Civic Tech Fellows

Osama Alshaykh is a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University.  He is founder of collaborate.center (Knowledge collaboration platform) used in telecommunications and construction (TalonView) and healthcare (CEO of nxtec and CTO and board member of Talon). Osama served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on CSVT and an area Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication, Theory, Techniques & Applications Journal. Osama was part of the founding team of PacketVideo Corporation and was its CTO.  He served as a research scientist in Rockwell Science Center and Visiting Researcher at University of California Berkley. He has served on technology and development boards including AT&T, Verizon, Android, Euclid, Talon and LogicBlox. Osama received the BU ECE Award of Excellence in Teaching, 2015, the BU ECE Best Class Award, 2016 and Fulbright Scholarship, 1991.

Lei Guo joined the Emerging Media Studies faculty in 2014. She is also an affiliated faculty member at Boston University’s Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on the development of media effects theories, computational social science methodologies, and emerging media and democracy in the United States and China.

Michelle Johnson is an Associate Professor of the Practice, Multimedia/Online Journalism, at Boston University, where she has taught full time since 2009. In addition to teaching, Johnson oversees the award-winning Boston University News Service, a showcase for work produced BU Journalism students. In 2014 BU News Service was named top online student news site by both the Associated Press, Massachusetts/Rhode Island, and the Society of Professional Journalists, Region I. Dive deeper into Michelle's work and teaching.

Dr. Gabe Kaptchuk is a Research Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Research Development Fellow at BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2020, under the supervision of his advisors Avi Rubin and Matt Green. Gabe has worked in industry, at Intel Labs, and in the policy sphere, working in the United States Senate in the personal office of Sen. Ron Wyden. He has broad research interests within cryptographic systems and is passionate about the spread of provably secure systems beyond the laboratory setting. Discover more about Gabe.

Maxwell Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston University and a Faculty Fellow at the Initiative on Cities. He studies American political institutions, including Congress, electoral institutions, and local political institutions. He is particularly interested in how institutional arrangements and rules impact representation and policy outcomes. He also works as a consultant and expert witness on questions about voting rights, redistricting, and representation. Find out more about his research.

Andrew Sellars is the founding director of the Technology Law Clinic, a legal service for undergraduate and graduate students at MIT and BU. In the clinic, BU Law students counsel clients on laws and regulations that affect their research, advocacy, and innovation, including intellectual property, media law, data privacy, and cybersecurity law. Sellars has overseen the legal representation of hundreds of student clients through his work in the clinic, representing computer security researchers, public interest advocates on technology and society issues, innovative startups, and student journalists. His scholarship focuses on application of intellectual property and computer access laws to technology research and journalism. Learn more about his research interests.

Gianluca Stringhini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. In his research Gianluca applies a data-driven approach to better understand malicious activity on the Internet, including mis- and disinformation and hate speech. Through the collection and analysis of large-scale datasets, he develops robust mitigation techniques to make the Internet a safer place. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed papers, is the PI of multiple NSF grants, and has led university-wide initiatives that bring together scholars from different disciplines to better understand and fight online misinformation. Learn more about his work.

Derry is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science. She conducts research in natural language processing and knowledge bases, with a focus on machine learning and deep learning applications on these research areas. Her studies include machine translation, which demonstrates how to leverage well-annotated languages to improve the translation of less-annotated ones. She also studies methods for automatically learning the meanings of verbs and extracting information for knowledge base population through analysis of diverse information sources. Prior to joining BU, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and received her Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore. Find out all about her here.

Brooke Williams is an investigative reporter who specializes in data journalism. Her work has contributed to a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, a George Polk Award and a Gerald Loeb Award, among many others. Before joining Boston University, she was a residential journalism fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Her internationally recognized data-driven investigations have appeared in print and online as well as on radio and TV in publications such as ABC World News, The San Diego Union-Tribune, inewsource and NPR. Williams currently is a contributor to The Intercept and working on a multi-year investigation into federal prosecutors that utilizes machine learning. Williams teaches a course where students cover the city of Newton for the Boston Globe. She also teaches and helps students publish data-driven investigative reports for newspaper, radio and TV as part of the Justice Media Computational Journalism co-Lab. Find out more about Brooke's career.