Bio (short)
Tanja Aitamurto, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she leads the Media/Democracy Lab. Tanja studies the impact of new media technologies on people’s behavior and society. These technologies include crowdsourcing, virtual and augmented reality, and artificial intelligence applied in journalism and democratic processes. Previously Tanja worked at Stanford, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, and Oxford.
Her work has received several awards and has been published in highly-ranked academic venues such as the New Media & Society, Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). She has attended meetings and given talks about her research at the White House, the United Nations, OECD, the Council of Europe and in several national parliaments and governments.
In her projects, Tanja often collaborates on in-the-wild experiments with media organizations and local and national government bodies. Prior to returning to academia, Tanja worked as a journalist specializing in military and defense, reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola, and Uganda. She also covered technology at VentureBeat, a Silicon Valley -based tech blog.
Bio (longer)
Tanja Aitamurto, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she leads the Media/Democracy Lab. Tanja examines the impact of new media technologies on people’s behavior and society. These technologies include crowdsourcing, virtual and augmented reality, and artificial intelligence applied in journalism and democratic processes.
Her work has received several awards and has been published in highly-ranked academic venues such as the New Media & Society, Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). She has attended meetings and given talks about her research at the White House, the United Nations, OECD, the Council of Europe and in several national parliaments and governments.
In her projects, Tanja often collaborates on in-the-wild experiments with media organizations and local and national governments. Prior to returning to academia, Tanja worked as a journalist specializing in military and defense, reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola, and Uganda.
Previously Tanja was a a postdoctoral scholar at the Crowdsourced Democracy Team at the School of Engineering at Stanford. Prior to that, during her doctoral studies, Tanja studied as a visiting student researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology and the Center for Design Research at Stanford and at the Data and Democracy Initiative at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley.
Tanja received her doctoral degree in Social Sciences, majoring in Communication, in 2014 from the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland. She studied in her PhD program from 2010-2014, of which she studied most of the time as a visiting student researcher at Stanford and at UC Berkeley. She also holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities, both from the Jyväskylä University, Finland.
Prior to returning to academia, Tanja was a professional journalist in Finland specializing in military and defense. She did reporting in countries like Afghanistan, Angola, and Uganda. She worked for the leading daily newspaper in Finland, the Helsingin Sanomat and at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE. She also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, worked at the Namibia Press Agency, and covered technology at VentureBeat, a Silicon Valley -based tech blog.
Tanja occasionally participates in the phenomena she is studying; for instance, she crowdfunded a research trip to Egypt in 2011 after the Arab Spring to examine crowdsourcing in public deliberation.