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I am a doctoral student in the Dept. of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. I am interested in human-centered technologies towards socio-economic betterment. I am also interested in mobile and ubiquitous computing as vehicles of social change.
Prior to Irvine, I spent two years in Atlanta, exploring various research avenues at the GVU, College of Computing, Georgia Tech, eventually earning a Master of Science in Human-computer Interaction. My heart belongs to sultry Madras, India, where I was born, raised and turned into a woman (so please, keep your enlargment pill e-mails to yourself), and even earned a Bachelor of Engineering from Anna University.
I immensely enjoy co-reviewing [Anticoda], playing [Weekend Cornucopia on WREK, 91.1 FM, Georgia Tech], and listening [Last.fm] to world music, watching, creating [Katharasis], and improvising [The Pit in NYC] theatre, and capturing [Flickr], documenting [H2G2], reading [Library Thing] and tagging [del.icio.us] the world. I also spend a significant fraction of time co-managing Surabhi--the Indian Students Association at UCI. A column on technologies for development for the alternative is in the pipeline. Be sure to check out the website on October 2nd!
Projects:
>>Studying the role of ICTs in socio-economic transitions in the nonformal sector. Fieldwork in the nonformal economies of Chennai and Mumbai, India. (current) With: Bonnie Nardi
>>Participatory digial video exchange between low-income communities towards community development. Ethnographic work in two slum communities of Bangalore. With: Kentaro Toyama and Ed Cutrell
>>How and why Ubicomp for slums? Sociological aspects of ICTD. With: Nimmi Rangaswamy
>>VoiceList -- User-generated Audio Content for Socio-economic Development
With: Bonnie Nardi | Donald J. Patterson Collaborator: Ruy Cervantes.
>>Greensweeper -- A Mobile Game for Environmental Landscape Awareness
With: Bill Tomlinson | Kah Liu | Hui-Chun Phoebe Lin.
Georgia Tech -- >>Simple Navigation and Access Platform -- ICT4D with Michael Best.
There's more..
Being in the space of development, I have taken a liking to both Amartya Sen and Agastya Sen.
Nithya Sambasivan
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine
5099 Donald Bren Hall
Irvine, CA 92697-3425
nsambasi at uci dot edu
I am usually at TechDec
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"Whatever you do will be insignificant,
but it is very important that you do it."
–Mahatma Gandhi.
