Posts Tagged ‘talks’

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Brent Roraback on OneApp

November 10th, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

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

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Rob Nathan on Portable Ultrasound

November 2nd, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

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

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Amit Saxena on Digital StudyHall

October 20th, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

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

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Justin Steventon on CyberTracker

October 14th, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

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

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Gaetano Borriello on Open Data Kit

October 12th, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

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

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A Look Back at Tapan Parikh’s CAM Toolkit

August 28th, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

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…

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Cell Phone Revolution in the Developing World

June 23rd, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

Change members Chris Coward and Yaw Anokwa will be speaking at an event organized by the Young Professional’s International Network, the World Affairs Council and co-sponsored by CIS entitled: “The Cell Phone Revolution in the Developing World”.

What: There are 4.1 billion cell phones in the world (2/3 of the world’s population has one) and their use is transforming lives in the developing world. The foremost authorities in the Puget Sound region have been assembled to discuss how these devices – that are taken for granted – are having a radical effect on people’s finances, health, education, businesses and politics.

When: Monday, June 29th, 2009. Doors open at 7, talk starts at 7:30 and goes till 9:30.

Where: Google Offices in Fremont
651 N 34th St
Seattle, WA 98102
(206) 234-5678

If you’re interested you must pre-register at http://www.world-affairs.org/calendar.cfm to reserve a spot. If you’re a member of the Young Professional’s International Network, the cost is $10, non-members pay $15 and students $10. The venue has a capacity of 50 people so please pre-register so as not to be disappointed night of…

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Walter Curioso on mHealth in Peru

June 2nd, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

There is a mounting interest in the field of mHealth – the provision of health-related services via mobile communications. mHealth projects are operating in a wide variety of developing countries and providing demonstrable impacts. Documented results – in both the developed and developing world – reveal that mobile technology improves the efficiency of healthcare delivery. Due to its nascent stage, mHealth presents a tremendous opportunity to create a global facilitation body, enabling maximum innovation and impact on global health.

In his talk on Thursday, June 4th, Dr. Walter Curioso will describe and present initial results of Cell-POS, a mHealth project that is currently being conducted in Peru. Innovative approaches using information technologies such as cell phones are needed to increase adherence to antiretroviral treatment for people with HIV/AIDS. Cell-POS, funded by the NIH grant R01TW007896, will develop and evaluate a computer-based intervention using cell phones to enhance adherence to antiretroviral therapy and support of HIV transmission risk-reduction among adult HIV- positive patients in Peru. The specific aims of Cell-POS are to: 1) Conduct focus groups to assess culturally-specific behavioral messages to be included in the computer-based system; 2) Develop and test an interactive computer-based system using cell phones to enhance adherence to antiretroviral treatment and to deliver HIV transmission risk reduction messages; 3) Evaluate the impact of the system on antiretroviral adherence and sexual risk behaviors.

Time: June 4th at 12.00
Place: UW Paul Allen Center, Room 303

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Kentaro Toyama on Computer Science Research for Global Development

March 25th, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

On the same planet where there are 1.4 billion Internet users, a far less fortunate 1.4 billion people survive below the World Bank’s definition of the poverty line. The same technology that has transformed our lives – the lives of the wealthiest people on the planet – also remains out of reach and irrelevant for the poorest.

How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? Can you keep five rural schoolchildren from fighting over one PC? What value is technology to a farmer earning $1 a day? The young field of “information and communication technology for development” (ICT4D) asks these kinds of questions in the expectation that computing and communication technologies can contribute to the socio-economic development of the world’s poorest communities.

Through the video and slides, Kentaro Toyama introduces the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India, where an interdisciplinary team of researchers explores solutions in the context of agriculture, education, healthcare, microfinance, and other domains of development. The talk discusses the role of computer science, project sustainability, and multidisciplinarity with academic integrity in the context of MultiPoint, a project where a computer-science concept not only solves a challenge in the context of under-resourced schools, but opens the door to rich avenues for further research.

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Recapping MSR’s Technology for Emerging Markets Talk

March 6th, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

Over sixty people showed up to hear Kentaro Toyama, Indrani Medhi, Aishwarya Ratan, Bill Thies and David Hutchful talk about their work at Microsoft Research India’s Technology for Emerging Market’s group.

For those who missed the presentation, the slides are posted below and the images are on Flickr.

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