Tembisa Ngqondi
Tembisa Ngqondi is an Associate Professor and a Dean of the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Prof Ngqondi’s leadership in the academic sector started as early as 2001 when she was appointed to the position of the Program Leader, followed by Head of Department and the Head of School. Over the years, she has accumulated work experience in academia, where she served in different committees, forums and advisory boards at departmental, school, faculty and institutional levels. Prof Ngqondi has a colourful career path since she obtained her qualifications from diverse education environment, such as Technikon, comprehensive university and a traditional university system. She obtained her PhD in Information Systems at the University of Fort Hare. Her research interest is on Information and Communication Technology with the specific focus on Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) and Information Technology Governance (ITG). Prof Ngqondi is an active community member who participate on diverse community engagement projects at an individual to national level. Her ambition is to contribute towards human capacity development. She believes that all humankind were born leaders in their respective capacity or rather capabilities. Her belief system is the anchor of her purpose-driven life. Her motto is that we are human first then all other tittles, which makes her believe that people must be treated with respect and dignity and that becomes a lifetime secret of respecting yourself.
Tara Chklovski
Tara Chklovski is CEO of Technovation, a nonprofit that has empowered 350,000 participants from underserved communities in 100+ countries to tackle local problems using cutting-edge technologies (mobile and AI). She has been featured in the award-winning documentary Codegirl, and named “the pioneer empowering the incredible tech girls of the future” by Forbes. She has led the Global Online Education Taskforce to address education needs during COVID, the 2019 education track at the UN’s AI for Good Global Summit, presented at the International Joint Conference on AI, and the Global Partnership on AI for Humanity convened by the French Government.
Dorothy Okello
Dorothy Okello is an Ugandan technologist, professor, and engineer known for founding the Women of Uganda Network or WOUGNET. In 2016, she became the first female president of the Uganda Institute of Professional Engineers Association. She has a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Makerere University, Uganda, a MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas where she was a Fulbright Scholar,[4] and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal, Canada (where she received a Commonwealth Scholarship).[5] She has worked to get more women and rural communities engaged in the information society. Okello is Africa's first-ever Digital Woman of the Year, an honour bestowed upon her at an Africa ICT Days gala ceremony for the Digital Woman Award finalists that took place on 16 November in Yaoundé, Cameroon. In October 2012, Okello was awarded the Women Achievers Award for her service in empowering women and girls through Science and Technology. Okello was elected as the first female president of the Uganda Institution of Professional Engineers at the institution AGM on 29 April 2016.[9] On 2 June 2016 a congratulatory letter from the Irish President Michael D. Higgins was presented to her by the Irish Ambassador to Uganda Dónal Cronin on becoming the first female president of the institution. Okello is married with three children
Sakinat Folorunso
Sakinat is a computer science lecturer, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning researcher. She is a Girl-Child and Women mentor. She is a facilitator for the Machine Learning and Data Science for Humanity Research Projects cohort of her university and organized several events to promote AI for social good. Member of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Women in Music Information Retrieval (WiMIR). High goals and target driven. Compassionate, fast learner and deeply committed to research which spans Information Retrieval, data science and machine learning. As part of the COVID-19 response efforts of the worldwide Data Science researchers, she was appointed as co-country lead and board member for Nigeria on the Virus Outbreak Data Africa Network (VODAN Africa) in April 2020. The network teams are building Fair Data Points on the COVID-19 pandemic for Africa and covering Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Tunisia. Recently, working on making machine learning pipeline FAIR, Ontology and vocabulary building, curriculum and course content development with VODANA.
Taneea Agrawaal
Taneea is a first-year PhD student in Computer Science, working with Dr Joseph Jay Williams. She is a part of the Dynamic Graphics Project at University of Toronto. Her current research lies at the intersection of computer science and social science. Broadly, Taneea works in applied Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction, and Natural Language Processing. Taneea’s background in NLP involves analyzing and detecting gender bias in movies (PMLR 2018, FAT* 2018). She is interested in building inclusive machine reasoning which stems from a deep understanding of human behavior. In a past life, Taneea worked at Goldman Sachs, where she built (and sometimes broke) the in-house trading database, SecDB. With a Bachelors in Technology from IIIT Delhi, Taneea is an alumnus of Rails Girls Summer of Code and profoundly influenced by the open source and development community. Taneea accredits her home community and mentors for her fruitful journey in technology, and giving back to her community is a big part of her personal philosophy. She has been actively engaged in diversity and inclusion in tech initiatives, with the most recent being a Graduate Student Mentor to underrepresented grad school applicants in computer science, working with the Indian Women in Engineering chapter at Goldman Sachs, and Grace Hopper Celebration India. She’s been the Chapter Lead for Rails Girls New Delhi, and has been involved with Google Women Techmakers and Facebook Developer Circles’ core teams. She has spoken about inclusivity and diversity in computer science at conferences like Fairness, Accountability and Transparency 2018 and RubyConf India 2017.
Zainab Abdulkareem is a PhD student at the University of Strathcylde, United Kingdom. Zainab is also a faculty member in the department of Telecommunication Sciences, University of Ilorin, Nigeria. She is interested in research that improves digital accessibility and inclusiveness in Africa. Zainab has a strong passion to motivate girls and women to be involved in computer science. She is a member of the organizing committee for Nigeria Geek Girls Collaborative events, including GeGCoC 2014, 2015, 2016 and Nigeria Girls and Women Hackathon for Social Change (Nigathon 2014, 2015) in 2014. She is currently a Board Member for the Organization.
Osemwonyenmwen Joyce Omoregbee is a System Analyst, Educator and a PhD student. She is a purpose driven individual who takes great pleasure in impacting lives and building problem solving skills in the younger generation through coding and computer science education. She works at Lekki British School, Lagos where she teaches Cambridge KS3, KS4 and A-level ICT/Computer Science, she is one of the school’s main IT Staff and she facilitates the coding/Robotics club. She played an active role in the 2020 Virtual Innovation Summer Boot-Camp organised by Schools Computer Club Initiative during the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic lockdown in Nigeria. She is the initiator of JITECH CONCEPTS, a platform tailored to meet needs with IT solutions. She is a Geek Girls Collaborative Facilitator.