Our Team

Dr. Simone Ashby is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Exact Sciences and Engineering at the University of Madeira, an Adjunct Lecturer with the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and a Research Fellow at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI). As an interdisciplinary scholar and educator, Simone brings together approaches from computer and information science, text and speech processing, ethnography, and human-computer interaction for the study and design of multimodal interactive technologies. Her background covers a wide range of application areas in digitally mediated communication, including: peer-oriented radio networks (with the former director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT Media Lab, Chris Csikszentmihàlyi – currently European Research Area Chair of Human-Computer Interaction and Design Innovation at M-ITI); affective computing; crowdsourcing; community engagement platforms; interactive installations; information visualization; user research; participatory design; speech and multimodal information processing; online resources for minority language varieties; computational lexicography; semantically based information retrieval; corpus linguistics; and gesture analysis. Simone has also worked for Microsoft, the Catholic University of Lisbon, the Centre for Speech Technology Research, and a number of other research institutes and high-tech companies. She received her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at University College Dublin and is an alum of Media Lab Europe.