Panelists
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Kayla DesPortes
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Dr. Kayla DesPortes is an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and the Learning Sciences at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She is a collaborative, community-centered researcher, designer, and engineer. Her work explores how artistic computing, engineering, AI/ML, and data literacy education can foster learners to leverage their knowledge and build new skills in order to empower themselves and their communities. She engages in long-term relationships with community partners and applies participatory methods that engage partners in agenda-setting, problem-solving, and integration of their knowledge and values into our designs. Further, she centers equity in her investigations of the learning environment by examining how design with artistic practices can foster learners’ and educators’ engagement with cultures, identities, and the social and political dimensions of society.
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Netta Iivari
UNIVERSITY OF OULU
Netta Iivari is a Professor in Information Systems and research unit leader of INTERACT research unit in University of Oulu. She has background in Cultural Anthropology as well as in Information Systems and Human Computer Interaction. Her long lasting research interest concerns understanding and strengthening people's participation in shaping and making their digital futures. She has particularly studied the topic with children, exploring participatory design, critical design, critical making, empowerment, inclusion, ethics, values and criticality in collaboration with children. Her research is strongly influenced by interpretive and critical research traditions. She has a specific interest in the examination and support of transdisciplinary research and design.
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Thomas M. Philip
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Thomas M. Philip is a Professor in the Berkeley School of Education, where he also serves as the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Teacher Education Program. He studies how ideology shapes learning and how learning is a site of ideological contestation and becoming. As a learning scientist and teacher educator, he is interested in how teachers make sense of power and hierarchy, and act on their sense of agency as they navigate and ultimately transform classrooms and institutions toward more equitable, just, and democratic practices and outcomes. His scholarship also explores the possibilities and tensions that emerge with the use of artificial intelligence and digital learning technologies in classrooms.
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Tiffany Tseng
BARNARD COLLEGE
Tiffany Tseng is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Barnard College, Columbia University and the director of the Design Tools Lab. Her work aims to empower a range of users, from young people to professional designers, to realize their creative potential using new technologies. Her research contributes design software that enables creative expression and knowledge sharing practices. Before joining Barnard, she was a research scientist at Apple and Project Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo. She has developed design tools across creative domains including animation, machine learning, electronics prototyping, and 3D design, both through her research and professional work as a product designer at companies such as Autodesk and IDEO. She holds a PhD from MIT in Media Arts and Sciences.
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Jody Medich
GOOGLE
Jody creates superhumans, not supercomputers. She creates human-centric AI collaboration tools that leverage brain-machine interfaces, AR/VR, robotics, wearables, and IoT to extend, amplify, and augment human capabilities dramatically. Her most notable work includes HCI for DARPA’S Big Dog, Principal Experience Designer of Microsoft’s HoloLens, and the HCI of Toyota’s AiCar. Today she is a Creative Strategist at Google working on the future of Technology & Society with a focus on AI. Career highlights include Director of Design for Singularity University Labs, Principal Design Lead of the Central Incubation Team at Microsoft, and Principal Design Researcher and Tech Advisor in Microsoft’s Office of the CTO. Throughout her career, Jody has prioritized inclusive design and has focused on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals including Education, Health, Industrial Innovation, and Shared Prosperity.
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Vishesh Kumar
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY
Vishesh Kumar is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education, and a core member of the Learning Innovation Incubator (LIVE) Initiative. He designs and studies tools and activities aimed at enriching learning through and across diverse social configurations, across different contexts and learning domains. Enabling these different kinds of social learning opportunities has the potential to unsettle dominant disciplinary boundaries and practices, as well as persistent teacher-student, adult-child, expert-novice binaries – critical for enabling richer connections to people’s whole lives and across time, community, and space. His work aims to center supporting minoritized learners – across lenses of gender, race, and dis/ability among others – in seeing themselves as capable participants with a sense of rightful belonging, funds of knowledge, and values that are relevant and valuable for their communities’ and personal growth.
