Elisa Oreglia is a Reader in Global Digital Cultures in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She has researched digital lives and policies in China and Southeast Asia for the past 15 years, first looking at mobile phone use in Shandong and Hebei villages, then at the early wave of (Chinese) digital technologies in Myanmar and at social media and daily lives among factory workers in Cambodia. DIGISILK allows her to bring together her interest on the micro-level impact of (Chinese) digital technologies, especially among marginal communities, and macro-level policies, investments and strategies carried out by states and corporations.

Oyuna Baldakova is a PhD candidate at the Free University of Berlin, researching how China’s Belt and Road Initiative is being institutionalised in Beijing and implemented in light of the economic, political, and social realities of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Her research interests lie in the fields of political economy for development, China’s foreign economic policy, energy transition, and sustainable development in Eurasia. Oyuna completed her Master’s degree in Modern East Asian Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. She has extensive experience in the field of international development, having interned at UNESCO Bangkok, managed an EU-funded project for Central Asia, and run communications at the International Organization of Folk Art (IOV).

Mo is a PhD student studying internet users and consumption of mobile phones, with a focus on how Chinese mobile phones and digital technology fill in the digital divide gap in Myanmar. His research interests include the use of mobile internet under the distinctive environments of difficult connectivity vis-a-vis rapid leapfrog in mobile adoption of Myanmar.

James Burroughs is an undergraduate student in Computer Science at King's College London. He was a summer research assistant in 2021 as part of the King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship, where he used digital methods to investigate mobile applications in order to help understand the Digital Silk Road. He is currently continuing with the team as a Digital Methods Specialist.

Thais Lobo holds an MA in Digital Humanities from King's College London. As a media researcher and practitioner, she combines data analysis and research outreach to disseminate critical insights into digital platforms and online cultures. She has applied digital methods to explore social issues like disinformation, political bots, greenwashing, datafication and digital surveillance in interdisciplinary projects collaborating with external organisations. Her experience includes roles at media outlets in Brazil.

Weidi Zheng holds an MSc and a PhD in Global Media and Post-national Communications, from SOAS University of London. Her expertise is on media anthropology, political communication, journalism studies and China-Africa/Africa-China studies. For her PhD, she conducted a year-long ethnographic research with Kenyan-Chinese reporters, SOEs, expats and small traders in Nairobi and Beijing. Weidi is keen to bringing an anti-essentialism approach into the conceptualisation and theorisation of South-South collaborations, through grounded, inductive and ethnographic method. Her recent work has focused on digital inclusion, innovation, entrepreneurship, and values and politics of technology.

Shalen (Yangyiman) Fu is a PhD researcher in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Her research interest lies in impact assessment (IA), digital strategy, digitisation, and audience engagement in the heritage sector. She is currently researching how best to assess the impact of digital museum resources in China. Fascinated by new ways of engaging with heritage, Shalen has participated in various digital projects, including the Courtauld Institute of Art’s HLF Digitisation Project and The Watercolor World. As an IA professional and digitisation academic, she has helped develop the Europeana Impact Playbook Phase III.

Tobias Blanke is University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. His academic background is in moral philosophy and computer science. Tobias’ principal research interests lie in the development and research of artificial intelligence and big data devices as well as infrastructures for research, particularly in the human sciences. His latest book is 'Algorithmic Reason - the Governance of Self and Other'.

Professor Emeritus Rosemary Foot is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a Research Associate of Oxford’s China Centre. In 1996, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests and publications cover security relations in the Asia-Pacific, broadly defined, with a particular focus on China and regional and world order, and China-US relations. Author or editor of 13 books, her latest book is entitled China, the UN, and Human Protection: Beliefs, Power, Image (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Nargis Kassenova is Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations and Regional Studies of KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan). She is the former founder and director of the KIMEP Central Asian Studies Center and the China and Central Asia Studies Center. Her research focuses on Central Asian politics and security, Eurasian geopolitics, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and governance in Central Asia, and the history of state-making in Central Asia.

Channé Suy Lan is an expert in ICT for Development and co-founder of Kawsang, a Cambodian social enterprise. Her focus is on designing and implementing technology-based solutions for health, education, and socio-economic development. Cambodia's 115 National Health hotline, a project she initiated and led, won the WHO Western Pacific Challenge 2022. Channé's digital upskilling programs empower small businesses and introduce computational thinking in public schools. She also collaborates with stakeholders to enhance citizen engagement and social accountability in local governments.

Ashwin Mathew is an ethnographer of Internet infrastructure, studying the technologies and technical communities involved in the operation of the global Internet. He is interested in how the Internet is built and maintained in everyday practice; and how the cultures of the Internet’s technical communities circulate and are re-articulated across Global South and Global North in the process of operating the Internet. He is currently Lecturer in Global Digital Cultures in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. Prior to his doctoral work, he spent a decade as a programmer and technical architect in companies such as Adobe Systems and Sun Microsystems.

Bingchun Meng is a Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE, where she directs the MSc Double-degree Programme in Global Media and Communications (with Fudan University). She is also the Co-Director of LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. Her research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies.

Raffaello Pantucci is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) in London. His work focuses on China's relations over its western borders in Central and South Asia, as well as terrorism and counter-terrorism. He is a widely published author in the academic and mainstream press, with his most recent book Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire (Oxford University Press, April 2022, with Alexandros Petersen), drawing on over a decade's worth of travel and research around China and Central Asia.

Edward Simpson is Professor and Head of Social Anthropology and Director of the South Asia Institute at SOAS University of London. He has been PI on major awards from ESRC and ERC. He is author of The Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat India (2013) and Highways to the End of the World: Roads, Roadmen and Power in South Asia (2022).

Justin Watkins is Professor of Burmese and Linguistics at SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on the phonetics, linguistics and lexicography of Burmese and other South-East Asian languages, especially Tibeto-Burman and Mon-Khmer languages of Myanmar such as Wa, Sumtu and Sgaw Karen.