Home | Workshop Proposal (pdf) | Workshop Program | Organizers | Contact
Andrea Kavanaugh: This short paper is a synopsis of the work I have been doing related specifically to sustainability, and highlights from my research work in Iran and the US (Appalachian region) on the long-term sustainability of tele-centers, comparative models, using a case study methodology (including questionnaires, interviews, observation and archival records). I am especially interested in the role of mobile phone technology and mobile network infrastructure for development?
Long-term Sustainability of Tele-Centers: Comparing Model Cases
Thomas Smyth I'm a 2nd year Ph.D student at Georgia Tech's GVU Center, studying under Dr. Michael Best. My research interests are in new media technologies in developing regions, interaction techniques for low-literacy users. I have field experience in Liberia, Uganda, and Ghana, both as a researcher and as a volunteer software developer. One thing I would like to get from the workshop is a better collection of sources for information on development theory and practice and the development 'industry' in general. I follow a few blogs and have read a few books, but feel like I should be reading a lot more about development. I'm sure some other people at the workshop will have some good tips.
Designing with Diaspora: A Case Study of Work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia
Nikhil Welankar Affiliation: IDC, IIT Bombay (Former), Tech Mahindra (Current)
Education: B.F.A.-Applied Art, PGDBA
Research interests: User research and usability evaluations for emerging markets
Prior experience: 6.5 years (Interaction design, visual communication)
Future plans: HCI research and development for emerging markets
Expectations from the workshop: Knowledge sharing and community development with diverse practitioners and researchers.
Kirti .H. Kanitkar Affiliation: M.Des. (Interaction Design) student IDC, IITB
Education: B.F.A.-Applied Art (Visualisation), M.F.A. (Illustration), and M.Des. (Interaction Design)- (Ongoing)
Research interests: User research, usability evaluation in emerging market and enhancing design in regards to the same.
Prior experience: 1 year (in Interaction design)
Future plans: Research in design for technology and ethnography
What do you expect to get out of the workshop: Knowledge sharing and learning about the various trends in researches those are going on globally
Viraj Sapre Affiliation: Research Intern IITB, final year MCA student university of Mumbai.
Education: Master of Computer Application, University of Mumbai.
Research Interests: HCC for developing economies, Interaction Design for mobile and other handheld devices and Physical Computing.
Future plans: Pursuing a research degree in Human Computer Interaction.
Keyur Sorathia Affiliation: Interaction Design Consultant for Idean-the next big thing (Finland) & Desolve Strategic Design (India), Interaction Design Consultant for IIT Bombay.
Education: Master's in Interaction Design, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea+Domus Academy, Milan, Italy.
Research Interests: Experience Design, Design Research, Ethnography, Ubiquitous Computing & Tangible Interaction.
Further Plans: Understanding interaction & experience design domain through ethnography in rural-semi urban areas, understanding future possibilities in rural-semi urban areas in terms of interaction design.
Neha Madame Affiliation: Midco Ltd, IDC Researcher IITB
Education: M Des IITB Mumbai, B Arch VNIT Nagpur
Research interests: Interaction design
Prior experience: 1 And 1/2 years (Product design and Interaction design)
Future plans: Master or PhD in the field of design
Expectations from the workshop: Exposure in different fields of interaction design like in art,science, product technology and research. I would like to find the focus for my research interest in PhD.
Shweta Sali Affiliation: IDC, IIT Bombay
Education: Bachelor of Engineering (Information Technology), Pune
Research Interests: Interaction design for Ubiquitous Computing
Future plans: Research and Development in Human Computer Interaction.
