Late at night, when the hallways are empty but the screens are still glowing, a certain kind of silence descends upon a university computer science lab. Rita Orji has spent years in rooms like these, somewhere on the Halifax campus of Dalhousie University, asking a question that most people in her field have neglected to take seriously: for whom is technology being developed?
For a while, the response was awkward. The majority of the systems that influence daily life, such as recommendation engines and health apps, were created with a relatively specific user in mind. youthful. Western. linked. proficient in Silicon Valley’s visual language. The world is finally catching up to Orji, a computer scientist from Nigeria who currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Persuasive Technology, who has been fighting against that default for more than 20 years.
Her appointment to the United Nations’ Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, which was created by the General Assembly the previous August, was confirmed by the African Academy of Sciences in February 2026. Out of over 2,600 applicants, she was selected. The final list consisted of forty individuals. After years of operating somewhat outside the mainstream conversation, it’s difficult not to interpret that number as a silent verdict on how seriously her work is now taken.
Her work isn’t as glamorous as that of frontier AI labs. There are no ostentatious demos or chatbots with peculiar personalities. Instead, the field of persuasive computing—which examines how digital systems can influence human behavior without taking advantage of it—has a tenacious and patient body of work. Hundreds of references have been made to her most cited paper, which is an expansion of the 2012 health belief model. The work is extremely empirical, meticulous, and dense. Additionally, it becomes crucial when developing mobile health interventions for underprivileged and underserved communities.
When discussing her work with professionals in the field, it seems as though Orji has been sticking to a certain line. She maintains that customization isn’t a luxury. It’s the difference between an app that helps a young woman in Lagos deal with anxiety and one that just doesn’t speak her native tongue. Her lab has investigated sentiment analysis on COVID-19 discourse, gamification, dietary behavior modification, and mental health interventions. There is a large range. There is consistency in the thread beneath.
Beyond its apparent prestige, her appointment to the UN panel feels noteworthy because of the geography it recognizes. The Global South is often mentioned rather than represented when discussing global AI governance. This panel’s Orji’s voice modifies that calculation, if only marginally. She has frequently discussed creating ethical frameworks that bring AI into compliance with social norms and legal requirements, and there’s a good chance that she will bring the same emphasis on context-specific design to the policy table.
It’s also worth taking a moment to consider the bigger picture. Researchers in the HCI community have been reexamining its grand challenges and have come to the conclusion that generative AI has sharpened rather than replaced earlier human-centered concerns. One could almost read Orji’s career as a sneak peek at that insight. Long before the current wave of AI made those issues impossible to ignore, she was considering cultural adaptation, underserved users, and what constitutes ethical persuasion.
It is unclear whether the panel’s recommendations will be taken seriously in capitals ranging from Beijing to Washington. Global governance is contentious, slow, and frequently disappointing. But the composition of the room matters before the recommendations do. And in a field that has spent decades defaulting to one kind of user, having someone like Orji at the table is a small, overdue correction.
