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Dr. Neeta Verma
Ex. DG NIC and Ex. Chief Advisor (IT) ECI
India HCI 2025
Dr. Neeta Verma is a distinguished Indian technology leader who has previously served as the Director General of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and Chief Advisor (IT) to the Election Commission of India (ECI). At ECI, she guided IT strategy for the management of India’s elections and played a key role in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Prior to that, as DG at NIC, the Government of India’s premier ICT organisation, she led large-scale digital infrastructure and e-governance platforms , Dr. Verma has been instrumental in driving digital transformation across health, education, government services and citizen-engagement platforms. Her leadership has emphasised inclusion, scalability and the integration of emerging technologies into public service delivery. A strong advocate of digital access as a human right, she brings strategic vision as well as operational expertise helping institutions move from manual processes to sustainable, technology-enabled frameworks.
In her current and past capacities, Dr. Verma has built strong cross-functional partnerships across government, industry and academia, and is widely regarded for her ability to translate complex technical mandates into socially meaningful outcomes.
Anicia Peters
National Commission on Research, Science and Technology, Bangladesh
India HCI 2025
Anicia is a computer scientist specializing in Human-Computer Interaction and currently serves as CEO of Namibia’s National Commission on Research, Science and Technology (NCRST). She previously held key roles as Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Development at the University of Namibia and Chairperson of the Presidential Task Force on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A bold, independent thinker, Anicia is driven to advance tech, research, and innovation across Africa. Outside work, she enjoys family life, gardening, and writing.
Catherine Holloway
Academic Director, GDI Hub & Professor Interaction Design & Innovation, UCLIC
India HCI 2025
Cathy is the Academic Director of the Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub) and Professor of Interaction Design and Innovation at UCL’s Interaction Centre. She co-led GDI Hub to become the first WHO Collaborating Centre on Assistive Technology, with projects across 41 countries impacting over 28 million people. Cathy has shaped global policy through roles with WHO and the Global Report on Assistive Technology, and has driven innovation by launching Africa’s first assistive tech accelerator and impact fund. She has published over 190 papers and the book *Disability Interactions*, and was named in the Shawe Trust Disability 100 List 2023.
Anirban Bondyopadhyay
Senior Scientist at National Institute of Materials Science
India HCI 2025
Anirban Bandyopadhyay is a Senior Scientist at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), specializing in brain-inspired molecular computing and quantum biophysics. He is known for developing “nano-brain” architectures and exploring the role of quantum oscillations in cognition and consciousness. Anirban has authored over 180 publications and several books, and his innovations span from organic nanomachines to new circuit elements. A former visiting scientist at MIT and recipient of multiple international awards, he continues to push the frontiers of science at the intersection of technology, biology, and physics.
Rama Vennelakanti
Anthropologist, Systems Thinker, a seasoned User Researcher, and a newly minted entrepreneur
India HCI 2025
As one of the earliest User and HCI researchers in India she has worked with multidisciplinary multinational teams in innovation driven environments driving exploratory , generative , and evaluative research across categories of products and services at various stages of maturity including at Intel and HP Labs. She brings an ethnographic expertise and lens backed by a systems thinking approach, to ensure human centeredness and actionable insights to influence the work and work ethos of teams and organization she works with. She has to her credit peer reviewed publications and patent grants.
Dr. Nova Ahmed
North South University, Bangladesh
India HCI 2024
Dr. Nova Ahmed is a computer scientist living in Bangladesh. She finished her PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and returned 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 by enabling better technology designs funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Her work ensures social justice and feminist human-computer interaction.
Eric Zimmerman
NYU Game Center, USA
India HCI 2024
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer, interaction designer, technology artist, and games researcher. He explores system design, play cultures, and interactive aesthetics. With Katie Salen, he co-authored the seminal "Rules of Play" which contains the most fundamental design thoughts on games. He has taught at NYU, MIT, Parsons School of Design, and The School of Visual Arts, and has led hundreds of classes and workshops on game design worldwide. He is a founding faculty and Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center, Tisch School of the Arts.
He founded the GameLab in NYC with Peter Lee and published several games like Diner Dash. He has worked with LEGO, Disney, Mattel, VH-1, Leapfrog, Fisher-Price, Nickelodeon, and HBO.
Atul Manohar
Thought-Craft Design Studio, India
India HCI 2024
With over 30 years of experience in product innovation and development, Atul is a seasoned strategist who has designed several physical and software products for consumer and enterprise markets. He is currently the Chief Innovation Officer at Thought-Craft Design Studio, a company that offers UX product innovation services to product companies and tech startups.
At Thought-Craft, Atul leads the design interventions at various stages of the journey of an idea to a successful product, improving the customer experience and solving problems with design thinking. He also supports UXI Tank, a platform that connects UX professionals with the right opportunities, as a strategic investor. Previously, he led the Zededa Experience Design team, designing their cloud platform interface for industrial IoT use cases. Atul is passionate about experimenting with innovation tools, mentoring young entrepreneurs, and organizing UX and HCI conferences.
