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Saiph Savage

Director

HCI Lab at WVU

Saiph Savage directs the Civic Innovation Lab where she studies how collective action is organized. She then uses these findings to design human centered platforms that organize citizen crowds to produce collective action to build improved democracies, access better jobs, and create positive change. Impact. Dr. Savage's research has had observable impact. She was named one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by the MIT Technology Review. She recently also won a 2.5 million dollar NSF grant to study systems to computationally organize displaced rural workers to develop their digital skills for the purpose of accessing better jobs and diminishing disinformation in their rural towns. Saiph has opened the area of Human Computer Interaction in rural West Virginia, and has had noticeable influence on national and local governments in Latin America by leading them to adopt Human Centered Design to deliver better services to citizens. Her research also helped push the creation of a Federal Advisory Committee in Mexico for exponential technology. She frequently collaborates directly with Mexico's Federal Government and social companies to create research and systems that are used throughout the nation. Dr. Savage has also shared her research with Latin American presidencies, European Government officials, as well as well-established civic organizations, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), the National Democratic Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Council, the Aspen Institute, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Through these collaborations, she has designed human centered technology that empowers underpriviledged citizens and organizations at scale (e.g., rural adults, civic institutions in the Global South, or gig workers). Dr. Savage's work has been covered on major news outlets, such as: the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Vice News and the New York Times. Background. Saiph is currently a visiting professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and adjunct professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She holds a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from UNAM, a masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has worked at Microsoft Bing and Intel Labs.