Our Speakers

De Ranitz, has been the CEO of SURF since May 2020. SURF, headquartered in Utrecht and Amsterdam, employs around 500 people working in research and education (R&E). Prior to this, she held leadership positions in various organizations, Chairman of the Executive Board of Inholland University of Applied Science, Chairman of the Amsterdam School of the Arts, Managing Director of Nederlands Dans Theater and of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Tilburg University.

With a background in the commercial sector, she brings extensive experience in change management to her role. She holds a Master of Arts degree from Leiden University. Throughout her career, De Ranitz has focused on collaborating with highly skilled professionals, emphasizing creativity and ambition. She has a keen interest in leveraging technology for innovation, particularly in her current role at SURF. In addition to her responsibilities at SURF, she serves on several Supervisory Boards in the arts, healthcare, and insurance sectors. De Ranitz resides in The Hague with her husband and dog, and has two adult children.

Dr. Agha Ali Raza received his Ph.D. in Computer Science/Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. He has 19 years of experience as a teacher and researcher spanning prestigious organizations within Pakistan, including FAST-NU, Lahore, the Information Technology University, Punjab, and LUMS. His research focuses on Speech & Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning (ML), and Technologies for Development.

The goal of his research and work is to help foster an accessible, inclusive, equitable, and safe digital world where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. He aims to serve low-literate, low-income, tech naïve, visually impaired, linguistically/socially marginalized populations. To this end, he has developed and deployed novel and innovative products, software, and services. These include a viral speech-based information dissemination platform accessible over basic phones called Polly, a maternal health and vaccination hotline for expectant fathers called Super Abbu, a voice-based social network called Baang, a voice-based survey platform called Sawaal, and a voice-based crowdsourcing platform called Karamad. These services have reached over 300,000 low-literate and non-tech-savvy users in Pakistan, India, and West Africa, leading to a significant social, health, and economic impact.

Dr. Raza works on Machine Learning and Language Technologies focuses on tailoring and democratizing these technologies for the developing world and resource-constrained settings. He developed the first medium vocabulary speech recognition system for Urdu in 2009, forming the backbone of several speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems for Urdu.

He is the Program Committee chair for ACM COMPASS 2024. He has been an Associate Chair for CHI since 2019, the short papers PC chair for ICTD 2017, the open session chair for ICTD 2022, and the Associate Editor for the ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies (JCSS).