Maud Adjeley Ashong Elliot is a computer scientist extraordinaire who encourages female students to enter the field of Information Technology. At the Department of Information Technology Studies at the University of Professional Studies, Accra, she teaches Systems Analysis and Design and Management Information Systems. She is an IBM-trained educator in mobile and cloud development. Graduated from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, she started her teaching career at the Computer Science Department of the same university. Her research interests are digital transformation and women in technology. She is an advocate for safe internet usage for young & old and she advocates and supports for early teaching of programming languages such as Python to children.
Hans Akkermans is professor of Business Informatics (emeritus) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Network Institute at Amsterdam that studies the interaction between digital technology and society, in which researchers from the faculties of social sciences, humanities, law, economics, and informatics participate. He has worked for many years in knowledge engineering & management, information systems and innovative e-business modelling, with for example applications and innovations in smart electricity distribution networks and the sustainable energy transition that have been internationally field-deployed and are now in industrial and commercial use. His current research interests focus on the interdisciplinary research, education and community service program W4RA (Web alliance for Regreening in Africa). He is co-chair of DigHum’s Curriculum Working Group. He holds a cum laude PhD in theoretical physics in the field of nuclear reactions from the University of Groningen.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Search Chief Scientist at You.com as well as part-time WASP Professor at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is also a part-time professor at the Dept. of Engineering of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, as well as at the Department of Computing Sciences of the University of Chile in Santiago. He is also an affiliated professor at the Data Science and AI division of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg as well as at the Data Systems Group of the Cheriton School of Computer Science of the University of Waterloo, Canada. Finally, he is also a visiting professor at the DATA Lab of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Network Science Institute of Northeastern University at its Silicon Valley campus. His research interests includes algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, web search and data mining, and data science and visualization.
Adams Bodomo is University Professor of African Studies, distinguished scholar, accomplished author, researcher, and a leading advocate of African languages in the literary world. For over 40 years, he’s taught at prestigious universities including the University of Ghana, Stanford University, University of Hong Kong, Bayreuth University, and the University of Vienna, Austria. He’s currently one of the most prominent scholars in the field of Linguistics and African Studies globally. Indeed, he’s one of the first black scholars to be appointed into the position of Chair Professorship in Austria, the highest academic position in the German-speaking world. He has won several prestigious fellowships and research projects throughout his academic life. One of the most prominent books he has authored is “The structure of Dagaare” which is a pioneering study on the grammatical structure of his native language, Dagaare, spoken in northwestern Ghana and adjoining areas of Burkina Faso.
Victor de Boer is Associate Professor (UHD) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), where he co-leads the User-Centric Data Science group of the Computer Science department. He is also a co-director of the Cultural AI Lab. In his research, he combines (Semantic) Web technologies with Human-Computer Interaction, Knowledge Representation and Information Extraction to tackle research challenges in various domains. These include Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities and ICT for Development (ICT4D).
Anna Bon is researcher and lecturer in Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and senior project manager at VU Amsterdam’s International Office (CIS Centre for International Cooperation). She directs the interdisciplinary research, education and community service program W4RA (Web alliance for Regreening in Africa). Her interdisciplinary research centers around how innovative context-aware technologies, serving especially communities in Africa’s drylands. Her international projects include digital voice-service support for local value networks in West Africa; ICT4D Community Service Learning in rural Sarawak, Malaysia; Sustainability and Ethics in Digital Development; AI for Sustainable Development, and the Amsterdam Digital Divide.
Saa Dittoh is professor in agricultural development and food systems economy at the University for Development Studies (UDS), Ghana. His interest is in smallholder agriculture, food and nutrition security, irrigation and water management technologies, sustainable natural resources management, ICT for rural development and participatory learning approaches. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE). He has worked for international development organizations including UNICEF, WFP, FAO, IFAD, The World Bank, AfDB, World Vision, USAID, DFID, and EU. He has contributed to Ghana’s Medium Term Agriculture Sector Development Plans (METASIP I and II), Ghana’s Long Term Development Plan (2018 – 2057). Saa Dittoh has been Head of Department, Dean of Faculty, Dean of Students and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the UDS.
Gaétan Hains is a professor of computer science in the Faculty of Science and Technology at Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) and a member of the Algorithms, Complexity, and Logic Laboratory (LACL). He is currently vice-president for digital affairs of the university. A former recipient of scholarships from Quebec, Canada, and the Commonwealth, he graduated from the University of Oxford and served as a faculty member and researcher at the University of Montreal and then the University of Orléans before joining UPEC in 2006. He has served as director of computer science laboratories, program manager for software programs at the French ANR, and head of R&D teams in the private sector. He is the author of more than 100 publications in Computer Science and supervised a dozen PhD students.
Carlo Ghezzi is an Emeritus Professor at Politecnico di Milano, where he has been teaching and doing research for over 40 years. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, member of Academia Europaea, and member of the Italian Academy of Sciences (Istituto Lombardo). He received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award. He has been President of Informatics Europe. He has done research on programming languages and software engineering. He has published over 200 papers in international journals and conferences and co-authored 6 books. He is interested in the ethical implications of research in computer science. He is currently chairing the Ethics Committee at Politecnico di Milano.
