Welcoming Knowledge Exchange
Issued on: 06 Nov 2020
The Social Digital Change and Economy group has a new Knowledge Exchange (KE) associate funded by the College of Social Science ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA). We have Bishakha Chaudhury as the dedicated KE associate for the group. She comes to us from the Social Brains in Action Lab in the Department of NeuroScience and Psychology within the University of Glasgow. She has hand-on work experience in the private sector for over 12 years as a programmer and technical requirement analyst in an assortment of industry – games, computer-assisted surgery and financial technology. She is keen to identify opportunities and build bridges across the different academic disciplines and non-academic sector with a focus on promoting social good. Bish will be
- Liaising with Impact Acceleration team and Research Development & Partnership Engagement team for the Social Digital Change group
- Consolidating existing team contacts with external academic/non-academic partners, as well as generating and nurturing new contacts, projects and funding opportunities
- Developing and Facilitating knowledge exchange events
- Helping the group with their digital presence and with reaching a wider audience
Bish has a wide range of interests around the issues of applications of Social Robot, uses and effects of AI in the Society, games and technology uses from the perspective of education, economic divide, gender and age. When working in the industry, Bish started getting interested in how the users adapted the systems her team built and personalised its use for themselves. As a technical analyst, it became apparent to her that in addition to technical requirements, identifying the meaning of what the client said or did not say and an awareness of how clients expected to use the software was key to building the most efficient solution. This intuition of focusing on people developed into a more solid understanding when she started working with academics in neuroscience and psychology for designing experiments on how humans perceived and interacted with social robots. She started getting exposure to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that underpinned those studies and participated in knowledge exchange projects. This helped her in gaining insight on how academic research can build bridges to people in industry, government and society at large. So, what started from focusing on creating efficient software solutions grew into an interest in connecting the knowledge of social sciences to creating and experiencing of digital. Consequently, she has entered this role with an enthusiasm for learning, understanding and connecting not only the various academic discourses on the Social and Digital but also, for linking them to the industry and third-sector practitioners.
We are delighted to say that Bish has hit the ground running by setting up collaborations with Social Robots (SoBOTs) Lab under Prof Emily Cross. Currently, she is helping us with planning events for this academic year, promoting community engagement for our Festival of Social Science event, and organizing our blogs and newsletters. Since she is part of the IAA team and works with the Research Office, it would be part of her remit to be updating us with any Social Digital theme-specific funding calls. I am sure we would all get to meet her in person after the pandemic but till then she is available on Zoom and Teams. To contact her please email: bishakha.chaudhury@glasgow.ac.uk.