Opening Keynote
Josephine Miliza (she/her)
Association of Progressive Communications-LOCNET project
Josephine Miliza is a digital inclusion and community networks champion passionate about supporting communities to build resilient and scalable bottom-up connectivity models. She is among the pioneers of the community network movement in Africa and has co-founded TunapandaNET a community network in Kibera, Nairobi Kenya. Josephine serves as Africa regional coordinator for the Association of Progressive Communications-LOCNET project hosted by the Kenya ICT Action Network in Nairobi Kenya. This project aims to contribute to an enabling ecosystem for the emergence and growth of community networks and other community-based connectivity initiatives in the global south. Josephine is actively involved in promoting the community networks movement in Africa participating in organizing the Africa community networks summit, awareness building, capacity building and policy advocacy forums. Her current interests are in bottom-up sustainable connectivity models and creative approaches to an enabling environment that fosters resilience and innovation for communities in Africa.
Closing Keynote
Mary L. Gray (she/her)
Microsoft Research/Indiana University
Mary L. Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She maintains a faculty position in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Mary, an anthropologist and media scholar by training, focuses on how people’s everyday uses of technologies transform labor, identity, and human rights. She earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California at San Diego in 2004, under the direction of Susan Leigh Star. Her books include In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999), Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (2009), and, most recently, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, co-authored with computer scientist Siddharth Suri. Ghost Work chronicles workers’ experiences of on-demand information gig work—from content moderation and data-labeling to telehealth—and their essential role in the global growth of artificial intelligence and platform economies more broadly. The book was named a Financial Times’ Critic’s Pick and awarded the McGannon Center for Communication Research Book Prize in 2019.
Mary also chairs the Microsoft Research Ethics Review Program—the only federally-registered institutional review board of its kind in Tech—and she is recognized as a leading expert in the emerging field of AI and ethics. Her research has been covered by publications ranging from The Guardian, El Pais, and The New York Times to Nature, The Economist, and Forbes Magazine. Mary currently sits on several boards, including the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors and Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R).
In 2020, Mary was named a MacArthur Fellow for her contributions to anthropology and the study of technology, digital economies, and society.