Appointed 2023-24 PAN-African Professional Alliance IT Officer

Last updated on Dec 21, 2023 2 min read

The PAN-African Professional Alliances IT Officer serves on the Executive Board and plays a critical role in managing the organization’s information technology infrastructure. This includes overseeing PANAPA’s website, leading and organizing ICT services for major PANAPA events such as the annual conference, chapter meetings, recreational activities, cultural programs, and diversity events.

As IT Officer, I chair PANAPA’s Information Technology Committee which explores new technologies and digital platforms to enhance delivery of the organization’s mission. I provide leadership and strategic direction for leveraging technology to better serve PANAPA members and the broader community.

Key responsibilities include:

  • Direct maintenance and enhancement PANAPA’s website, keeping content updated and exploring new features to improve user experience

  • Leading planning and execution of ICT services for major PANAPA events including audio/visual equipment, wifi, video conferencing, etc.

  • Advising and educating the Executive Board on emerging technology trends relevant to the organization

  • Building collaborative relationships with IT professionals and firms that can provide technical support to PANAPA

  • Promoting innovative projects that use IT to increase PANAPA’s community impact

The IT Officer will lead a committee of IT professionals and liaise frequently with the Communications Committee and other key internal stakeholders. Strong technical knowledge, leadership ability, creativity and excellent communication skills are essential to success in this dynamic and influential Executive Board role.

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Jason Lucas
Jason Lucas
Ph.D. Student in Informatics

My research interests include low-resource multilingual NLP, linguistics, adversarial machine learning and mis/disinformation generation/detection. My Ph.D. thesis is in the area of applying artificial intelligence for cybersecurity and social good, with a focus on low-resource multilingual natural language processing. More specifically, I develop NLP techniques to promote cybersecurity, combat mis/disinformation, and enable AI accessibility for non-English languages and underserved populations. This involves creating novel models and techniques for tasks like multilingual and crosslingual text classification, machine translation, text generation, and adversarial attacks in limited training data settings. My goal is to democratize state-of-the-art AI capabilities by extending them beyond high-resource languages like English into the long tail of lower-resourced languages worldwide. By innovating robust learning approaches from scarce linguistic data, this research aims to open promising directions where AI can have dual benefits strengthening security, integrity and social welfare across diverse global locales.