Two and a half years ago, Tapan Parikh gave his “job talk” at the University of Washington. In that talk, Tap described his experiences developing CAM — a toolkit for mobile phone data collection in the rural developing world. Drawing from the results of an work in rural India, he outlined a set of guidelines for delivering mobile information services to such regions.
Tap went on to win the TR35’s Humanitarian of the Year a few months later, and in the article written about his work, he said, “I think often times with formal and well-established disciplines like computer science, you run into the problem of inertia, a kind of hesitancy to accept new ideas about what should count as important…I’m cautiously optimistic that within academia as a whole, there’s a broad sense that the real-world impact of someone’s work is an important criterion by which to judge it.”
In the time that has passed, the ideas behind CAM have sparked similar and successful projects. From open source frameworks (Open Data Kit, OpenRosa) to applications for clinicians (CommCare, e-IMCI) and farmers (Digital ICS), phone based tools for rural regions has become an active area of research. Given this, it does seem that academia’s inertia can be overcome…
