The University has recognized four Faculty of Information assistant professors with Connaught New Researcher Awards. Congratulations to Profs Claire Battershill, Priyank Chandra, Rafael Grohmann and Anastasia Kuzminykh.
Forty-nine faculty members were recognized across the University’s three campuses. The annual award supports early-stage researchers across a diverse range of disciplines and aims to enhance their competitiveness for external awards. The Connaught New Researcher Award is part of the Connaught Fund, Canada’s largest university research funding program which has given out more than $183 million to tackle pressing global issues.
Assistant Professor Claire Battershill
Project: ‘Lighting the Windows of the Past’: Feminist and Queer Poetics, Data Visualization, and Creative Engagements with Literary and Historical Special Collections
Assistant Professor Claire Battershill is cross appointed with the Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of English. Her research focuses on the history and future of the book, examining relationships between feminist experimental publishing, literary aesthetics, and practices of book making in 20th and 21st-century literature. She is a Co-Director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a critical digital archive of early 20th-century publishers’ records, the author of a collection of short stories and the Co-Creator of ‘Make Believe,’ a collaborative research-creation project funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Assistant Professor Priyank Chandra
Project: Participatory Design to Facilitate Collective Action Among Gig Economy Workers
Assistant Professor Priyank Chandra is the director of the STREET Lab. His research focuses on the sociotechnical practices of informal communities at the margins of society. Prof Chandra’s research is interdisciplinary, influenced by research drawn from HCI and CSCW, and theories and concepts from STS, sociology, development studies and institutional analysis. Through empirically investigating the lived experiences of communities, he critically assesses the design and evaluation of technologies and the role they play in social exclusion. His research is committed to developing socially just and ethical systems designed to support the needs of marginalized communities and individuals. Read our recent story on the STREET Lab which marked its first birthday this fall
Assistant Professor Rafael Grohmann
Project: Worker-owned platforms and gender: rider and tech coops in Brazil and Argentina
Assistant Professor Rafael Grohmann is cross appointed to Arts, Culture and Media at UTSC. He leads the DigiLabour Initiative and is a researcher with Fairwork. Prof Grohmann is interested in platform labour and platformization of labour, especially the forms of agency, organization and resistance on the part of workers. He has a research background in Latin America, connecting old forms of informal work with “new” platform mechanisms. Prof Grohmann is currently developing research on click farm work, fair work in the platform economy and platform cooperativism in Latin America, using mixed methods and action research.
Assistant Professor Anastasia Kuzminykh
Project: Interpretation of Information in Human Collaboration with Conversational AI
In her work in human-computer interaction and information dynamics, Assistant Professor Anastasia Kuzminykh analyzes the complex communication environments and designs corresponding systems to advance user performance. Her current research interests are mostly focused on human interaction with AI systems, particularly on human-agent communication supported through conversational user interfaces. She is interested in how users perceive AI systems and how these perceptions affect information exchange processes, how people organize information through conversational interfaces. Prof Kuzminykh is the director of the COoKIE research group (Communication, Organization of Knowledge, Information Ecosystems) and the Founder of the Toronto Human-AI Interaction Research School.
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