Speaker Bios and Links to Presentations

Hadi Al-Khatib has been working on collecting, verifying, and investigating citizen-generated data as evidence of human rights violations in order to expose and draw attention to human rights violations committed by all sides in the Syrian conflict, and to make sure that journalists are able to use verified data for their investigations. Hadi has previously worked with Tactical Technology Collective for the last 5 years to support journalists and news agencies in securing their data, devices and communications online, as well as a digital and informational security trainer with the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX). In addition, Hadi is part-time project leader for Middle East and North Africa investigations with Bellingcat. Hadi is also a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Human Rights. Hadi is based in Berlin, Germany.

Cameran Ashraf is Assistant Professor of new media and global communications at the CEU School of Public Policy. Prior to CEU, Cameran was a digital activist whose work with Iran led to co-founding AccessNow, one of the largest international human rights organizations dedicated to defending and extending the digital rights of users at risk around the world. In 2010, the European Parliament selected AccessNow as a finalist for the 2010 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. At CEU, Cameran teaches courses on the geopolitics of the Internet, cyberconflict, and technology and human rights.

Anikó Bakonyi has an M.A. degree in Human Rights at the Central European University. She has been working for the Refugee Programme of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee since 2010 as a project and advocacy officer. She coordinates the human rights monitoring activities of the refugee program and manages projects such as the Refugee Law Reader and regularly takes part in the advocacy activities of the program. She is also responsible for the production of information materials for asylum seekers.

Yolande Ditewig has been working with UNHCR since 2005. She has worked in the field of Protection in a variety of countries, including in Africa, the Middle East and more recently in Europe. Ms. Ditewig is currently working with UNHCR’s Regional Representation in Budapest, where she heads the Protection Unit. Prior to joining UNHCR, Ms. Ditewig worked as a corporate lawyer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Anne J. Gilliland is Professor and Director of the Archival Studies specialization in the Department of Information Studies, Director of the Center for Information as Evidence, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She is also the director of the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI), a global collaborative effort amongst academic institutions that seeks to promote state-of-the-art in scholarship in archival studies, as well as to encourage curricular and pedagogical innovation in archival and recordkeeping education locally and worldwide. Her interests relate broadly to the history, nature, human impact, and technologies associated with archives, recordkeeping and memory, particularly in translocal and international contexts.

James Lowry is a lecturer in the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies. He led the development of the UK government's commitment on records management in its Open Government Partnership National Action Plan (2013-15). James has led records and archives management projects in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Russia Trinidad and Tobago, and Tunisia as the Deputy Director of the International Records Management Trust. He is Chair of the Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Records Managers, and Secretary to the International Council on Archives (ICA) Africa Programme. His research interests include the development of national capacities for government record-keeping (regulatory frameworks, role of national archives) and access to information (Commonwealth administrative traditions, cultures of secrecy, displaced/migrated archives, FOI, and open data).

Boldizsár Nagy read law and philosophy and received his PhD in law at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. He teaches international law and asylum law at the Central European University. He has acted as an expert for the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Union and was a counsel for Hungary in the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Project case in front of the ICJ. Ankara, Beijing, Brussels, Geneva, Kazan, Moscow, New York, Tbilisi, Yekaterinburg and Yerevan are among his former teaching venues. He is one of the founders of the European Society of International Law and of the Refugee Law Reader. Most of his research centers on refugee law. Further details are available at his website: www.nagyboldizsar.hu

Robert Parnica is a Senior Reference Archivist at Blinken OSA. He graduated in history and archeology from the University of Zagreb, and completed an MA in History at Central European University, where he also earned an MPhil in Comparative History of South East Europe from the History Department. Recently, he earned an MA in International Relations from Corvinus University in Budapest. He is interested in the recent social, political, and diplomatic history of Balkans and Central Europe but is also passionate about late antique and early medieval archeology.

István Rév is Professor of History and Political Science at CEU, and Director of Blinken OSA. He was a founding member of the Danube Circle environmental organization in 1984, and winner of the Right for Livelihood award (the alternative Nobel Prize) of the Swedish Parliament. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a research fellow at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. In 1995, he was the recipient of the New Europe Prize. He is a member of the Open Society Foundations Global Board. His scholarly interests include historical amnesia, memory, historical anthropology, and documentary traces of the past.

Patricia Anne Sleeman qualified as an archivist in Dublin, Ireland. She has worked in the National Archives of Ireland and the University of London - on many projects such as the - The National Digital Archive of Datasets, the project manager of the Digital Preservation Training Programme designed by the British Library and Cornell University as well as many other projects both in the UK and internationally connected to digital preservation. She has also worked with Un Ponte per..., an Italian NGO in the Middle East on the protection of cultural property (archives) with the National Library of Iraq. Since 2013 she has worked with UNHCR as a digital archivist. She is a qualified archaeologist and an artist.

Iván Székely, social informatist, CSc in sociology, is an internationally known expert in the multidisciplinary fields of data protection and freedom of information. Former chief counsellor of the Hungarian Data Protection ombudsman, Székely is at present Senior Research Fellow at Blinken OSA, associate professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and member of international research associations. His research interests and publications are focused on information autonomy, openness and secrecy, privacy, identity, surveillance and resilience, memory and forgetting, and archivistics.

Csaba Szilágyi is responsible for the human rights collections, education and programs at Blinken OSA. He co-teaches/coordinates the Archives, Evidence and Human Rights course and the Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization at CEU. He was also a records manager/archives consultant for the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, and curator of the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research at Columbia University in New York. He is interested in how technology informs the collection, archiving and dissemination of human rights records, and in the representation and memorialization of mass atrocities in the archival space. Csaba holds an MA in American Studies.