Customizing Contextual Inquiries for Multicultural and Multilingual Rural India
User Recruitment in Semi-Urban and Rural India
Suleman Shahid. I was born and raised in Pakistan. I am currently a doctoral candidate in the Tilburg centre for Creative Computing, Dept. of Communication and Information Sciences, at Tilburg University. My background is in Media Computing, but in the last few years I have primarily been involved in Interaction Design and social aspects of computing, particularly in a cross-cultural setting. My current research deals with cross-cultural aspects of Affective Computing. I am also interested in exploring how different design methods can be used across cultures, particularly in the developing world, and how a variety of user groups (children, elderly, highly skilled workers etc,) can be involved into the design process. From this workshop, I aim to get more insight into best practices for human-centred design in the developing world and for getting a better understanding of user characteristics, especially for users belonging to different age groups, having different skills and socio-economic backgrounds. This workshop will also be an interesting venue to talk to fellow researchers and look for possible collaborations in this area. I will also be pleased to contribute to this workshop by discussing other related projects where similar design methods are being used in the developing world context e.g., working with emergency response workers and exploring different variations of participatory design method for understanding their complex work practices.
Emiel Krahmer. Emiel Krahmer is a full professor at Tilburg University. After obtaining his PhD in 1995, he worked for six years at IPO, the Centre for User-System Interaction at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Since 2001 he works at Tilburg University, where his research concentrates on obtaining a better understanding of the way humans communicate with each other, and to improve human-computer communication based on these insights. Special interests include the role of non-verbal communication for human-human and human-computer communication, and cross-cultural differences in verbal and non- verbal communication.
Human-centred Design in the Developing World: Towards designing didactic games for children
Dillip Pattanaik Dillip Pattanaik is currently Director, IRMA-India (Information Resource Management Association) a division of OSVSWA (Orissa State Volunteers and Social Workers Association) in Orissa, India. With a professional education degree in Computer and Telecommunication engineering, he has been relentlessly pursuing research and action research for upliftment of rural/tribal/poor and isolated communities through various developmental activities including Information and Communication Technology. Reiterating his commitment to ensure and enhance access of rural/urban/tribal/ women and children to Information Technology, he has gathered a lot of experience at the grassroot level. His disciple zeal finds expression in his commitment to help out the rural/poor/tribal communities in their access to information related to their rights, education, health and livelihood in the rural and tribal areas. Being a part of the OSVSWA in India, he has proved his extensive and intensive understanding and application of Information and Communication Technology for exploring new frontiers and vistas of learning in the interest of marginalized segment of the society like dalits and tribals. His involvement with many other international organizations like Engineers for Sustainable World (ESW), Connected Nation, International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists, Community Wireless Network and IRMA-International as the Indian representative for India again boosting him for further sustainable development of the poor and isolated communities as a whole. Among other papers, Mr. Pattanaik has published "The Social Impacts of Information Technology in Rural India," "Engendering Knowledge Networks - Empowering Women through ICT," and "Study Report on Setup of Rural Information Centre in Remote Villages in Orissa, India."
Community Information Centre: Enabling Technology and Empowering Poor in Rural India
Yolanda A. Rankin: Yolanda A. Rankin is Research Scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Her primary research interests involve the design and evaluation of virtual worlds as collaborative spaces that promote informal learning among inhabitants and serve as the ideal platform for innovative, self-service technologies. Yolanda accumulated more than six years experience in the telecommunications industry at Lucent Technologies-Bell Labs working as a software engineer developing IS41 wireless features, providing first tier customer technical support for wireless service providers, and successfully managing Y2K deployment and TDMA Overlay for SBC/Ameritech. As a senior program manager at Luxcore Networks, she managed the product development phase of two prototypes of optical networking subsystems. She has received numerous honors and awards: the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Northwestern University Graduate School Fellowship, Alliance of Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Scholarship, the Patricia Roberts Harris Fellowship, Tougaloo College Presidential Scholarship, and the Columbia Broadcasting System Scholarship. Yolanda completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Northwestern University in December 2008, attained a M.A. in Computer Science at Kent State University in December 1994, and a B.S. in Mathematics at Tougaloo College in May 1992. She hopes to establish connections and collaborations with others who conduct research concerning the design and evaluation of technology for emerging markets as well as learning what others are doing in this line of research.
