Presenters

Alipta Ballav

Alipta is a fun-loving and jovial person, easily approachable, a problem solver, someone who likes to gives and receive genuine feedback, and who continuously learns. He is from Bangalore. He is a design graduate from one of the oldest D school from Kolkata. He has been in the design industry for almost 2 decades and has been a part of multiple digital transforming journeys for high profile clients, wearing multiple hats while at work. At present, he is building and managing the User experience Design team at Cerner Corporation in Bangalore.

Davide Bolchini

Davide Bolchini is Professor and Chair in the Department of Human-Centered Computing at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI, and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) MS and PhD programs. His HCI research specializes in requirements modelling, user experience design methodologies, and interactive accessibility for the blind and visually impaired. His work generated more than 120 peer-reviewed publications in major international conferences and journals in the field, and has been supported by multiple research grants from the NSF, Google Faculty Research Awards, and industry collaborations. His research has been continuously funded by the NSF since 2010.

Jaki Clark

Jaki Clark fell in love with quantitative and qualitative research while earning her degrees in psychology and designing tech for learning. She’s performed user research for Education.com, Adobe, The Walt Disney Company, as well as established formative user research practices at Eli Lilly and Lessonly.

Doug Gardner

Doug Gardner is a Principal User Experience Consultant at GravityDrive. As a research and design consultant, he helps clients make decisions based on a clear understanding of business objectives, science, system users and their needs.

Doug has a PhD in Experimental Psychology and over 20 years of experience with human factors and leadership in User Experience (UX).  His work experience includes LexisNexis, Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (now Siemens), as well as numerous clients as a consultant.  He is the past chair of the Computer Systems Technical Group within the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), as well as holding other positions within HFES.  He was the founder and served as host of the Southwest Ohio World Usability Day event 5 times.  A pragmatic empiricist at heart, Doug believes it is important to constantly strive for excellence in UX by being a conduit to link basic understanding to applied success.

Poppe Guthrie

Poppe is a passionate life-long learner and community builder. She has supported SEP and numerous clients in integrating research driven design and cohesive team collaboration including all stakeholders in the process.  Through a passion for design and community, she founded the Indianapolis chapter of the Interaction Design Association, the annual Indy Design Week, and Indy Coffee Box with her husband, and also supports the indy.design slack group and IxDA International. She is grateful to work with SEP building exceptional products with exceptional people, a rare opportunity.

Gopinath Jaganmohan

Gopinath Jaganmohan has spent over 17 years in the technology space and led the development of ConverSight.ai’s voice and natural language-based conversational AI platform equipped with Athena, a multi-channel bot that provides a goal-oriented conversational interface for business tasks. ConverSight.ai’s unique natural language processing (NLP) capabilities enables a user to ask a question in simple terms and builds context from one question to the next, supporting a user’s insight discovery process. The cutting-edge product allows sales and service teams to gather real-time insights, automates busywork and answers questions instantly to improve productivity over 200%.

He previously was a Principal Architect at Cognizant Technology Solutions where he founded their Internet of Things Labs and canter for the Future of Work. ConverSight.ai is Gopinath’s third start-up, with two successful exits from previous ventures in business intelligence and SaaS architecture.

Lindsay Kurbursky

Lindsay Kurbursky has been researching the topic of emotion and shame resilience in user-centered design as a “passion  project.” She has been published on the UXBlog, Medium, and the UX Collective.

Lindsay is a career changer, having a background in fine arts. She obtained her Master of Science in Media Arts and Science and Human-Computer Interaction in 2016 and currently works for Allegion PLC as a Senior Interaction Designer.

Aqueasha Martin-Hammond

Aqueasha Martin-Hammond is an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at IUPUI in the Human-Centered Computing Department and is associated with the newly developed Institute of Integrative AI. Her research examines the design of novel intelligent technologies that support older adults and how existing intelligent technologies help or hinder independent living and aging. She has over a decade of experience designing and examining technologies that support individuals’ health, wellness, and continued independence as they age.

