This Thursday at Change, we have an open discussion. Come share whatever it is you are working on! There will also be a brief recap of the mHealth Summit that took place in Washington, D.C.
What: Open Discussion
When: Thursday, November 12 at Noon
Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 403
While Change has historically been based in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, it is a campus wide organization that cares about more than just the technical parts of global development. To help expose more of what the University of Washington has to offer in global development, I wanted to start a series of posts which feature some (but not all) of the relevant degrees, programs and faculty at UW.
First up is the Evans School of Public Affairs. The Evans School is the pre-eminent graduate school of public policy and management in the Northwest, and ranks nationally in the top tier of graduate schools in its field. The school emphasizes policy analysis and management through their Master of Public Administration and Public Policy and Management Ph.D. programs.
The Evans School also offers a one-year International Development Policy and Management Certificate Program (IDCP) gives students the tools and frameworks needed for addressing pressing international issues in developing countries. IDCP students are drawn from diverse departments from across the university, giving the core classes a unique, interdisciplinary perspective on development.
Some of the faculty from the Evans School interested in development are listed below. If we missed someone or something, feel free to add the information in the comments. Hopefully, we’ll have some from this list presenting their work at Change!
Alison Cullen
Environmental Risk Analysis, Environmental Science and Policy, Quantitative Uncertainty Analysis, Statistical Decision Theory
Andrew Gordon
Microcomputers, Ethnographic Data Analysis, Information Systems and International Information Exchange, Community Organizations
Charles Hirschman
Demography and Ecology, Immigration and Ethnicity, Fertility and Family, Social Stratification and Mobility, Southeast Asia
David Harrison
Nonprofit Organizations, Regional Economic Development, Growth Management
Diana Fletchner
Development Economics, Economics of Gender, Intrahousehold Decision-Making, Behavioral Economics, Group Effects, Rural Credit Markets, Microfinance
Joseph H. Cook
Environmental Economics, Health Economics, Water and Sanitation Policy in Developing Countries, Benefit-Cost Analysis
Leigh Anderson
International Development; Trade and Environmental Policy
Mary Kay Gugerty
International development; nonprofit and public management; program analysis and evaluation
Michael Blake
Social and Political Philosophy, International Ethics, Philosophy of Economics, Morality and Public Policy
Richard Zerbe
Law and Economics, Benefit-Cost Analysis, Antitrust, Environmental Economics, Economic History
Sanjeev Khagram
Transnational Studies, Global Governance, Civil Society, Corporate Citizenship, Human Security, and Sustainable Development
Sara Curran
Social Demography, Environment, Development and Globalization, Gender
Steven Rathgeb Smith
Nonprofit and Public Management, Community Development, and the Changing Roles of Nonprofit Organizations and Government in Civil Society
This Thursday at Change, Brent Roraback will be presenting on his work on Microsoft’s OneApp.
Brent Roraback (a UW Jackson School graduate) is a Principal Program Manager in the Microsoft Startup Business Group’s Mobile team. Brent joined Microsoft in 2007 after Microsoft’s purchase of digital media and technology company aQuantive, where Brent served as Director of Emerging Media Product Development.
Brent’s team in SPG Mobile focuses on creating software and platforms for “feature phones”, the non-smartphone handsets most common in the developing world. The combination of cheap, readily available mobile phones, expanded mobile operator data networks, and cloud-based services can help address many of the challenges faced by NGOs, governments, businesses and end users in these markets. Brent will discuss his group’s work and provide examples of how their current product, OneApp, is being used for data collection and diagnoses by field health care workers.
What: Brent Roraback on OneApp
When: Thursday, November 12 at Noon
Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 403
This Thursday at Change, Rob Nathan will be presenting on his work on Portable Ultrasound.
According to the UN Africa and the Millennium Development Goals 2007 “Maternal health remains a regional and global scandal, with the odds that a sub-Saharan African woman will die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth during her life at 1 in 16 compared with 1 in 3,800 in the developed world.”
We have begun a pilot project in Uganda to teach midwives to perform limited obstetrical ultrasound to identify potential birth complications. Women with those conditions will be encouraged to deliver in a facility equipped to perform cesarean section, rather than at a lower level health facility or in the home. Midwives will use off the shelf portable ultrasound equipment donated by GE. We have begun to work with Computing and Engineering and HCDE to develop equipment that is more appropriate for rural developing country environments: durable, cheap, simple, able to run off the electrical grid. We hope to incorporate ODK into this equipment.
