research Council. His areas of interest include Black Existential Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, and Intergroup Relations. His most important publications include: Tortured souls and disposed bodies (Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society); Contact theory and the concept of prejudice; Metaphysical and moral explorations and an epistemological question (Theory and & Psychology); and Interracial contact among university and school youth in post-apartheid South Africa (The Wiley Handbook of Group Processes). For him, this project provides an opportunity to reflect on violence as a theoretical discourse and as a lived experience in the lives of young people in South Africa.

Dr Samuel Segun

Samuel T. Segun is a Research Associate in the Ethics of AI research group at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) at the University of Pretoria. He completed his PhD at the University of Johannesburg with a doctoral research focused on developing a robust ethical theory for autonomous intelligent systems that is informed by African values and rivals Western approaches. Samuel’s research interests include the philosophy of artificial intelligence, with a special focus on computational and machine ethics. His other areas of research include the philosophy of mind, especially neurophilosophy and consciousness, business ethics and African intellectual development. Samuel is also a Researcher at the Institute of Intelligent Systems, University of Johannesburg, and a Research Fellow of the Conversational School of Philosophy (CSP).

Dr Rachel Adams

Dr Rachel Adams is a Chief Research Specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa. Dr Adams has degrees in Jurisprudence (PhD, University of Cape Town), International Human Rights Law (MPhil, University of Cape Town) and English Literature and Philosophy (BA, Royal Holloway, University of London). Her research lies at the intersection of philosophy, gender, technology, law and race. Dr Adams was previously the Senior Researcher for Civil and Political Rights at the South African Human Rights Commission, and completed a post-doctorate at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Dr Adams sits on the Independent Expert Panel of the South African Department of Science and Innovation and Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre on Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), and she is a member of the Independent Advisory Group of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner for the UK Home Office. Dr Adams is further an Editor of the South African Journal on Human Rights, and the author of Transparency: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2020).

Chenai chair

Chenai Chair is a digital policy researcher who has extensively focused on understanding the impact of technology in society to better public interest in policy. She is World Wide Web Foundation’s Research Manager focused on Gender and Digital Rights and a 2019 Mozilla Tech Policy Fellow focused on assessing adequacy of data protection and privacy regulation in Africa taking on gender and data justice perspectives. Through her fellowship, she recently launched mydatarights.africa a resource site on AI and gender, feminist methodology and policy recommendations on AI in Africa. Her work has included research on ICT access and use issues from a youth perspective, net neutrality and zero rating and unpacking the gendered digital divide through a feminist perspective.

Dr Michael Gastrow

Dr Michael Gastrow is the Director of the Science in Society unit within the Impact Centre of the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa, and a Professor of Practice at the DST/NRF/Newton Fund Trilateral Research Chair in Transformative Innovation, the 4th Industrial Revolution and Sustainable Development at the University of Johannesburg. His research focus is on innovation systems, skills development, the public understanding of science, and science communication. He is a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He’s passionate about the role of science and technology in society, particularly in the ways they can foster constructive public discourse and inclusive human development. Gastrow is the author two previous publication with the HSRC Press: Gastrow, M. 2017. The Stars in Our Eyes. HSRC Press: Cape Town; and Kruss, G. and Gastrow, M. 2015. Linking Universities and Marginalised Communities. HSRC Press: Cape Town.

DIVINE FUH

Divine Fuh is a social anthropologist and Director of HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa, at the University of Cape Town (UCT). His research focuses on the politics of suffering and smiling, particularly examining how African urban youth seek ways of smiling in the midst of their suffering. He has done work in Botswana, Cameroon, Senegal and South Africa. His current research focuses on the political economy of Pan-African knowledge production, and also AI and the ethics of care in Africa. He previously served as Director of Publications and Dissemination Programme at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). He is Founding Managing Editor of Langaa Research and Publishing, and is currently Co-Chair of the Global Africa Group (GAG) of the World Universities Council (WUN).

Professor Jane Taylor

Professor Jane Taylor holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance, at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Taylor has for some years been involved in public scholarship, curating, and arts. She directs the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects, a creative arts hub that explores questions about the subject-object continuum; and the significance of motion in the history of the idea of ‘the live.’ Taylor works across the arts and has published several novels, and playtexts, as well as traditional scholarship. Taylor’s PhD is from Northwestern University, Illinois. She has held the Wole Soyinka Chair of Theatre at Leeds; Skye Chair of Drama at Wits; Visiting Professorship at the University of Chicago; Visiting Fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge; Writer’s Residency at Northwestern, and Visiting Avenali Chair at Berkeley; and was Advisor for Dokumenta; and has been a guest curator of Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea. She helped launch the Barrydale Festival, working on aesthetics, robotics, AI, and puppetry arts.

Professor Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem

Professor Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem is professor and head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria. She is the leader of the ethics of AI research group at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) in South Africa. She is the general chair of the Organising Committee of the Southern African Conference on AI Research (SACAIR 2020) hosted by CAIR, postponed to February 2021 due to COVID-19. She is the founder of the CAIR/UP ‘Artificial Intelligence for Society’ Symposium. She is a member of the UNESCO World Commission for Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) for the period 2020-2023. Prof Ruttkamp-Bloem was the 2020 chairperson of the UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group (AHEG) on the ethics of artificial intelligence. Currently, in the ethics of artificial intelligence, she works on themes in machine ethics, ethics of social robotics, data ethics, and AI and children, and she is an AI ethics policy researcher.

bayo adenkambi

Bayo Adenkambi is an award-winning business executive who combines 19 years of cognate industry experience in Strategy, Marketing, Analytics and Business Transformation from two largest economies in Africa (Nigeria and South Africa). He is a Kaggle-validated hands-on Data Scientist and a doctoral researcher with a Data Science product patent on Social Pricing Recommender. He graduated with Distinction from the University of Reading postgraduate School, United Kingdom, and has also had both full-time and executive education in many other leading institutions, including Columbia Business School, New York; The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago; INSEAD Business School, France; Telecoms Training Institute, London; ETH Zurich, Switzerland; and Gatton College of Business at the University of Kentucky, Kentucky.

He was on PhD research sabbatical at City, University of London (July 2015- September 2016) from his role as the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at MTN Nigeria, where he has also been awarded with the prestigious MTN Yello Star award for the conceptualisation of a Customer Value/Risk Management framework, which led to multi-billion naira revenue growth. Post-sabbatical, Bayo is back at MTN Nigeria as the Chief Transformation Officer, driving a holistic programme aimed to accelerate business and financial performance through business reengineering, innovation and advanced analytics. He is the convener of Data Science Nigeria, a non-profit that is building a world-class Artificial Intelligence knowledge, research and innovation ecosystem which delivers high impact & transformational research, business use applications, AI-first start-ups, employability and social good use cases. Bayo is recognized as one of the Top 100 Global Data and Analytics innovators in 2020 by the US-based Corinium Intelligence.

He is the author of "The Future is Shared“, “Artificial Intelligence Simplified for Starters” and Beginners‘ Artificial Intelligence & python programming for primary and Junior Secondary School

NEDINE MOONSAMY

Nedine Moonsamy is a Senior Lecturer in the English Literature department at the University of Pretoria. She is currently writing a monograph on contemporary South African Fiction and otherwise conducts research on science fiction in Africa. Her debut novel, The Unfamous Five, is published by Modjaji Books (September 2019).