Jakita O. Thomas: Jakita O. Thomas, Ph.D. is a Research Staff Member at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. She is a member of the Service Practices group of Almaden Services Research. After graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics in 1999, Dr. Thomas attended the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia where she was a Presidential Fellow, National Physical Science Consortium Fellow, tutor, mentor, and Research Assistant. In 2006, she was conferred a Doctorate of Philosophy in Computer Science with a specialization in the Learning Sciences and Technology. Her research interests include investigating how complex skill sets are developed over time and describing the developmental trajectory of those skills. Of specific interest is understanding the impact of educational software in cognitive-apprenticeship learning environments on students’ ability to acquire and develop skills over time. Additional research interests include understanding the relational interactions and exchanges in service systems, promoting the development of Service Science, Management, and Engineering at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), developing and integrating healthcare services in rural African communities, supporting information-seeking and knowledge management, computer-supported collaborative learning, reasoning using expert cases, scientific reasoning, and complex cognitive skills learning.
T. Jama Ndwe: T. Jama Ndwe is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town and presently a visiting student at the University of Tampere in Finland. His research is within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as applied to Voice User Interface design for healthcare information service delivery in the developing countries of Southern African region. The targeted user population for his research is illiterate to semi-literate people who are otherwise numerically literate. He received his BS in computer engineering and his MSc in computer science at Rhodes University. His research is biased more towards the human side of HCI than the computer side and has spent a year studying social science research methods
Tightly Integrating Cultural Exploration and Understanding into Design
Rama Vennelakanti: Rama Vennelakanti is a Senior User Researcher with HP Labs India. She joined HP Labs India in Dec 2004. She has a Masters Degree in Social Anthropology from the Andhra University. While at HP Labs India, she has been involved with numerous projects as a user researcher, user experience designer and has led the technology trials for TVPrintCast. Rama has over 14 years of experience of user / consumer research, and prior to joining HP Labs India has worked with BPL Mobile as a Senior Manager Market Research, with Probe Qualitative Research - IMRB (India's largest Market Research Agency) as an Associate Project Director, and other organisaitions. Her current research interests include studying human to human and human to device interactions in the context of making interfaces less intimidating and more natural
Ajay Gupta: Ajay Gupta is the Director of HP's Imaging & Printing Group (IPG) R&D center in Bangalore India. Prior to joining IPG R&D center in Jan 09, Ajay led HP Labs India, the corporate research arm of Hewlett-Packard. HP Labs India is focused on technology innovation for "the next billion customers of HP" - large majority of which are going to come from the rapidly growing economies such as India. Ajay has been with Hewlett-Packard since 1986, when he started his research career at HP Labs in Bristol, UK. Ajay has been straddling strategic research at HP Labs and product/services innovation at various HP businesses in the UK, US, Singapore & India. Prior to rejoining HP Labs India in 2003 Ajay was the Managing Director of EHPT India, an HP & Ericsson joint venture, where he built its global R&D and services centre in New Delhi. He has a BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and Masters in Artificial Intelligence from University of Edinburgh,Scotland.
Leveraging Existing Television Infrastructure - Enabling Broadcasting and Printing Documents via TVPrintCast
Ricardo Chavero Mr. Chavero is a graduate student in his last semester of a MS in Telecommunications at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He graduated as an Electrical Engineer in 2006 from the University of the Americas (UDLA) in Puebla Mexico. Mr. Chavero's research interests are focused in ICT for development and resource management. He is currently working towards his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.
Marco Kuhlmann . Marco Kuhlmann is currently working in business case development for Qwest Communications in Denver, Colorado. He received his MS in Telecommunications and ME in Engineering Management in December 2008 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He spent 4 years working in the Mexican Telecommunication Industry as a Radiofrequency Engineer for Telefónica Moviles México and as a Junior Manager in the Strategic Development group for Telmex. While pursuing his graduate studies, Mr. Kuhlmann was invited by the EDC at CU to participate in the Amazon River Project in October 2006.
Bernard Amadei . Dr. Amadei is Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his PhD in 1982 from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Amadei is also the Founding President of Engineers Without Borders - USA and the co-founder of the Engineers Without Borders-International network. The mission of EWB-USA is to partner with disadvantaged communities to improve their quality of life through implementation of sustainable engineering projects, while involving and training internationally responsible engineering professionals and students. Among other distinctions, Dr. Amadei is a 2007 co-recipient of the Heinz Award for the Environment and is a newly elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
Robyn Sandekian . Ms. Robyn Sandekian is the Associate Director of the Engineering for Developing Communities Program and the Service Learning Programs Coordinator for the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She obtained her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU-Boulder, and has worked on-campus in the areas of student and program development since 1994. She joined the Engineering for Developing Communities Program in February 2004. Ms. Sandekian has helped to establish the Engineering for Developing Communities track in Civil Engineering, and works to expand hands-on learning opportunities for engineering students.
