This Thursday at Change Krysta Yousoufian and Rohit Chaudri will discuss financial models for healthcare in rural areas.

What: Discussion on financial models for healthcare in rural areas.

When: Thursday, January 26th at noon

Where: Paul Allen Center, Room 203

Update: Nicolas di Tada has had to postpone his trip to Seattle and won’t be able to make it.

What: Nicolás di Tada on InSTEDD.
When: Thursday, January 19th at Noon
Where: Paul Allen Center, Room 203

This Thursday at Change Ted McCarthy from the University of Michigan will be discussing screen reader use among the visually impaired in India and sharing the results of a study conducted last summer in Bangalore, India with Microsoft Research, where he worked with Joyojeet Pal (Univ. of Michigan) and Ed Cutrell (MSR).

While the study was largely exploratory in examining the ways in which members of the visually impaired (VI) community use screen reader technologies, the research led to several interesting discoveries, particularly the nature surrounding VI preference for one screen reader software over another, and factors leading to (or preventing) the switch in use between one software program and another. The study focused especially on the two most dominant screen reader programs according to our survey and others, JAWS and NVDA, the first a ~$1000 software (and the most popularly used), and the latter a free and open source program which nevertheless sees far less use by VI persons in India. While the study revealed that piracy was a key factor contributing to the dominance of JAWS over NVDA, it also revealed patterns in the shift in preferences of users over time from “surface” factors such as screen reader text-to-speech quality to computer application support by the screen reader software. The authors show that this may in fact lead to a lower-than-expected adoption of NVDA (the free and open source software) due to that program’s strengths and weaknesses relative to JAWS. Ted will discuss the outcomes of the initial research conducted last summer, as well as theoretical frameworks which help to explain the switching phenomenon observed. The results of this research will also be presented at the ICTD 2012 conference this coming March in Atlanta, GA.

Ted is a second-year Master’s student at the University of Michigan School of Information. He plans to obtain a PhD with a focus on technology use in health care and in developing country contexts. His background prior to Michigan involved an undergraduate focus on cognitive science at Brown University, followed by several years of teaching.  Ted will continue to work with Joyojeet Pal and Ed Cutrell to further investigate the use of screen readers in India and elsewhere, and is additionally beginning to explore the use of a mobile app and series of sensors to monitor symptom severity and identify environmental causal factors in patients with syndromes and disorders such as Tourette’s, seizure disorders, autism spectrum disorders, and others.

What: Ted McCarthy on screen reader use among the visually impaired in India.

When: Thursday, January 12th at Noon

Where: Paul Allen Center, Room 203

CSE 590F is a UW seminar that some of you may be interested in. The focus of the seminar this quarter will be on software toolkits for ICTD. Each week someone will lead the discussion by presenting the principal components of the toolkit and their major interfaces and standards. The objective is to get a sense of the landscape of software toolkits as well as their salient properties and, ideally, what makes them more or less successful.

More information about the seminar and the schedule may be found at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse590f/12wi/. Please join us for any discussion that you may be interested in. Seminars are held on Tuesday from 1.30-2.30pm in CSE 203. Also feel free to register for the seminar for 1 credit (SLN 12401).

This Thursday at Change UW CSE Professor Richard Anderson will talk about Software and Global Health:  Assessing vaccine cold chains from national equipment inventories.

Immunization is recognized as one of the most successful public health interventions ever devised. A critical component of immunization programs is the vaccine cold chain – the cold storage to keep vaccines safe from manufacture to eventual delivery to a child. Countries face challenges in managing their cold chains in ensuring sufficient storage capacity, optimizing allocation of equipment to control energy costs, and planning for the introduction of new and more expensive vaccines. The Cold Chain Equipment Manager (CCEM) project at PATH aims to support these processes through the development of cold chain planning and inventory tools. This talk describes the process of introducing the CCEM software to four countries in Africa and the results of using CCEM to analyze the country cold chain inventories. We will examine the roles of multiple stakeholders in adoption and use of the system. Main challenges include creating a system and work process that allows the equipment inventory to be kept up to date, and making information from the inventory accessible so that it can be used by decision makers. These will be addressed in future work through the development of web based tools with improved analysis and visualization capabilities and simplification of the modeling mechanism that the tool uses.

Richard Anderson is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics from Reed College in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. In 1986 he joined the University of Washington after a one-year Postdoc at the Mathematical Science Research Institute in Berkeley, CA. He has held visiting positions with the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India and with the Learning Sciences and Technology group at Microsoft Research. For the last two years he has been collaborating with PATH, a Seattle based public health NGO, applying computing technology to a range of problems in global health.

What: Richard Anderson on Software and Global Health:  Assessing vaccine cold chains from national equipment inventories.

When: Thursday, January 5th at Noon

Where: Paul Allen Center, Room 203

Files: Slides, Handout