Dr. Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
ishtiaque@csebuet.org
Founding Member

Short Biography

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of the ‘Third Space” research group. He is also a graduate faculty member of the School of Environment, a Faculty Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, and a Senior Fellow at Massey College.

Ishtiaque’s research focuses on the design challenges around strengthening the ‘voices’ of marginalized communities worldwide. He conducted ethnography and built technologies with many underprivileged communities in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, China, Canada, and the US. Ishtiaque received his Ph.D. and Master’s from Cornell University in the USA and his Bachelor’s from BUET in Bangladesh. He received the International Fulbright Science and Technology Fellowship, Fulbright Centennial Fellowship, and Schwartz Reisman Institute Fellowship, among others. His research has been funded by all three branches of Canadian tri-council research (NSERC, CIHR, SSHRC), NSF, NIH, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, Samsung, the World Bank, UNICEF, and UNDP, among others.

Selected Publications

  1. Ahmed, Syed Ishtiaque, et al. “Protibadi: A platform for fighting sexual harassment in urban Bangladesh.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2014.
  2. Ahmed, Syed Ishtiaque, Nusrat Jahan Mim, and Steven J. Jackson. “Residual mobilities: infrastructural displacement and post-colonial computing in Bangladesh.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2015.
  3. Ahmed, Syed Ishtiaque, et al. “Privacy, security, and surveillance in the Global South: A study of biometric mobile SIM registration in Bangladesh.” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2017
  4. Ahmed, Syed Ishtiaque, Steven J. Jackson, and Md Rashidujjaman Rifat. “Learning to fix: knowledge, collaboration and mobile phone repair in Dhaka, Bangladesh.” Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. 2015.
  5. Ahmed, Syed Ishtiaque, et al. “Digital privacy challenges with shared mobile phone use in Bangladesh.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1.CSCW (2017): 1-20