Peter Knees is a Full Professor of the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien, Austria and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Music for the Fall term 2022. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from TU Wien and a PhD in the same field from Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. For almost two decades, he has been an active member of the Music Information Retrieval research community, reaching out to the related fields of multimedia and text information retrieval, recommender systems, and the digital arts. His research activities center on music search engines and interfaces as well as music recommender systems, and more recently, on smart(er) tools for music creation. He is one of the proponents of the Digital Humanism initiative of the Faculty of Informatics of TU Wien. Since 2023, he has also headed the UNESCO Chair in Digital Humanism.
George Metakides is Professor Emeritus from the University of Patras, Honorary President of the Digital Enlightenment Forum and Advisor to several international organizations. He is often a Visiting Professor in European Universities. He is involved in the analysis of the economic, political and social impact of digitization, related cybersecurity, data protection and regulatory issues and the promotion of international cooperation towards a digital ecosystem respecting shared human values. With a Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic earned from Cornell University in 1971, he pursued an academic career at MIT, Cornell and Rochester University before returning to Greece as Chair of Logic at the University of Patras. Since 1984 he has held senior positions with responsibility for Research & Development policy, funding and international co-operation in European institutions including the Directorship of the ESPRIT program He has contributed to the establishment of international institutions (including the launch of the World Wide Web consortium in 1993), has received a number of awards and honorary degrees and is a corresponding member of several National Academies.
Stanley Mukasa is the Associate Director of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University Africa, where he builds innovation and venture development pathways that translate African talent, research and technology into products, enterprises, employment and wider societal
value. Through the African Engineering and Technology Network (Afretec), he leads multi-country initiatives advancing entrepreneurship, talent development and inclusive digital trans-formation across Africa. Working across universities, industry, investors, entrepreneurs, public institutions and development partners, Stanley connects innovation to the partnerships, mar-kets and institutional environments required for adoption and scale. His work spans venture building, university, industry collaboration, research commercialization and the development of ecosystems that expand pathways to economic opportunity. His interests lie at the intersec-tion of technology, entrepreneurship and society, with a particular focus on human-centered innovation and ensuring that digital transformation responds to African realities, institutions and communities.
Carine Mukamakuza is lecturer, researcher, and entrepreneur. Her research focuses on digital healthcare solutions, business intelligence, data science (specifically machine learning, where she has centered her attention on recommender systems), online social network behavior, and personalization. Using publicly available datasets, she has investigated the extent to which social connections influence user rating behavior over time. Driven by her interest in digital healthcare solutions, Carine Mukamakuza is creating a digital detection project. She is currently focused on Rwanda as a case study, and her long-term goals for the interface are much broader where she envisions creating a system that could be utilized across countries in Africa, and across diseases.
Bukelwa Ngoqo works at the School of IT, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Bukelwa does research in Information Systems (Business Informatics) and Computer Security and Reliability. Their current project is e-Government information security behaviour profiling. Exploring the association between employee awareness, behavioural intent and cognitive biases.
Julia Neidhardt is an Assistant Professor at the Data Science Research Unit at TU Wien, Vienna, Austria, where she leads the Christian Doppler Lab for Recommender Systems. She has held the UNESCO Co-Chair on Digital Humanism since 2023. She has a background in mathematics and computer science and has been a guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Northwestern University, and the University of Geneva. Her research lies at the intersection of user modeling, recommender systems, and Digital Humanism, with applications in domains such as news, e-commerce, and tourism. Her recent work focuses on generative conversational recommender systems and the impact of digitalisation on linguistic diversity. She is actively involved in the international research community through editorial, program committee, and organizational roles, and serves on the board of the TU Wien Center for AI and Machine Learning (CAIML).
Prosper Simbarashe Maguchu is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Public International Law, at the Law Faculty of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is also a Senior Advisor on International Development at the VU Center for International Cooperation, in Amsterdam. Previously he worked as an international coordinator for the Anti-Corruption Act Southern Africa and as a senior projects lawyer with the Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum specializing in public interest litigation on behalf of torture and organized violence victims. His main research interest are in the area of financial crimes and human rights.
Francis Saa-Dittoh is a Computer Scientist and ICT4D Researcher whose work focuses on designing community-driven digital systems for marginalised and underrepresented communities. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research work explores how participatory design, indigenous knowledge, and emerging technologies such as AI, low-resource language processing, and community networks, can be combined to build inclusive sociotechnical systems. Francis also develops practical platforms and tools that translate research into real-world impact, particularly in Africa. His work sits at the intersection of Digital Humanism, ICT for Development, and culturally inclusive AI design.
Hannes Werthner is emeritus professor of e-Commerce at the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien. Prior to joining TU Wien, he had several professorships at Austrian and international Universities. His research is in several fields such as Decision Support Systems, e-Commerce, e-Tourism, Recommender Systems, and lately in Network Analysis and Text Mining. Besides research and teaching he is active in starting new initiatives, such as the Vienna PhD School of Informatics and the i2c (Informatics Innovation Center). In the area of e-Tourism, the International Federation for IT and Tourism (IFITT) grants the “Hannes Werthner Tourism and Technology Lifetime Achievement Award” to outstanding academics and/or professionals in the field.