Posts Tagged ‘video’

ODK Collect v1.1 Released

October 22nd, 2009 by Yaw Anokwa

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.

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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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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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