Welcome to our DataSkop team: Sana, Rachel and Johannes

Sana Shah

Sana Shah is Project Manager for the projects DataSkop and Digital Autonomy Hub. Both projects raise questions in regard to digital ownership, analyze algorithmic decision-making processes, and enhance skills to understand and critically reflect data-based systems. Sana Shah studied Political Science and International Development and researches questions on the ethical, social, and political implications of artificial intelligence. She works on the question of bias in algorithms as well as discrimination through algorithms. Sana Shah has profound experience in research management particularly in the field of integration and migration research. Furthermore, she has also led various diversity and women`s* empowerment projects. Prior to joining AlgorithmWatch she was head of the department Network and Diversity Management at the German Center for Integration- and Migration Research. Her professional career also led her to work for the Berlin Institute for Migration and Integration Research at Humboldt-University of Berlin, the Office of the Central Women’s Representative at Humboldt-University, SOAS, University of London as well as the Austrian Foreign Ministry.

Rachel Brochado

Rachel joined AlgorithmWatch as Product Manager for the DataSkop Project. She holds a Master’s in Sustainability Science and Policy from Maastricht University and has a background in web development. Her research at Maastricht University focused on the governance and development of Global Action Networks as emerging multi-stakeholder arrangements with the role of protecting the global commons. Prior to starting with AlgorithmWatch, Rachel worked in communications at a tech start-up in the field of online advertising and speaking at conferences around Europe and South America. Most of her efforts have been tailored to open source communities and data privacy advocacy.

Johannes Filter

Johannes is a software developer at AlgorithmWatch and currently working on the DataSkop project. He is a full-stack developer, data analyst, and machine learning practitioner. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. During his studies, he stayed abroad in Estonia and Spain. Prior to joining AlgorithmWatch, he built software together with the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany to provide free access to information and increase government transparency (FragDenStaat, OffeneGesetze, verfassungsschutzberichte.de). Johannes developed and maintains several open-source libraries. For his latest work pd3f, he extracts continuous text out of PDFs with the help of machine learning.

Team photos by Julia Bornkessel (CC-BY)