About Us
Research
lead
Dr. Lyuba Encheva
Lyuba Encheva is a communications scholar whose research areas include algorithmic representation of emotion, persuasive technologies, human-computer interaction, gamification and digital humanities. She focuses on the ways in which the technological restructuring of communication processes leads to the reorganization of social relations and hierarchies. As a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Institute, she is the Lead of the Coding Happiness project which tracks the digital uses of human emotion and evaluates the social, political and ethical ramifications of emotion recognition technologies as systems of representation and social stratification.
Encheva received her degree from the graduate program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University under the supervision of Dr. Isabel Pedersen. Her thesis entitled ‘Gamification: The Magic Circle of Technology’ examines the political agenda of gamification as a communication phenomenon and user experience design trend. Some of her research has been published in Rhetor: Journal of the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, The International Journal of the Image, and the edited collection Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime.
Research
advisor
Dr. Isabel Pedersen
Dr. Isabel Pedersen is Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media, and Culture and Professor of Communication Studies at Ontario Tech University.
She is Founder and Director of the Digital Life Institute and research advisor for the Coding Happiness Project. Dr. Pedersen studies the cultural, ethical, and political challenges posed by technological change. She is co-editor of Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles (2020, MIT Press). She is published in many academic journals including the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, and Parol – Quaderni d’arte e di eipistemologia. Her collaborative media arts projects include iMind, TombSeer, Fearmonger, and FabricofDigitalLife.com. She is a member of the IEEE Global Initiative Education Committee, which is an official subcommittee of The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (AIS).
Technical
consultants
Dr. Emil Enchev
Dr. Enchev has worked for more than twenty years at the Institute of Technical Cybernetics and Robotics at the Bulgarian National Academy of Science. After emigrating to North America he has held jobs as data architect in a number of companies such as Ontario Hydro, Bunge, and Credit Swiss
Dr. Apostol Natsev
Dr. Natsev is a Principal Engineer and Manager at Google, San Francisco Bay Area. He leads the Video Understanding team in the Machine Perception group at Google Research. His team works on building computer vision and video understanding systems at large scales, making it easier to find and discover great video content on YouTube and the web. Their long-term technology mission is to achieve the ability to understand and describe video at the level of a human expert, purely from pixels and audio samples.
With support from
