Team

  • Ali Karimi

    DIRECTOR

    Ali Karimi is an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. He is a scholar of critical information studies with a focus on surveillance, privacy, and data justice. He is also the founding director of the Data Justice Research Centre.

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  • Hafsa Maqsood

    GRADUATE FELLOW

    Hafsa Maqsood is a current PhD student in Communications and Media Studies at the University of Calgary. Her research interests focus on Islamophobia, representation, discourse, justice, and counter-narrative. Hafsa’s current research is on Palestinian diasporic anticolonial resistance on visual social media platforms and counter-representations of Palestine in western news discourse.

  • Cassandra Rodberg

    UNDERGRADUATE FELLOW

    Cassandra Rodberg is a second-year student currently completing her honours baccalaureate in Computer Science. In addition to her studies, she is a member of the University of Calgary’s Scholars Academy, the Arts and Sciences Honours Academy, and holds an executive position with the group HerAI, which promotes women entering STEM fields.

Faculty Affiliates

  • Marina Gavrilova

    FACULTY AFFILIATE

    Dr. Marina Gavrilova is a Professor of Computer Science and the UCalgary Research Excellence Chair in Trustworthy and Explainable AI.  Over the span of twenty years, Dr Gavrilova positioned herself as an award-winning researcher and an innovator. Her team introduced AI informed decision-making processes, received best paper awards and informed policymakers of responsible, ethical, and accurate data analytics. They also have extensive experience and made substantial contributions to the domain of human behavioral modeling and ethical use of AI, incorporating concepts of trustworthiness, interpretability, privacy, and social awareness in AI-based decision-making. Dr Gavrilova has a vast experience in organizing large-scale international research gatherings, including CGI, CASA, WSCG, ICCSA and CW, and serves on Editorial Boards of prestigious International Journals. She received numerous awards, including Killam Annual Professorship and Order of the University of Calgary Inductee.

  • Mariana Bento

    FACULTY AFFILIATE

    Dr. Mariana Bento, a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Schulich School of Engineering, with joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering (ESE) at the University of Calgary. They have been working in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for healthcare applications for over 10 years, with focus on key aspects like responsibility, trustworthiness, fairness, and bias mitigation, considering biases related to varying demographics and heterogeneous data (variability related to acquisition protocols).

  • Ronnie de Souza Santos

    FACULTY AFFILIATE

    Dr. Ronnie de Souza Santos is an Assistant Professor in the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary (Canada), where he leads the SE-ALL Lab (Software Engineering for All). His research focuses on software fairness, with the goal of making software systems more just, accessible, and inclusive. He places particular emphasis on testing practices to identify and mitigate bias in AI-based systems. In recent years, his work has been dedicated to understanding how software development teams navigate the challenges of algorithmic fairness, drawing on software engineering methods in combination with interdisciplinary perspectives.