Events Calendar

Speaker

Mahmood Jasim

Abstract

The advancement of online engagement platforms, and civic and smart technologies have enabled the creation of public-generated data at an unprecedented rate. We are dependent on this public-generated data to make critical decisions that impact policies on commerce, healthcare, transit, and urban planning at a personal, local, or national scale. However, off-the-shelf data analysis tools and techniques, and traditional public engagement methods and practices fall short of fulfilling data analysts' and decision-makers desire to derive insights from rich qualitative public-generated data for informing policy decisions that have a significant impact on people’s lives. These methods are mostly based on aggregation and oversimplification of public input into what is most convenient or popular, which often leaves out unpopular and marginalized opinions.

In this talk, I discuss the design, development, and evaluation of novel human-centered technologies that can facilitate the sense-making of public-generated data for informed decision-making and empower inclusivity in the public engagement process to enable decision-makers to forage, peruse, and sublimate public-generated-data into concrete and actionable insights.

Bio

Mahmood Jasim is a PhD candidate at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research interests include designing, developing, and evaluating decision-support systems for inclusive collection and analysis of large-scale public-generated data to enable effective and efficient data-driven decision-making. His interdisciplinary research is spread across human-computer interactions (HCI), information visualization, and applied machine learning. Mahmood is the recipient of best paper awards including CSCW 2020, DIS 2021 (Honorable Mention), and EuroVIS 2022. He holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Dhaka. Before joining UMass for his PhD, Mahmood worked as a teaching faculty at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Dhaka.