The Team behind OxGen23

Director

Cassidy Bereskin

Cassidy is a doctoral researcher and Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford whose research focuses on interventions for restoring online trust and reducing users’ susceptibility to deceptive generative media. She was the Director of the Oxford Synthetic Media Forum, the UK's first expert convening on generative AI & society. Cassidy has researched and advised UK policymakers on responses to disinformation and vaccine hesitancy as part of The Alan Turing Institute’s Online Safety Team and at the COVID-19 Monitor, Canada’s largest public opinion study on the pandemic. Her research at the OII leverages experimental social and data science methods to study the efficacy of provenance and authenticity tools for combating deceptive synthetic content.

She holds an MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where she graduated with Distinction, and an Honours BA from McMaster University, where she graduated as valedictorian. 

Logistics Director

Will Shao

Born and raised in New York, Will spent time living in Asia and the United Kingdom before moving back to America for his undergraduate education. He currently holds a BA in Classics with minors in International Relations and Modern Languages from Stanford University, as well as an MSt in Classics from the University of Oxford. His research interests in recent years have focused on the intersection between Classics and technology policy, the latter being a topic he explored both during his time as a Ditchley intern in 2019 and in his subsequent position as a research assistant at the Stanford Cyber Policy Centre. Will re-joined the Ditchley team in 2022 in his current position as the Technology and Democracy Networks Lead. His work in this role centres around the impact and future of emerging and disruptive technologies, including semiconductors, generational models, and XR systems. Will is also interested in foreign policy more broadly, and currently serves as the co-head of the Oxford regional branch for the think tank Agora.

Hackathon Director

Harvey Pitt

Harvey is a Master's student at the Oxford Internet Institute, where he applies a human-computer interaction and UX lens to the field of generative AI. Formerly a Trust and Safety Analyst at Facebook, he has a strong background in online safety. As the founder of Alive Industries, Harvey aids small businesses in harnessing AI technologies and has developed CPUmade, an app that allows users to craft AI-generated custom t-shirts.

Marketing Director

Zi Ling Ng

Zi Ling holds a BA in Human, Social, and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge and is completing her MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute. She has worked on technology policy and research at Singapore’s Ministry of Communications and Information, as well as served as President of Cambridge University Southeast Asian Society, where she organised academic and cultural events. Her interests lie in the intersection of sustainability and digital technologies, with her current research examining the role of social media in climate communication and advocacy.

Hackathon Exec

Jabez Magomere

Jabez Magomere is a Rhodes Scholar currently pursuing an MSc in Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research is centered around constructing and evaluating classification models for multilingual election reports and cross-domain classification settings to scale crowdsourced election monitoring.
 

Before joining the OII, Jabez worked for 3 years as a Software Engineer at Twiga, a technology-driven company that offers retail services to consumers, vendors, and suppliers across Africa. At Twiga, Jabez led the design and implementation of core payment and notification micro-services and Android application features to support over 140,000 vendors.
 

Jabez has previously participated in and won multiple hackathons. In particular, he played a key role in the Nairobi Tech Week 2019 Hackathon, where he collaborated with a team to create VisualDiagnosis, an Android app that utilizes machine learning to detect diabetic retinopathy. Additionally, Jabez led a team in the IBM Water Hackathon challenge, successfully developing an IoT-enabled water level sensor for densely populated urban areas.
 

He has gained valuable experience in organising developer conferences, particularly through his role in organising DroidCon Kenya 2018-2019, the largest Android Developer Conference in Sub-Saharan Africa. Jabez holds a BSc in Computer Science from Strathmore University, Kenya, where he graduated as the top student in the School of Computing and Engineering Science.

Logistics Director

Hunter Hinson

Hunter Hinson is a Shirley Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute pursuing an MSc in Social Science of the Internet. His research focuses on how violence, hate, and political radicalization are promoted online through computational propaganda and other emerging technologies like generative AI. Prior to joining the OII, Hunter worked on U.S. congressional campaigns, in management consulting, and at a federal agency in Washington, D.C. He also has three years of experience in academic research, serving as a Research Team Lead at the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab. While at the SPEC Lab, Hunter led a team of 3-5 research assistants and prepared briefing materials for U.S. policymakers on how to combat new forms of coercion in the digital age. Hunter holds a BA in Communication and Political Science from the University of Southern California. He is originally from San Francisco, California.

Marketing Director

Antonella Maia Perini

Antonella Maia Perini is a Research Associate in Data Justice and Global Ethical Futures within the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute. Her research focuses on ethics of AI and AI governance and regulation. At the Turing, she works on the Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice project, the AI Ethics and Governance in Practice Programme, and on research projects on equity in AI-enabled medical devices and governance of foundation models and generative AI.

​

Prior to joining The Alan Turing Institute, Antonella worked as Project Manager at the Latin-American think tank Asuntos del Sur, where she coordinated training programmes on democratic innovation and digital rights, and later led a research consortium of seven universities and organisations studying the governance models in the responses to COVID-19. She also conducted digital security workshops and research on open government and digitalisation.

Furthermore, Antonella assisted research on disinformation and hate speech at the Oxford Internet Institute and contributed to research led by the Centre of Technology and Society (CETyS) and Centro Latam Digital that aimed to understand the levels of awareness and implementation of AI ethical principles in start-ups developing AI systems in Latin America. She co-founded Youth IGF Argentina and between 2018 and 2019 was the Latin America and Caribbean Representative at the Executive Committee of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
 
Antonella holds a BA in International Relations from Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina), an MA in International Relations by the University of Bologna, and an MSc in Social Science of the Internet by the Oxford Internet Institute from the University of Oxford. Her MSc dissertation sought to understand the way Latin American civil society organisations engage with discussions about ethics and governance of AI in Internet Governance arrangements, and how they interact with each other and the broader ecosystem.

Web Director

Urmika Unnikrishnan

Urmika Unnikrishnan has been working as a software developer for over 3 years. She is interested in crafting responsible AI solutions and in transparency of algorithms. She holds a BE in Electronics and Telecommunication from the University of Mumbai.

Marketing Director

Nitya Kuthiala

Nitya graduated from the University of Oxford with an MSc. in Social Science of the Internet in October of 2023. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Trust & Safety and Responsible AI, focusing on vulnerable and marginalised audiences. Her MSc dissertation examined the interplay of clashing values embedded in Western technology platforms and Indian society, through the case study of dating applications. Prior to coming back to school, she was a Senior Design Researcher and Strategist at a human-centred design consulting firm working across the emerging markets region. Nitya is keen to balance rich qualitative data from user stories with rigorous academic data in her work, to build actionable, inclusive, and safe technology products.

Hackathon Executive

Nishen Menerapitiyage

Nishen is a 4th year MEng Student in Engineering Science at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is a member of the events team at the Oxford AI Society where they invite guest speakers and organise panels to discuss topics in AI from Machine Learning in medicine to Large Language Models. His interest lies in using machine learning and computational models for robotics and medical applications.