Prof. Judy van Biljon
University of South Africa, South Africa
India HCI 2024
Judy van Biljon is a professor at the University of South Africa (Unisa). She was educated at the universities of the Free State (MSc), Northwest (BEd), and Unisa (PhD in Computer Science). She holds the National Research Foundation's Chair in Information and Communication for Development (ICT4D) hosted by the School of Computing. She is passionate about the use of Human-Computer Interaction principles to improve the design and evaluation of technology for teaching and learning and the sustainable use of technology in resource-constrained environments. She promotes research collaboration and capacity building through initiatives such as the Southern African Chapter of the International Network for Postgraduate Students in ICT4D (IPID), Swedish and South African collaboration (SASUF) and Responsible AI (RAI) UK project, and the ict4dsa.com platform. She is collaborating with researchers in Ghana, Uganda, Sweden, Finland, and the UK.
Prof. Venkatesh Rajamanickam
IIT Bombay, India
India HCI 2023
Venkatesh Rajamanickam is a Professor at the IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay. He is a HCI designer, educator and researcher. His Information Design Lab at IIT Bombay utilizes graphic design, interactive computer graphics, data-processing algorithms and emerging technologies to address challenging problems in data, design and art. His research focuses on data-based and visual understanding of a range of issues from public understanding of science, urban living, politics, education, transportation, to generative art.
Prof. Janet Read
University of Central Lancashire, UK
India HCI 2023
A pioneer in the research area of Child Computer Interaction, Janet is an academic within Computer Science where she has taught a range of subjects including HCI, Research methods for CS, User Centred Security, Interaction Design, and Mathematics.
Before joining academia, Janet spent ten years teaching secondary mathematics. Her PhD at UCLan was the first research to consider how handwriting recognition could be used to support children’s writing and this work brought her into the then-new community of academics looking at interactive technology for children. She hosted the first Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC) in Preston in 2003 and then repeated this in 2016, hosting it with the BBC. She founded the Fun and Games conference series at UCLan which later became the ACM CHIPlay conference series and has also hosted the British HCI conference.
Prof. Richard Anderson
University of Washington, USA
India HCI 2022
Richard Anderson is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, where he has been on the faculty since 1986, with brief leaves to Indian Institute of Science, Microsoft Research, and PATH. His research has focused on computing for the developing world since 2005, when he became involved with the Digital Study Hall project. In 2009, Richard spent a sabbatical year working with the Digital Health Solutions group at PATH, a global health NGO based in Seattle. This opportunity allowed him to increase his efforts on applying computing technologies to challenges in global health. While working with PATH, he co-founded the Projecting Health project, which used the Community-Led Video Education model to promote healthy practices in rural areas in India. His research interests in ICTD include technologies for behavior change communication, improving tools to support the use of data in strengthening health systems, and digital financial services. In 2020 he received the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics for contributions bridging the fields of computer science, education, and global health.
Manohar Swaminathan
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research
India HCI 2022
Manohar Swaminathan is a Senior Principal researcher at Microsoft Research India. His current research in accessibility is built around Ludic Design for Accessibility a new methodology which puts play and playfulness central to all technology solutions for accessibility. He is also a founding co-convener of the Center for Accessibility in the Global South at the IIIT-Bangalore. Manohar is an academic-turned technology entrepreneur-turned researcher with a driving passion to build and deploy technology for positive societal impact. He has a PhD in CS from Brown University, was a Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, and has co-founded, managed, advised, and angel-funded several technology startups in India, including PicoPeta Simputers and Strand Life Sciences.
Prof. Helen Petrie
University of York, UK
India HCI 2021
Prof. Petrie is Professor Emerita of HCI in the Department of Computer Science, University of York, having over 20 years of internationally-recognized research on technologies for people with disabilities and elderly people, aiming to improve their quality of life and well-being. She has been involved in over 30 British and international projects in these areas and has published widely.
She has received a Royal Television Society Technical Innovation Prize, a Social Impact Award from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Royal National Institute for Blind People. She is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society.
Her current interests lie in the areas of Inclusive and Usable Security in Computing, Sustainability through Interaction Design, Psychological aspects of the Introduction and Use of New Technologies and Supporting the elderly to live independently in their own homes for longer.
Prof. Roger K. Moore
The University of Sheffield, UK
India HCI 2020 (Online)
Prof. Roger K. Moore has over 40 years’ experience in Speech Technology R&D and, although an engineer by training, much of his research has been based on insights from human speech perception and production.
As Head of the UK Government's Speech Research Unit from 1985 to 1999, he was responsible for the development of the Aurix range of speech technology products and the subsequent formation of 20/20 Speech Ltd.
Prashant Shukla
Managing Director, Udemy Inc., India
India HCI 2020 (Online)
Prashant Shukla’s career over the last two decades spans successful leadership roles in marketing, sales, product management and software development in US and India.
Currently, Prashant is the Managing Director for Udemy (UFG) business for India and South Asia. Udemy, a San Francisco based company, is one of largest and most popular online learning system offering 100,000 courses from leading experts in tech courses and soft skills courses to 37 million users worldwide.
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