Episode 5 – Innovation from the Global South

How can we fight women’s harassment? What does it take to be an activist? In this podcast episode number 5, Almas speaks with Dr. Nova Ahmed an Associate Professor at North South University, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Dr. Nova Ahmed is a computer scientist living in Bangladesh. She has finished her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and came back to Bangladesh to make changes. She used her experiences of working with sensors to fight social challenges such as systems to protect women from sexual harassment as she returned.

She continued to use her work that could support marginal communities with low-cost, locally available solution approaches. She has worked with Google to explore the inclusion of women and marginal communities in technology. She is currently working on a funded project to enhance the inclusion of women in digital finance through enabling better technology designs funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Her work ensures social justice and feminist human-computer interaction.

Nova is one of the founders and one of the Executive Committee members of the National Young Academy Bangladesh, she is a member of the Executive Committee of Global Young Academy, Fellow of Sangat, the feminist network in South Asia, founding board member of Kaan Pete Roi: a suicide prevention call center. She is an active volunteer of the Bangladesh Mathematical Olympiad, Children’s Science Congress and Missing Daughter’s Initiative. She is the Chair of SIGCHI, Dhaka Chapter in Bangladesh. She has organized the Ada Lovelace Celebration to include more women in technology in Bangladesh for 2020 and 2021. In her free time, she is busy with her two daughters and a fun partner!