Hello! I’m Silvia Cazacu

📝spell Silvia with two ‘i’s, not ‘y-i’ & pronounce Cazacu as ‘Kah-zah-koo’. TY!

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Postdoc Researcher at Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris DIVA group

[former] PhD Researcher at KU Leuven SADL | Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher at ODECO | and Research fellow at The Open Data Institute

🧩 Things on my mind recently

Co-organizing the CHI26 workshop on Responsible AI: HCI-TERRA: HCI Towards EnviRonmentally Responsible AI
Exploring new intersections of Power x Design x HCI… do you have an idea you’d like to explore with me?

Revealing the Power Dynamics of Collaborative Sense-Making supported by Participatory Data Physicalization Silvia Cazacu, Georgia Panagiotidou and Andrew Vande Moere. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26). HAL
Infrastructuring Critical Data Literacy through Role-playing: a Retrospective Study of the Game “Datopolis” Silvia Cazacu, Elena Simperl, Gefion Thuermer, Joe Massey, Thérèse Steenberghen, Georgia Panagiotidou and Andrew Vande Moere. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26). arxiv
Disentangling the Power Dynamics in Participatory Data Physicalisation Silvia Cazacu, Georgia Panagiotidou, Thérèse Steenberghen, and Andrew Vande Moere. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). arxiv
The EnviroMapper Toolkit: An Input Physicalisation that Captures the Situated Experience of Environmental Comfort in Offices Silvia Cazacu, Stien Poncelet, Emma Feijtraij, and Andrew Vande Moere.In Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA’25). arxiv

April 2026 - My final PhD thesis chapter received an Honorable Mention at CHI26; this brings the total of chapters awarded at CHI to two!
April 2026 - I practiced my CHI26 talk for Revealing the Power Dynamics of Collaborative Sense-Making supported by Participatory Data Physicalization at Paris Pre-CHI.
March 2026 - going back to KU Leuven after my PhD defence to teach DataVis for Digital Humanities (taking over the lectures of prof. Andrew Vande Moere during his sabbatical).
February 2026 - moving to Paris 🚗! to start a post-doc with Nathalie Bressa and Samuel Huron on Collective Deliberation x Data Physicalization.
January 2026 - I defended my PhD after exactly 4 years since I started my academic journey at KU Leuven! Yay! So grateful to my supervisors, mentors, collaborators, co-authors, participants, lab colleagues, friends and family for supporting me during this time.
November 2025 - I travelled to Norway for CSCW25 to present our retrospective analysis with players of Datopolis, the ODI-designed boardgame that teaches data infrastructure literacy to organizations.
October 2025 - I submitted my PhD thesis ‘Towards Critical Data Infrastructures: Revealing Power Dynamics in Participatory Data Practices through Data Physicalisation Design’, available upon request on Limo. Or email me, I’ll send you a copy :)

🦄 Thanks for visiting!