AIDG’s Peter Haas selected as a 2010 TED Senior Fellow
by Catherine LaineDecember 21st, 2009
The non-profit TED has selected AIDG’s Executive Director Peter Haas as one of 20 inaugural Senior Fellows. The TED Senior Fellows program is designed to bring together young world-changers and trailblazers from the arts, science, entrepreneurship, the NGO sector and education. As part of its commitment to TED, AIDG will be launching an exciting new initiative in our technology research and development program in 2010 that will transform our ability to do research with local and university partners. We’ll be able to share more details next year.
Two of our favorite bloggers Erik Hersman (Co-founder of Ushahidi.com; blogger, AfriGadget and White African) and Juliana Rotich (Co-founder, Ushahidi.com; blogger, Afromusing and Global Voices) are also 2010 senior Fellows.
Erik Hersman of Afrigadget documents low-tech entrepreneurialism in Africa. Specifically he looks at ingenuity born of necessity, “tech that keeps economies on life support”. Raised in Sudan (until the war got bad), Kenya, and then again Sudan, he’s a bit of a tech anthropologist searching for Africans solutions to African problems.
From wikipedia
Ushahidi (Kiswahili for “testimony” or “witness”) was a website created in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map. It is also the name of the open source software developed for that site, which has since been improved, released freely, and used for a number of similar projects.
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The software has since been used to track violence in Congo and pharmacy stockouts in Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Malawi, and monitor elections in Mexico and India, among other projects. It was also used by Al Jazeera to collect eyewitness reports during the 2008-2009 Gaza War.
In addition to Pete, Eric and Juliana, here are the 17 other fellows:
Taghi Amirani (Iran/UK) - Documentary filmmaker, Amirani Films
Rachel Armstrong (UK) - Teaching fellow, The Bartlett School of Architecture; physician; science-fiction author
Frederick Balagadde (Uganda/US) - Research scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; co-inventor of the microchemostat, a medical diagnostic chip
April Karen Baptiste (Trinidad) - Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Colgate University
Faisal Chohan (Pakistan) - CEO, Cogilent Solutions; founder, Brightspyre, Pakistan’s largest online job portal
Colleen Flanigan (US) - Fine artist; stop-motion armaturist, coral reef restoration expert
Gabriella Gómez-Mont (Mexico) - Founder, Tóxico Cultura, a Mexico City-based artistic think tank
Jonathan Gosier (US/Uganda) - Founder, Appfrica, a business incubator in Kampala
Adrian Hong (US/North Korea/South Korea) - Director, The Pegasus Project; former director, Liberty in North Korea
Juliette LaMontagne (US) - Education consultant; innovation facilitator
Alexander MacDonald (US) - Economist, NASA Ames Research Center
Juliana Machado-Ferreira (Brazil) - Biologist, SOS FAUNA; PhD candidate, Sao Paulo University
VK Madhavan (India) - Executive Director, Central Himalayan Rural Action Group (Chirag)
Naomi Natale (Italy/US) - Founder, One Million Bones, a large-scale social activism art installation
Bola Olabisi (Nigeria/UK) - Founder, Global Women Inventors and Innovators Network (GWIIN)
Alexander Petroff (US/Democratic Republic of the Congo) - Founder, Working Villages International
Mohammad Tauheed (Bangladesh) - Architect; founder, ArchSociety
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