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Innovation Leaders

Innovation Leaders is a section of Ubiquity that consists of interviews of young professionals, who comment on their concerns about the future of computing and their ambitions to shape the future through their leadership. We probe how the interviewee's big concern grew up in their history, what they are doing about it in the present, and what ambitions and plans they have for shaping the future. Through this section, we aim to give voice to the many moving and compelling stories our young professionals are bringing to their work and our field.

In addition to the written interview, we offer each interviewee the opportunity to make a podcast of themselves reading their own interviews. Podcasts appeal to many busy young professionals who can listen while they are walking or commuting. The podcasts are linked to the interview page when it is published.

Our innovation leader interviews are made visible to a large community through our Facebook page and Twitter channel.

If you are interested in being interviewed as an innovation leader, contact our section editor, Bushra Anjum. She can be reached via Twitter @DrBushraAnjum.

Articles

  • A Conversation with Ken Holstein: Fostering human-AI complementarity

    Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Ken Holstein, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the Co-Augmentation, Learning, & AI (CoALA) Lab. We discuss how, amidst all of the current AI hype, human ability and expertise remain underappreciated. Designing for complementarity in AI-augmented tooling ensures that domain-specific worker-facing AI systems are designed to bring out the best of human ability rather than simply attempting to, many a time incorrectly, automate them away.

  • A Conversation with Francis Enyi: Bridging the healthcare deficit via IVR

    Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Francis Enyi, a senior program analyst with the Information and Communication Technology Department at Delta State University Teaching Hospital in Nigeria. They discuss how Enyi and his team of computer software developers, medical personnel, and linguists are working toward bridging the deficit of healthcare personnel in remote and rural areas in Africa. The conversation also details the team's flagship service, interactive voice response (IVR) software, providing access to quality non-surgical medical care information to the populace, made available via the GSM telephone network.

  • A Conversation with Sunita Chandrasekaran: Exploring sustainable and portable software solutions

    Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Sunita Chandrasekaran, an associate professor with the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. Chandrasekaran discusses her goal, as a researcher as well as an educator, to prepare the next-generation workforce to tackle rich hardware features while exploring suitable software solutions. The discussion also addresses sustainable, maintainable, and portable solutions for legacy code that is traditionally unsuited for modern architectures.

  • A Conversation with Daniel Russo: The future of work for software developers

    Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Daniel Russo, an associate professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, about the future of work for software developers. They discuss the longitudinal studies Dr. Russo and his team have performed to monitor software developers' productivity and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, the conversation focuses on what kind of hybrid work environment is a better fit for software developers based on the different institutional, work, and personal preferences.

  • A conversation with Grace IbukunOluwa Ufeoshi: Preparing African youth for the future of work in the IT ecosystem

    Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Grace IbukunOluwa Ufeoshi, a data science professional and AI entrepreneur, about her passion for preparing the underprivileged African youth for the future of work in the IT ecosystem. They discuss IbukunOluwa's journey as a computer science educator and community leader, and her latest initiatives to equip young people with the requisite skills needed to apply AI in solving real social and business problems---especially in areas of socio-economic development across Africa.