Mario Vidalon . Dr. Vidalon directs the Center for Advanced Engineering and Technology Education. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and prior to his current position he spent 10 years as director of engineering/information technologies programs, business development and corporate training at the University of California Irvine Extension.
Telemedicine and Educational Services for Developing Communities using Wireless Technologies
David Frohlich is Director of Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey and Professor of Interaction Design. He worked at HP Labs for 14 years before joining Digital World in January 2005 to establish a new research agenda on user-centred innovation for the consumer market. Current work includes a mixture of PhD, Industrial and Research Council projects on future photography, future literacy and future communication technologies http://www.dwrc.surrey.ac.uk/ . As part of this work, he was Principal Investigator on the EPSRC-funded StoryBank project. David also teaches a new MSc module on Interaction Design for the Department of Computing.
Community-centred design for development
Dr. Anupama Saxena is currently working as Head, Department of Political Science and Public Administration and in charge Director of Women's Studies and Development Centre of Guru Ghasidas University, Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India (www.ggu.ac.in ). She is actively engaged in research, policy advocacy and extension activities related to women. Her research interests include ICT and its equity dimensions and E Governance. She is a keen observer and analyst of emerging information society with a special focus on the disadvantaged and rural sections of the society. She has published and presented a number of research papers at national and international level. She is located in one of the most socially and economically challanged regions of India .She wants to explore the possibilities of academic collaborations with various organizations and institutes during the workshop based on similar objectives and shared goals.
Gender Evaluation of Rural E-Governance In India: A Case Study of E-Gram Suraj Scheme
Leo Burd is interested in the development of appropriate technologies and services for social empowerment. He earned a MS from Unicamp (Brazil) on the development of technologies for education, coordinated a non-profit organization that built computer schools in Sao Paulo slums, and earned a PhD from the MIT Media Lab on the design and analysis of technological initiatives for social empowerment. Burd worked for 3 years as a software engineer with Alcatel in Europe, contributed articles to popular education technology magazines, and consulted around the world on the uses of new technologies in education. Currently, Leo Burd is part of the Global Learning Research team of the Microsoft Education Products Group.
A framework for the design and analysis of technological initiatives for social empowerment
Kentaro Toyama is assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India in Bangalore, where he supports the lab's daily operation and contributes to strategy and overall management. He also leads the "Technology for Emerging Markets" group, which conducts multidisciplinary research to identify applications of computing and electronic technology for socio-economic development. In 2006, he co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), as a global platform for rigorous scholarship in this area. Prior to his work in India, Kentaro did research in computer vision, multimedia, and digital graphics in Redmond and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Ghana. Kentaro graduated with a PhD in computer science from Yale and a bachelors degree in physics from Harvard. http://research.microsoft.com/~toyama
ICT4D Research and Potential Sustainability
Neema Moraveji is a Ph.D. student at Stanford University's Learning Sciences and Technology Design research program. He also works with the Departments of Computer Science, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication. His background is in human-computer interaction and computer science. Before coming to Stanford, he was a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing for two years and received his masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include the study of large-group collaborative learning technologies and complex adaptive systems. He hopes to gain new insights into developing sustainable research agendas at the workshop.
Nasha Fitter is a senior product manager with Microsoft's Unlimited Potential Group, overseeing the worldwide deployment of MultiPoint, a new collaborative technology for emerging market schools. Within this, she is committed to working with partners to create new business models and opportunities. Nasha has spent many years working within the ICT for development and education space and founded two companies prior to joining Microsoft. She has worked with governments, NGO's and commercial education providers to design and deploy innovative and affordable education content. Nasha is an MBA graduate from the Harvard Business School.