Geetha Priya Padmanaban

Geetha Priya Padmanaban is a current Master’s student in Human-Computer Interaction at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. In the past, she built user interfaces using design systems for mission-critical products in healthcare and financial domains. During her course of work, she developed a deep admiration towards the design world and nurtured it by involving in conversations with the UX community.

With her background in engineering, specialization in Human-Centered thinking, and unbounded enthusiasm to create better user experiences, she strives to be a design advocate for meeting the user needs, business goals, and technical limitations irrespective of the domain.

Prakash Sambaraju

Working with Wipro’s Digital Consulting space, Prakash Sambaraju is a seasoned IT professional with nearly 15 years of experience in diverse areas such as Digital Consulting, Robotic Process Automation, Digital Transformation and Business Process Re-Engineering.

In his current role, Prakash is responsible for driving transformational change across all levels of an organization through the implementation of cutting-edge digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Digital Process Automation (DPA).

Prakash was inspired to get into AI from having worked extensively in the space of Process Automation and Process Re-engineering where he found AI offered a gateway to solutions that align with Business Strategy through Digital Channels. The Next generation Decision-Science will be a combination of AI + ML + Design Thinking driven and rightly described as ‘Fourth Industrial revolution’.

Doug Scamahorn

Doug Scamahorn has been designing for the constantly evolving digital world for over 20 years, adapting the fundamentals of human-centered design to each new interaction paradigm. His current professional areas of interest are around growth experimentation, design thinking and facilitation. He is amazed at what can be accomplished by rapidly seeking insight into a problem space, ideating, prototyping and testing potential solutions before heavily investing in them. To that end, he has been exploring ways to make VUI and AI engagements human-centered and workshop-able. You can find out more about Doug’s professional background on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/dscamahorn).

Mike Sellers

Mike Sellers has been practicing user-centered-design since the late 1980s. In addition to more than twenty-five years working as a game designer, he has worked in mechanical engineering, medical and scientific visualization, and consulted on many products ranging from airport defibrillators to office copiers. As part of work done with DARPA, he has also created and published original research on advanced social/emotional artificial intelligence.

He is now Director of the Game Design Program and a Professor of Practice at Indiana University, and is the author of “Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach” (2017). In the early 1990s he founded and ran a successful user interface design consultancy, followed by three game companies, in addition to working for major game studios and enterprise software companies.

Abdul Suleiman

Abdul Suleiman is Chief Experience Officer of UX 4Sight, a digital user experience (UX) agency that specializes in making websites and software applications more intuitive, engaging, and profitable. For the last 18 years Abdul has helped over 40 Fortune 500 companies including AT&T, Citi, and Merck to strategically gather, analyze, and apply evidence-based user research to make informed user-centered design decisions. 

As an Adjunct Professor, Abdul has taught in DePaul University’s graduate UX programs and for 9 other universities. He has also taught over 330 UX best practices certification courses across 10 different course titles for companies like Disney, Capital One, Visa, and Intuit. Abdul holds a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His degree specialization encompasses User Experience and MBA coursework. He received his BA with honors from Loyola University Chicago.

Jordan Thayer

Jordan Thayer received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence in 2012 from the University of New Hampshire. Ever since, he’s been applying artificial intelligence in academia and industry to problems including intrusion detection, planning, static analysis, and program generation.

As a thought leader at SEP, he’s been proving that AI isn’t futuristic technology. Rather, it’s a collection of techniques of varying levels of maturity that can often reliably solve problems they have today. He gives talks, runs workshops, visualizes algorithm behavior, and builds proofs of concept as well as products to show what AI can do already.

Ke Zhuang

Ke is a UX Designer at ETS. She has applied UX strategies across different industries including Education, SaaS, and Healthcare. Ke loves motivating and empowering users by crafting innovative products. She graduated from IUPUI in 2019 with a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction.