Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, has been named a Fulbright Centennial Fellow, one of four selected worldwide.
The fellowship — open to Fulbright alumni — seeks to enhance Fulbright as a life-long experience and recognize alumni whose work embodies the core values of mutual understanding, leadership, global problem solving and global impact.
The Institute of International Education (IIE) spoke to the 2019-2020 cohort of Centennial Fellows, including Ahmed about their projects.
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
IIE Centennial Fellowship
Toward Safe & Sustainable Repairing & Recycling for the Electronic Waste Workers in Bangladesh
2011-2014 Fulbright Foreign Student to United States
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed is a Bangladeshi citizen and an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He conducts research in the intersection between Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD). He received his PhD from Cornell University in 2017. He established the first HCI research lab in Bangladesh in 2009. He also launched the first open-source digital map-making initiative in Bangladesh in 2010. He was a Fulbright Foreign Student from 2011–2014, an Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing graduate fellow in 2015, and a Connaught Early Researcher Award recipient in 2018.
What is your project and its significance?
My project is “Toward Safe and Sustainable Repairing and Recycling for the Electronic Waste Workers of Bangladesh.” With every broken electronic device recycled, we save our planet from toxic materials. However, this is challenging in low-income countries where there is no adequate infrastructure to process e-waste in a safe manner.
Like in Bangladesh, most e-waste is processed in informal markets by people who have little training on safe handling of e-wastes which is creating a threat to their health and polluting the local water, soil and air. This project aims to address these problems by designing appropriate technologies.
What you are looking most forward to with the project?
I’m looking most forward to building technologies to save the environment from the damaging impact of electronic waste. I aim to do this by creating awareness among the e-waste workers and designing technologies with them for their safety and environmental protection.
I believe that the innovations that will come out of this project will benefit thousands of e-waste workers in Bangladesh and later in other countries. More importantly, this will contribute to saving the environment of our planet from toxic chemicals used in electronic devices.
The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered by the IIE.
With files from the IIE.