Sustainable Research Agendas
Ban Al-Ani is a Research Scientist at Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to this she was a tenured professor at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) - Australia. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Systems (investigating the problem of incompletely documented stakeholder needs) from the school of Computer Systems, Faculty of Engineering at UTS. Ban is interested in research into global software development and social aspects of development. Future plans include investigating the issue of trust within different context and identifying remote stakeholders in addition to their needs. Ban attended the workshop in last year and gained invaluable insights into the challenges encountered first-hand by researchers and practitioners of ICTD/Development.
Challenges Encountered When Identifying Remote Stakeholders
Catalina Danis is a Research Staff Member in the Social Computing Group at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. Her research focuses on the study of work, and on collaboration and communications technologies that support work. While at IBM Catalina has worked in the areas of automatic speech recognition, collaboration and high performance computing. She publishes in the CHI, CSCW and DIS communities. Catalina holds a Ph.D. in Cognition and Communication from the University of Chicago.
Mark Bailey received the M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Oregon specializing in human computer interaction. He joined IBM research as part of the Accessibility Research Group and is now enjoying helping to tackle some of the world's problems with the Social Computing Group.
Jim Christensen is a Senior Technical Staff member at IBM's T.J.Watson Research Center in Hawthorne New York. He has held both management and technical positions in IBM, and worked on a broad range of projects including applications for voice, image and text, on tools for program development and debugging, and at all levels of systems infrastructure. Jim graduated from the University of Illinois in 1977 with a masters degree in Computer Science.
Jason Ellis is a researcher in the Social Computing Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and analysis of social software that facilitates collaboration among diverse user populations. Examples include undeserved communities, online gaming communities, inter-generational communication, and the grassroots teams in open source. His current work includes using social computing technology to empower the "next billion users" -- those in developing countries who do not yet benefit from computing technology. He has published in conferences such as ACM CHI, CSCW, DIS and learning sciences conferences CSCL and ICLS. Jason earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Find more on his work at http://jellis.org/
Thomas Erickson is an interaction designer and researcher at IBM Research. His focus is on studying and designing systems that enable distributed groups to interact coherently and productively. Erickson has published over sixty articles and chapters, and co-edited HCI Remixed, a book of essays published by MIT Press in 2008.
Robert (Rob) Farrell is a Research Staff Member in the Social Computing Group at IBM T J Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. His research focuses on user interfaces to support information organization, learning, and collaborative action. He is currently developing an interactive audiovisual user interface for mobile touchscreen phones as part of the group's Next Billions project.
Wendy A. Kellogg manages the Social Computing Group at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center. Topics addressed by the group have included social translucence, computer-mediated communication, and recently social computing for green IT and the next billion users. Kellogg holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and publishes in HCI and CSCW. She serves on the editorial board of ACM's Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI) and has chaired a variety of key conferences and technical programs and venues (CHI, DIS, CSCW). Wendy served on the National Academy of Science's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB). She was named ACM Fellow in 2002 for contributions to social computing and human-computer interaction, and elected to the CHI Academy in 2008.
Mobile Applications for the Next Billions: A Social Computing Perspective
Daniel Orwa Ochieng is a lecturer and PhD student in the School of Computing and Informatics in the University of Nairobi in Kenya. He lectures and does research in a variety of areas such as mobile phones in education, health, agriculture, ICT4D, M4D, ICT adoption among rural communities in developing countries. Mr Orwa is also a technical committee member of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) representing Kenya, a publication reviewer with ICT4D , a member of Computer Society of Kenya and a member of VeSeL( Village eScience for Life) - a digital divide project collaboration with 5 leading UK universities.
