1

Extreme poverty is one of the great challenges facing the world What are some of the pieces of the

poverty puzzle?

2

What are some of the pieces of the poverty puzzle? Does technology have a role to play?

3

What are some of the pieces of the poverty puzzle?

Does technology have a role to play?

All of these can be seen as information dissemination problems

4

Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Technology is well-suited to

information dissemination But deploying technology in the

developing world is challenging Solutions must be:

5

Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Technology is well-suited to

information dissemination But deploying technology in the developing world

is challenging Solutions must be• Low-cost• Easy to use • Good battery life • Robust • Sufficient

processing power

6Photo (right): dsh.cs.washington.edu

Big themes in ICTD

Mobile phones are the thingThere are more mobile phones (6B in 2014)

in the world than toothbrushes1B Android phones sold in 201485% mobile penetration in Africa+10% mobile penetration +.6% GDP

Leverage limited numbers of highly trained peopleUse technology to empower less-trained

people

7

General Challenges

Diverse languages and scripts22 different languages in India alone

○ Wikipedia is not useful in these regions

Low literacy Really poor people are just like us

Don’t want to study in their spare timeBut they have less spare time!

Armed conflict, unstable governmentsThe war in the DRC has killed 5.4 million since 1998

8

Challenges

Some are technologicalPower

Some are socialLiteracy

Social scientists and technologists must work together

9

What do you think?

10

What do you think?

Is it inappropriate to spend money on cellphones when people are starving?

11

What do you think?

What do you think of the idea that projects need to be monetized?

12

Topics in ICTD

Livelihood Education Medicine Data Collection and Reporting

13

Data Collection and reporting Not exciting, but widely applicable Data collection: Open Data Kit

Medicine, esp. tracking HIV-positive patientsEnvironmental surveyingFraud monitoring electionshttp://opendatakit.org/about/deployments/

Data Reporting: FoneAstraColdChain maintenanceHuman breast milk bankinghttp://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/

11/10/362330539/a-smartphone-gadget-pumps-up-breast-milk-banks 14

Education

15

How do we improve access to education In the developing world Given shortage of teachers?

Primary education Livelihood and adult education

16Photos: dsh.cs.washington.edu,

One Approach: Facilitated Video

17

Excellent educator

Recorded at one site

Video shown to students at another site by aFacililtator who leadsinteraction around the video

Idea: combine strengths of lecture and discussion

Facilitated Video has been used in Rural India for Primary school education Health education Agricultural education

Digital Green

18Photos: dsh.cs.washington.edu

Pre-Natal education

Work done by Ramachandran et al in a collaboration between Berkeley and MSRI

Better suited to one-on-one interaction Difficult to persuade people to change

traditional practices Trust is very important!

19

Maternal mortality In 2012, India recorded more maternal deaths than

any other country in the world (around 56,000 per year),accounting for more than 20% that occur globallyFor comparison, in 2011 in US, 32,367 people died in car

accidents

A preliminary study has shown that moving deliveries from home to the hospital can reduce maternal mortality by half.

But in India, over 60% of all deliveries are still conducted at home, without a skilled birth attendant.

20

Empowering “Ashas”

Ashas are women in villages in India who are charged with convincing pregnant women to use health services and educating them about warning signsASHA = Accredited Social Health ActivistPersuading family as wellAshas’ status in the village is questionable“Very early, we were struck by the regularity with

which village women chose to ignore advice from health workers, and decline use of free health services”

21

Mobile phone as video creation AND presentation device Ashas are given some videos to start,

but can also make their own videos Videos of village elders

endorsing practice especially

usefulCache of technology

22

Findings (1) videos served as anchors for health discussions

that both scaffolded the ASHA and engaged her clients, a necessary precursor for persuasion

(2) creation of videos was motivating and fun for ASHAs

(3) high-status influencers in the community participated in video creation to a surprising extent

(4) Improved ASHA motivation (5) modest learning gains by ASHAs

23

Medical projects

Midwife’s ultrasound$1000-$3500 vs $7000-$9000OR $20000-75000

E-IMCI OpenMRS

24

Expanding Rural Cellular Networks with Virtual Coverage Work out of Berkeley’s TIER group

Start-up recently acquired by Facebook Mobile phones are a huge driver of

economic developmentRemittancesGetting goods to market

The cellular network is the biggest network in the world ~6B usersBut ~1B are uncovered, mostly in rural areas of

developing world.

Why aren’t they covered? Too expensive to build and operate towers.

Why?Power!“Contacts in rural areas have reported prices

between five hundred thousand to one million USD for the installation of a cell tower in an area without existing power or network”

The International Telecommunications Union has indicated that 50% of the OPEX cost for a rural network is power

Goal: Reduce cost of expanding the network

Make it cheaper by saving power Currently, turn it off at night

In the Punjab province of Pakistan, no power to the tower for over eighteen hours a day

So no calls, including emergency calls

Can we be smarter about when it’s turned off?“Virtual coverage”The tower turns off when no one is using it and

turns on when someone wants to make a call.

“Virtual Coverage”

This design allows us to save a large amount of power in the largest networks on Earth while still providing consistent coverage at all times.

• Sounds simple, right?

Not really! Requires changes to the way the tower

works. You can make a tower that will

automatically wake up for an incoming call, BUTa special device is still needed to wake

it up for an outgoing call.

They built the tower, and the device,

and a phone with the device built in!

Results “idle” mode saves between 65% to 84% of the

power on a tower. user’s experience is not dramatically affected Call setup increases by 2 seconds with Wake-up

Phone At most 25 seconds with normal phones and Wake-

up Radio (the cheaper solution) An installation using virtual coverage in a low-density area could operate with less than one-sixth of the solar panels, batteries, and price of a traditional setup.

