Our Team
Describe your team here.
My name is Widnie Pierre-Louis, and I am an undergraduate student at Rutgers University studying Biomedical Engineering. As a New Jersey native, I am glad to be in the biopharmaceutical hotspot of the U.S. Moreover, I adore the diverse cultures, foods, and activities I can partake in my home state. In addition to being a student, I am a research assistant at my university. The lab I work in leverages data analytics on integrated genomics with machine learning algorithms for precision medicine. I've been a part of the AI4All community since 2018, which has helped me shape my career path. I look forward to attending graduate school and working in industry in the future.
Victoria Muthoni Tswamuno is currently pursuing her Master’s Degree at Columbia School of Social Work and is entering her second and final year of study. Her concentration is Social Enterprise Administration and she is also a Management Fellow. Her research interests include identifying and addressing social issues that impact economic equity and advancement of women in the world especially Africa. Victoria has also worked tirelessly to advocate for women to be given access to education and to be allowed to choose their career path without gender being a barrier to who or what they should become. Victoria is interested in identifying the correlations between women’s empowerment issues and man’s issues addressed in unison and how that impacts adolescent and youth development as well as economic growth and development of a society. With her understanding that the environment plays a significant role in an individual’s trajectory, Victoria strongly believes that addressing women’s empowerment issues as well as addressing man’s issues will be an effective way to build a stronger more supportive structure for our youth who are the future. Victoria strongly believes that inclusion, understanding and acceptance of diversity is one of the greatest tools needed to solve some of the world’s biggest and most challenging problems.
AI4ALL is creating a world that is inclusive, safe and filled with opportunities that give our youth an opportunity and a chance to find their own way. A path that accepts who they are and allows them to thrive and be change makers at the same time becoming a part of a world changing movement through understanding and mastery of the artificial intelligence field. “Access and inclusion is so important for the youth in order to create different path ways that protect them from harm whilst allowing them to have a productive and positive trajectory.” We support and appreciate the initiative by AI4ALL into creating a better world for our youth through science and technology.
Antoinette “Toni” Gardner is a recent Master of Social Work graduate from the Columbia School of Social Work. As a student, she completed her field placement at SAFElab under Dr. Desmond Patton. During her time with SAFElab, she coordinated the 2021 UXR Fellowship Lab, engaging previously incarcerated young adults in user research design, coding, and other elements of computer science. She also co-led qualitative research in collaboration with the NYC Mayor’s Office. Born and raised in New Jersey, she received her BSW at Seton Hall University, where she minored in musical theater. She performed both locally and around the United States in various stage productions, most recently NJPAC’s national tour of The Magic Treehouse. Through social work, she hopes to continue to use her theatrical background, pushing for social justice and equity for marginalized and underserved populations throughout the NY metropolitan area and beyond.
Shouvik is an MS in Computer Science student at Columbia University. His research at the Computational Cancer Biology Lab focuses on using artificial intelligence to better understand disease and guide new and improved therapies. He is passionate about teaching Computer Science and takes pride in watching his students master new skills and apply them to their areas of interest. In his free time, he enjoys running, playing soccer, and reading.
Minahil Salam is an MSW student at Columbia School of Social Work. She graduated from New York University in 2020 with a double-major in Media, Culture, and Communication & English Literature from the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She has previously held positions at publishing houses including The New Press, a nonprofit public-interest publisher that aims to amplify progressive voices for a more inclusive, just, and equitable world. At Columbia she is motivated to advance her understanding of human behavior, continue her focus on social science literature, and gain knowledge to become a successful clinician. Her interests include reading, writing, art, and music.
Marissa is a current MSW candidate at Columbia School of Social Work, pursuing a Social Enterprise Administration track. Her current field placement is at the SAFElab, led by Dr. Desmond Patton. At the SAFELab, she has coordinated and built curriculum for the 2022 UXR Lab, where previously incarcerated individuals learn about user research and design, coding, computer science, and content creation. She is also a fellow for the Columbia World Grief Project, which studies the online expression of emotions in the Harlem community that occur in reaction to triggering events.
A native California, in 2019, she graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a BA in Political Economy. She has dedicated three years to advocacy work with the non-profits Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and Housing Works, in addition to teaching English in low income elementary schools in both the United States and France.
These domestic and international experiences solidified her passion to explore social work on a global scale. After graduating, she aims to continue her research in order to implement mental health interventions for those suffering from complex trauma, crises, and bereavement, as well as extend her passion for advocacy to online platforms.