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Arturo Cortez
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS
Arturo Cortez, PhD is a critical learning scientist exploring the possibilities of co-designing for consequential learning in intergenerational and transdisciplinary learning environments. In particular, he is interested in how young people and adults speculate new possible futures, opening up opportunities for building imaginary, real, and equitable worlds, while using everyday technologies. In line with this inquiry, Cortez founded The Learning To Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab to build models for equity-centered educator and student learning through the design of deeper relationships across the various learning ecologies people traverse in their everyday lives. His work has been published in Reading Research Quarterly, Mind, Culture, and Activity, Cognition and Instruction, and the Review of Research in Education. For the 2024-2025 academic year, Cortez will be a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. Cortez is a former public school educator and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Nichole Pinkard
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Nichole Pinkard is the founder of Digital Youth Network and L3, a social learning platform that connects youth’s learning opportunities across the school, home, community, and beyond.Through collaborations with city agencies Pinkard and DYN’s work has ignited new models for reimagining, visualizing, and documenting learning across spaces through the creation of existence proofs in urban contexts. Pinkard received a 2010 Common Sense Media Award for Outstanding Commitment to Creativity and Youth, the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies, an NSF Early CAREER Fellowship. She earned her bachelor’s in computer science from Stanford University, a master’s in computer science from Northwestern, and her doctorate in learning sciences from Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. Her current scholarly interests include the design and use of pedagogical-based social networks and socio-technical systems to support community-level ecological models of learning.
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Tiera Tanksley
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
Dr. Tiera Tanksley’s scholarship bridges education, Black studies and critical science and technology studies (STS) to examine how digital and artificially intelligent technologies impact the lives and schooling experiences of Black youth. In particular, she examines how racist logics get encoded into socio-technical infrastructures (e.g. code, algorithms, data, etc.) of school-based technologies in ways that hide, speed up and automate educational inequity for Black youth. Her work simultaneously recognizes young people as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist and rewrite racially biased technologies to produce more just and joyous digital experiences for the Black community.
Organizing Committee
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Yasmin B. Kafai
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Yasmin B. Kafai is Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, with a courtesy appointment in Computer and Information Science. She is a learning designer and researcher of online tools, projects and communities to promote coding, criticality, and creativity. With colleagues at MIT, she developed the widely popular programming language Scratch, with over 100 million users, and researched computational participation in clubs, classrooms, and communities. She has written several books, among them “Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming,” “Connected Gaming: What Making Videogames Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” and recently edited with N. Holbert and M. Berland “Designing Constructionist Futures: The Art, Theory, and Practice of Learning Designs” — all published by MIT Press. Kafai earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University while working at the MIT Media Lab.
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Marina Bers
BOSTON COLLEGE
Marina Umaschi Bers is the Augustus Long Professor of Education at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science. She is director of the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies (DevTech) research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote children’s positive development as a new literacy of the XXIst century. Prof. Bers has conceived and designed diverse technological tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds. Her current research focuses on robotics and programming languages that promote new ways of thinking and learning in early childhood alongside with socio-emotional development. For example, she co-developed the free ScratchJr programming language and she developed the KIBO robot kit that can be programmed with wooden blocks without keyboards or screens.
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Kathi Fisler
BROWN UNIVERSITY
Dr. Kathi Fisler is a Research Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, with a PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University. Active in computer science educational outreach for twenty years, she often draws insight from childhood conversations with her parents, both public school teachers and administrators. Her research looks at the interplay between human reasoning and logical systems, including how people learn to program. She is an ACM distinguished educator and has won WPI's Moruzzi Award for innovation in undergraduate education as well as WPI's Exemplary Faculty Prize.
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José Ramón Lizárraga
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Dr. José Ramón Lizárraga is a multiple Webby Award-winning designer and researcher of online experiences. As a learning scientist and information studies scholar, Dr. Lizárraga’s scholarly work focuses on the role of emergent technologies, AI, and media in the learning of individuals and communities. He is also Senior Pedagogy Advisor for the Algorithmic Justice League. Lizárraga holds a MA from Stanford University and a PhD from UC Berkeley.
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R. Benjamin Shapiro
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
R. Benjamin Shapiro is Associate Professor and the Associate Director for diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA) in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW). He co-directs the UW Center for Learning, Computing, and Imagination. His research focuses on the design of new tools and experiences that expand who can learn computing, how they can learn it, and what they can do with it, with a particular focus on creative applications of contemporary CS. He is passionate about doing this work in collaboration with educators and with youth. He founded Apple’s Learning Sciences research team, and remains a machine learning research scientist there. He has a PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University, and a BA in Independent Studies from the University of California San Diego.