Timothy M. Waema is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Informatics in the University of Nairobi. He lectures and does research in a variety of areas in Information Systems. His research interests are in information systems strategy, social issues in information systems development and implementation, ICT for national socio-economic development (ICT4D), software engineering and management of change. Prof. Waema is the Lead Researcher in Kenya for the Research ICT Africa (RIA!) network. He is also the Research Director of the Local Governance and ICTs Research Network for Africa (LOG-IN Africa), a pan-African network of researchers and research institutions from nine African countries focusing on local e-governance. Further, he is the University of Nairobi Research Leader in a bridging the global digital divide project in collaboration with 5 leading UK Universities and sponsored by the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Innovative Design Approach for User interfaces for Rural Farming Communities: The Kenyan Experience
Zhengjie Liu is founder and director of the Sino-European Usability Center (SEUC) (www.usabilitychina.com), professor of HCI at Dalian Maritime University, and cofounder and co-chair of ACM SIGCHI China (www.hci.org.cn). He has been working in HCI and usability in China since the early 1990s and is a pioneer in the fields there. In 2000 he founded and led SEUC, conducting research and providing consultancy services. Haixin Zhang, Jun Zhang and Junliang Chen are staff members at the Sino-European Usability Center, Dalian Maritime University, working in usability/HCI for years. Most of the research projects the authors conducted, both from public funds and industry, is related directly to developing ICT in China. They see usability/HCI as an industrial practice supported by application-oriented research. The work involved a broad spectrum of products/applications, targeted to different groups of people and covered both urban and rural areas in China. They are experienced in international joint projects and would like to find common interests and develop cooperation with other participants of the workshop.
Conducting Field Studies in Chinese SME Settings
Jose P. Gonzalez-Brenes is a graduate student at the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. He is interested in understanding how to enable artificial intelligence to have a maximal beneficial impact on communities and organizations. Jose has collaborated in the Interamerican Development Bank, a non-profit dedicated to provide solutions to development challenges to countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Jose's main interest for the workshop is to learn from other domains where technology can help in improving the living conditions of the developing world.
Speech Interfaces in the Context of the HealthLine Project
Dr. Anupama Saxena is currently working as Head, Department of Political Science and Public Administration and in charge Director of Women's Studies and Development Centre of Guru Ghasidas University, Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India (www.ggu.ac.in ). She is actively engaged in research, policy advocacy and extension activities related to women. Her research interests include ICT and its equity dimensions and E Governance. She is a keen observer and analyst of emerging information society with a special focus on the disadvantaged and rural sections of the society. She has published and presented a number of research papers at national and international level. She is located in one of the most socially and economically challanged regions of India .She wants to explore the possibilities of academic collaborations with various organizations and institutes during the workshop based on similar objectives and shared goals.
Gender Evaluation of Rural E-Governance In India: A Case Study of E-Gram Suraj Scheme
Polly Gaster is currently head of ICTs for Development at the Eduardo Mondlane University Informatics Centre (CIUEM) in Maputo, Mozambique, to which she moved after 20 years in Mozambique's Ministry of Information working in different areas of information planning, production and dissemination. She was a member of the Mozambican team that pioneered telecentres in rural districts in 1999, and more recently coordinated the Community Multimedia Centre Scale-up Initiative in Mozambique for UNESCO. Her interest in local development, communications and community media has led her towards a combination of practical work and research activities around ICT for Development issues. She is currently actively involved in national, regional and international network initiatives through telecentre.org, a community of people and organizations working together to improve the social and economic impact of grassroots telecentres.
How Can Computer Access Meet the Needs of Poor People in Mozambique's Rural Areas?
Shubhada Nagarkar Affiliation: Lecturer, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Pune, India
Education: Ph.D. in Library and Information Science, S.N.D.T. University, Mumbai
Research interests: participatory design, biodiversity informatics, information needs and information seeking behaviour, usability studies, knowledge and content management
Prior experience: Phd. research (six years) in the area of library science and biodiversity informatics in participatory design of database
Future plans: Research in user information needs and use of technology, usability testing
What do you expect to get out of the workshop: get acquianted with the research conducted in the area of HCI and the areas in which librarians can contribute.