Kauai A. Taylor is a Master’s candidate at the Columbia School of Social Work, pursuing an Advanced Clinical Practice track. She has dedicated the last 8 years to engaging with youth in Los Angeles through several art-based interventions, including as a teaching artist with Agency Arts, a performing arts program for formerly incarcerated & system impacted youth. Currently, she is involved with an early diversion program in Harlem that offers restorative justice for low-level offenses as an alternative to criminal punishment. Her passion for exploring non-traditional intervention practices has led to her interest in understanding the ways in which social workers can provide interventions through social media.
She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017, earning her degree in Psychology. Her research interest focuses on exploring complex traumas experienced by youth of color in low-income communities, and its impacts on their mental health. She is dedicated to increasing intersectional perspective in mental health care to produce more effective intervention approaches within low SES communities.
Eno Darkwa is a recent Master of Social Work graduate from Columbia University’s School of Social Work. She intends to pursue a law degree with a concentration in public interest law. She is very interested in policy, research, and community organizing and collaboration. Her career goal is to be able to utilize skills and knowledge gained from her experiences and academic background to collaborate with communities and national agencies through education and research. She hopes to design tailored approach and policies, specific to individual communities, to combat social issues, such as child sexual abuse, with the aim of protecting and rehabilitating victims. Her social work academic journey has emphasized for her the importance of viewing situations within the context of the individual and to desist from putting all the blame on individuals. Her time at SAFElab has opened up the possibilities and the constant needed interaction between social work and technology. AI4ALL is a great opportunity to shed light on the interaction between social work and technology, and dismantle some of the myths surrounding social work as a profession.
Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, Dr. Desmond Patton is the founding Director of SAFElab, Associate Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Data Science Institute, a faculty affiliate of the Social Intervention Group (SIG) and holds a courtesy appointment in the department of Sociology. He is the recipient of the 2018 Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR), and was named a 2017-2018 Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In his work, Dr. Patton combines social work, sociology, and technology to examine the relationship between youth, gang violence, and social media.
In 2017, Dr. Patton started a program called the Digital Scholars Fellowship Program and upon learning more about AI4ALL summer programs, he wanted to shift to the AI4ALL model in an effort to scale beyond New York City, signalling a new collaboration. Dr. Patton hopes to offer comprehensive training in AI that is embedded in a social work/social justice context. He emphasizes, "it's all about exposure, network, and community. AI4ALL exposes young people of color to AI while demystifying the idea that AI is only for a certain demographic. They are then wrapped in a support network of peers and adults who can support them in getting the skills they need to excel in AI while also having the psychosocial support to push through challenging times."
Augustin is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University since 2010, where he directs the Mobile Social Lab. The goal of his research is to reconcile the benefits of personal data and social networks with a commitment to fairness and privacy. His latest results address transparency in personalization, the role of human mobility in privacy across several domains, the efficiency of crowdsourced content curation, the fairness of incentives and algorithms used in social networking. His research lead to 35 papers in tier-1 conferences (five receiving best or best student paper awards at ACM CoNEXT, SIGMETRICS, USENIX IMC, IEEE MASS, Algotel), covered by several media including the NYT blog, The Washington Post, the Economist, or The Guardian. An ex student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he earned a Ph.D in mathematics and computer science in 2006, a NSF CAREER Award in 2013 and the ACM SIGMETRICS Rising star award in 2013. He has been an active member of the network and web research community, serving in the program committees of ACM SIGMETRICS (as chair), FAT*, SIGCOMM, WWW, CoNEXT (as chair), EC, MobiCom, MobiHoc, IMC, WSDM, COSN, AAAI ICWSM, and IEEE Infocom, as area editor for IEEE TMC, ACM SIGCOMM CCR, ACM SIGMOBILE MC2R, and editor in chief for PACM POMACS.
Andrea Clark-Sevilla is a PhD student in computer science from Querétaro, Mexico, working under Professor Salleb-Aouissi. She did her Master's in computer science at Columbia University and her undergraduate in mathematics at Cornell. She is interested broadly in machine learning, focusing on precision medicine and explainable AI and interpretability methods for understanding black-box models. In her spare time, she enjoys playing video games, biking, learning languages, and watching movies.
Ana-Andreea Stoica is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. Her work focuses on mathematical models, data analysis, and inequality in social networks. From recommendation algorithms to the way information spreads in networks, Ana is particularly interested in studying the effect of algorithms on people's sense of privacy, community, and access to information and opportunities. She strives to integrate tools from mathematical models—from graph theory to opinion dynamics—with sociology to gain a deeper understanding of the ethics and implications of technology in our everyday lives. Ana grew up in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to the US for college, where she graduated from Princeton in 2016 with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics. Since 2019, she has been co-organizing the Mechanism Design for Social Good initiative.