What: Rob Nathan on Portable Ultrasound
When: Thursday, November 5 at Noon
Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 403
This Thursday at Change, we will be trying something special for CSE Affiliates Day. We will be hosting the “Technology for Under-Served Regions” session. Please note the change in time and place.
11:40-11:45: Introduction and Overview, Carl Hartung
11:45-12:00: Digital Study Hall Evaluation Study, Amit Saxena
12:00-12:15: Open Data Kit, Carl Hartung
12:15-12:30: Building a Grassroots Transportation Information System, Ruth Anderson
Find out more on the Affiliates Day page.
What: CSE Affiliates Day
When: Thursday, October 29 from 11:40 to 12:30
Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 305
Open Data Kit (ODK) is an open-source mobile data collection toolkit for the citizen science, public health, and environmental monitoring.
ODK developers (and Change members), Yaw Anokwa and Carl Hartung have just released ODK Collect v1.1, an Android client which renders a form, survey, or algorithm into prompts that support complex logic, input constraints, repeating questions, and multiple languages.
Some of the new features include barcode scanning, image/audio/video capture and playback, editing of saved forms, and device metadata (phone number, IMEI, IMSI) support.
Read the release announcement or watch the video below for more.
This Thursday at Change, Amit Saxena will be presenting on his work with Digital StudyHall.
The Digital StudyHall (DSH) project aims to improve education for students in rural and slum schools in India. The researchers video record classes taught by experienced teachers, distribute these videos over “Postmannet” (effected by DVDs sent in the postal system), collect them in a large distributed database, and distribute them on DVDs to poor rural and slum schools. Education experts train local teachers to mediate the video lessons for use in their teaching. For more details, please see: http://dsh.cs.washington.edu/
The University of Washington and the StudyHall Educational Foundation are currently undertaking a two year mixed methods study of Digital StudyHall in 11 village schools in the the Chinhat Development Block, Lucknow, India. The study is supported by the National Science Foundation. In the presentation, I will share our preliminary analysis of the teaching and learning outcomes as well as the implementation of the DSH system in these schools.
What: Amit Saxena on Digital StudyHall
When: Thursday, October 22 at Noon
Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 403
This Thursday at Change, Justin Steventon will be presenting on his exciting work with CyberTracker.
Climate change, pollution, habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity may have serious impacts on human welfare. To anticipate and prevent negative impacts will require ongoing long-term monitoring of all aspects of the environment.
Our vision is to enable people to be part of a worldwide environmental monitoring network. Our mission is to help you improve environmental monitoring by increasing the efficiency of data gathering and to improve observer reliability.
CyberTracker is a software application which allows illiterate and low-literate people to capture rich data about their environment.
What: Justin Steventon on CyberTracker
When: Thursday, October 15 at Noon
Where: UW, Paul Allen Center, Room 403
This Tuesday at the CSE Colloqium, Professor Gaetano Borriello will be presenting Open Data Kit, work he did while on sabbatical at Google.
Open Data Kit (ODK) is an open-source mobile data collection toolkit for the citizen science, public health, and environmental monitoring communities. These groups share the fact that they all have limited resources and tend to be behind the technology curve. ODK’s goals are three-fold:
(1) make tools highly modular and customizable so that they can be easily composed and/or specialized into appropriate arrangements for the task at hand;
(2) exploit open interfaces and standards so that solutions are not “silo-ed” into monolithic enterprise-level packages that are difficult to understand and maintain; and
(3) get these communities to take advantage of evolving technologies including powerful mobile clients (e.g., Android), flexible and scalable server infrastructure (e.g., AppEngine) so as to reach a wider base of developers and avoid early obsolescence.
In this talk, Borriello will describe the current status and research and development plans. For those who cannot make it, the talk will live streamed and recorded.
What: Gaetano Borriello on Open Data Kit
When: Tuesday, October 13 at 3.30pm
Where: UW, Electrical Engineering Building, Room 105
In the past few days, a few interesting ICTD papers have been published that I wanted to share.
The first set comes from the Information Technologies & International Development (ITID), an interdisciplinary open-access journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the “other four billion”. There are a number of great papers in the fall issue, but two stood out to me.
For the more technical crowd, Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR) just posted their papers from their upcoming workshop. Here are two that I enjoyed.