Information needs of small scale farmers: role of ICTs and Information professionals
Non-authors
Ravin Balakrishnan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair in Human-Centred Interfaces at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) laboratory and serves as the department's Associate Chair for Research and Industrial Relations. He is also a member of the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI). His research interests are in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Information and Communications Technology for Development, and Interactive Computer Graphics. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, working with Bill Buxton, while concurrently a part-time researcher at Alias|wavefront (now part of Autodesk). He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), an Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award (2003), the Bell University Laboratories Associate Chair in HCI at the University of Toronto (2002-2006), and best paper awards and honourable mentions at the CHI 2008, CSCW 2006, UIST 2006, CHI 2005, Graphics Interface 2005 and UIST 2004 conferences. In addition to working with students and colleagues at Toronto, he collaborates with researchers at leading industrial laboratories and universities worldwide, including stints as a visiting researcher at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) (2005-2007), a visiting professor at the University of Paris & INRIA (2006), and most recently a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research's Redmond, Beijing, Bangalore and Cambridge labs while on sabbatical from the University of Toronto during the 2007-2008 academic year. He is also involved in two startups that are commercializing research conducted in his lab: Sketch2 Corp. and Bump Technologies Inc. Further information, including publications and videos demonstrating some of his research, can be obtained from www.dgp.toronto.edu/~ravin
Adebola Osuntogun I am a PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Interactive Computing. My research is in the Human Computer Interaction area focusing on Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) and Health Information Technologies. In spring 2008, in collaboration with Prof Santosh Vempala, Stephen Thomas (a PhD student) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a web-based tool for reporting the collection, screening and distribution of blood for 14 PEPFAR countries was developed. PEPFAR countries were selected under the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and consist of 14 countries in Africa and the Caribbean. We developed a web-based tool and conducted usability studies in Zambia and Tanzania. From our visit to Zambia, we realized there were several other problems in the blood distribution system which led to a separate project on the Design of a Blood Flow System for monitoring, prediction and allocation of blood units to different regions in the country. The internet infrastructure in Zambia and many other developing countries are quite different from what is available in Western countries, hence the need for solutions and systems that meet the local needs. I am currently working on the development of a solution in collaboration with Prof. Santosh Vempala , Prof. Gregory Abowd, Stephen Thomas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Zambian National Blood Transfusion Services. Attendance at the workshop on Human-Centered Computing in International Development will provide invaluable knowledge and broaden my understanding about conducting research in developing countries. I am specifically interested in learning best practices for designing interfaces for developing countries and key criteria for ensuring the development of a sustainable solution.
Rowena Luk is founder of AMITA Telemedicine Inc, a non-profit whose mission is to improve the quality of healthcare in Africa through research, development, and deployments of information technology. Recently she has worked in collaboration with Intel Research in order to develop and deploy a telemedicine network in Ghana consisting of 5 major hospitals and 125 doctors from around the world. She has also worked with the Tetherless Computing Lab at the University of Waterloo on drive-by internet solutions for rural kiosk operators in India and developed mobile technologies for Dimagi and the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia. She holds a Masters in Information Management and Systems from the University of California in Berkeley, where she was an active member of the TIER Research Group, and an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Ed Cutrell , Microsoft Research. My research mainly concerns the exploration and measurement of human interactions with information technology. I was trained as a cognitive neuroscientist, but I've been working in HCI for about 10 years. In that time I've been fortunate to work on a broad range of HCI topics, ranging from input technologies to visual perception to brain-computer interfaces to intelligent notifications and disruptions. In the past few years I've spent a lot of my time thinking about information interaction. With terabytes of information available at our fingertips, how do people find new information (i.e., search) and then how do they retrieve information they've seen before? How can we design systems and interaction techniques that make accessing this world of information simple and intuitive? Recently, I've gotten interested in understanding the role of HCI research in ICTD. To that end I'm spending the first half of 2009 working with the TEM group in MSR India, Bangalore. I'm working on several projects with people at different points on the economic scale. Some are at the bottom of the pyramid and others are a few stones up. From Seattle, it's virtually impossible to get a sense for what the problems in ICTD really are. Time in the field is critical for understanding the context that people live in, what is important to them and how any technology would actually be integrated into their lives. One of the things I've discovered in the short time I've spent in India is that if we hope to make anyone's life better through technology (or any other means), we have to be willing to keep an open mind about both the benefits AND the costs of any change we wish to introduce. As a researcher, I see my role as clearly identifying both and finding places where the benefits are great enough to clearly overcome the cost.