Results

Reduce the network power draw by 34% at night (21% during the day) for a South Asian operator.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where towers are more heavily utilized, save 21% of the power at night (and just 7% during the day)

Allow cellular companies to expand into new areas more cheaply

TR-35

MIT Tech Review 35 innovators under 35 years of age

Kurtis Heimerl

Networking

WildNet Daknet

33

Livelihood

Kerala Fisheries Digital Green

Main subject of my work

34

Natalie Linnell, Richard Anderson, Guy Bordelon, Rikin Gandhi, Bruce Hemingway, S.B. Nadagouda, Kentaro Toyama

35

Facilitated Video has been used in Rural India for Primary school education Health education Agricultural education

Digital Green

36

Primary school education Health education Agricultural education

Digital Green

Photos: dsh.cs.washington.edu

The work discussed here was done with Digital Green

Digital Green Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Facilitated video for agricultural extension

Teaching farmers better farming practices

Help existing agricultural organizations switch to facilitated video

Over 2,500 shows in

January 2011 488 villages with

recent shows

37

Digital Green processes

FacilitatorsRecruited from the villageLocal-language literateCompensatedFirst point of contact for

potential adopters

38Photo: dsh.cs.washington.edu

Extension officers

supervise facilitators

Benefits of Facilitated Video It enables a less skilled person to lead class Provides teacher training while teaching

BUT it relies heavily on the facilitatorInteraction is vitalThe quality of interaction matters

39

How can we ensure high quality and quantity

of interaction?Technology to increase capabilities of facilitators

Goal:

Use technology in facilitated video to provide structure to the interactionsupport to the facilitator

40

Contributions of this work:

41

Identifying the kind of support that is helpful to the facilitatorTargeted facilitation advice

Building two different technological solutions to provide support

Field testing and evaluating these solutionsWith a real deployment

Custom hardware remote control Audio Codes/Android Device

Talk Outline

Identifying what kinds of support are useful The technological solutions we built Field testing and evaluation of technological

solutions

42

What kinds of support are useful? During a 12-week investigationTried several interventionsUnderstand facilitator’s needs using low-tech prototypes

The most successful was providing information to the facilitator using subtitlesAdvice on when to stop

the video and

what to say

43

Lessons Learned

44

Helped a novice facilitator create more interaction Could it be useful for more advanced facilitators?

Enriched the kind of interaction

This is the approach we pursue:Providing information to the facilitator

Talk Outline

Identifying what kinds of support are useful The technological solutions we built Field testing and evaluation of technological

solutions

45

Approach: Provide prompts to the facilitator When to stop the videoWhat to sayOn a handheld device

Why use a handheld device? For monitoring the facilitator

Providing information to supervisors about the facilitator’s behavior

It provides a private channel to the facilitator

Allows us to provide richer materialsLonger prompts, pictures

Much easier to update materials

46

There is a challenge: How does the device know what video is playing and where it is?

47

We developed two different approaches

to this problem

Why two separate approaches? The two approaches have

complementary strengths and weaknesses

Rather than guessing which was betterEvaluate in the field with real users

48

First Approach: “Smart” Remote Control

Custom hardware device Normal remote control

+ screen for presenting information When the user puts the DVD into the

player, they enter that DVD’s ID

number Then the device tracks button presses to

know which video is playing and at what time offset

49

Second Approach:Audio Codes + Android Application Create (audible) “audio codes”

with distinctive frequency distribution

Embed them into the video at regular intervals

An Android-based application Activates the microphoneListens to audioUses simple digital signal

processing to the detect codes and display the correct information

50

Audio Codes

51

Talk Outline

Identifying what kinds of support are useful The technological solutions we built Field testing and evaluation of technological

solutions

52

How do we define Success? This determines how we design our study:

If success is: adoption of the systemOur study will be exploratoryWill focus on understanding “best practices”Will be an in-depth study of small user baseThis is more useful to Digital Green

If success is: rigorous evaluation of technology and deployment strategyOur study will involve randomized assignmentHave rigid up-front designBe a less detailed study of large user baseYield more generalizable results

53

Our goal is to build a system that is useful to Digital Green, so we define success as:

Adoption of the systemOur study will be exploratoryWill focus on understanding “best practices”Study will be an in-depth study of small user base

Field trials

4 week deployment 3 audio code users 1 remote control user

54

Goal was to understand use cases

We collected several kinds of data to do this:Audio recorded showsLog data from the devicesFacilitator surveys after each showSemi-structured interviews with facilitators

55

User responseIn interviews, all users said: They liked using the deviceIt helps them remember the points they should highlightWithout it sometimes they would forget points Facilitating was easier; without the device they needed to watch the video more closely

56

All the users enjoyed the deviceBut different users used it very differently

This is a solution people can and will use But they will use it in different ways and for

different reasons

57

Benefits gained by:

New facilitatorsEncourage questionsLearn timingGain confidence

58

Experienced facilitatorsExpand repertoireAllow more multi-tasking during showReminder of details

Lessons Learned – Audio codes

Acoustics affect recognition of audio codesMistakes did not decrease trust in the deviceWe would like to design a more sophisticated, robust

coding system

People didn’t mind noise from codesLikely because videos are of generally low production

quality

59

Lessons Learned - Remote

Not an extra deviceReplaces existing remote

Remote can get out of

sync with DVD player

60

Remote control commands

don’t always reach DVD

playerAs with audio codes,

mistakes did not decrease

trust in the device

Conclusions Support for the facilitator has a number of benefits

Improved interactionIncreased confidenceFacilitation trainingMaking facilitation easier

Context mattersAffects which benefits are realizedThe setting and the users matter

61