Organizers to be present at the workshop: (For the complete list, refer to Organizers
Susan Dray is a consultant with Dray & Associates, Inc. and has worked with HCI professionals in so called " developing" countries to help them build their own communities, as well as to help them to adapt user-centered design approaches to make them useful in economic development projects. In addition, she works with clients to help them understand the conditions in these countries so they can design more appropriate ICT systems and products for the " developing" world.
Matthew Kam is an Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research integrates his interests in education, economic development and information technology. His primary research investigates how e-learning games on cellphones can extend literacy and second language learning among children in rural areas and the urban slums in the developing world. His research has received major funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Microsoft, National Science Foundation, Qualcomm and Verizon. It has been featured in prominent media outlets including a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television documentary and a major national newspaper in India. Previously, with the support of a fellowship from the United Nations and University of California, Berkeley, Matthew participated as a third-party evaluator of a microfinance transaction technology in Uganda spearheaded by Hewlett-Packard. His leadership experience includes serving as an administrator on a US$5 million, 18-month project in the Singapore Armed Forces, where he helped to manage its finances and organize the logistics for 200,000 personnel. Matthew earned all his degrees at UC Berkeley: Ph.D. in Computer Science with a minor in Education, B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and B.A. in Economics.
Ann Light is Reader in Interaction, Media and Communication in the Communication and Computing Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, and till recently also a Senior Research Fellow in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in the social impact of technology and the politics of participation in design, explored in a range of current projects including Democratising Technology (DemTech: www.demtech.qmul.ac.uk), Fair Tracing (www.fairtracing.org), and Practical Design for Social Action (www.technologyandsocialaction.org). She helps run a charity using ICT for cultural exchange between Africa and Europe (www.fiankoma.org) and works as mentor for a user-centred design company (www.flowinteractive.com). She publishes in the areas of human computer interaction, cross-cultural methodology, interactive media and design, with a focus upon meaning-making and experience of interactive technology, begun in studies of websites and online discussion lists in 1995 and now turned upon mobile and ubiquitous contexts of use. She is part of the British "Bridging the Global Digital Divide" network and has co-organised several international workshops on the theme of HCI4D, the last being OzCHI's "Inclusivity, Interaction Design and Culture" (reported with her thoughts on Hofstede and cross-cultural work in HCI here: http://www.thinkflowinteractive.com/2009/01/14/designing-for-other-cultures-putting-hofstede-to-bed/).
Indrani Medhi is an Associate Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. Her research interest is in the area of Ethnographic UI Design. Her current work has been in User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. She has a Masters degree in Design from Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA (2005) and Bachelors degree in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India (2002). Currently, she is also a 1st year Ph.D. student at the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay), Mumbai, India.
Nithya Sambasivan is a second year doctoral student in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests are in Information and Communication Technologies for social and economic Development, from a Human-centered standpoint. She is particularly using low-cost audio, video, and mobile technologies. She has helped co-organize three workshops on HCI4D at CHI. She has a Master's degree in Human-computer Interaction-Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an undergraduate degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering at Anna University, Chennai, India. Her research experience includes summer research internships at Accenture Technology Labs, IBM T.J.Watson Center, and Nokia Research Center. She is currently a research intern at the Technologies for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India, conducting socio-technical research on information practices in slum communities in Bangalore.
John Thomas is a Research Staff Member at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center. He has worked in the general area of Human-Computer Interaction for 30 years and has over 150 papers, book chapters, and invited presentations. He has also served as Workshop Chair and general Co-Chair for CHI and co-organized and co-led more than a dozen workshops at CHI, CSCW, and ECSCW including two on cross-cultural issues in HCI.
Kentaro Toyama is assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India in Bangalore, where he supports the lab's daily operation and contributes to strategy and overall management. He also leads the "Technology for Emerging Markets" group, which conducts multidisciplinary research to identify applications of computing and electronic technology for socio-economic development. In 2006, he co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), as a global platform for rigorous scholarship in this area. Prior to his work in India, Kentaro did research in computer vision, multimedia, and digital graphics in Redmond and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Ghana. Kentaro graduated with a PhD in computer science from Yale and a bachelors degree in physics from Harvard. http://research.microsoft.com/~toyama