Aravind Eye Hospital: Enabling Rural Wireless Telemedicine
Sonesh Surana
With one ophthalmologist per over 100,000 people in India, there is a critical need to improve the utilization of eye doctors. In this talk, we discuss our work in deploying a long distance wireless network that enables high quality video-based telemedicine between rural eye clinics and centrally located doctors at the Aravind Eye Hospitals. In particular, we take a close look at the issues of financial and operational sustainability.

MILLEE: Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies
Matthew Kam

MILLEE improves literacy through language learning games on cellphones – which are a perfect vehicle for new kinds of out-of-school language learning that complement formal schooling in the developing world. The MILLEE research project is currently in its 5th year, and has involved eight rounds of fieldwork. It focuses on developing scalable, localizable design principles and tools for language learning. The challenges are (i) to integrate sound learning principles, (ii) to provide concrete design patterns that integrate entertainment and learning, and (iii) to account for cultural and learning differences in children in developing regions. We describe the complex adoption ecology in developing regions, and a framework called PACE which preserves learning principles while supporting rich localization and customization at multiple stages in the adoption hierarchy. We discuss our most recent work which patterns learning games after local children’s traditional village games and the benefits this approach offers. Finally, we share our experiences in interacting with local stakeholders at various levels in the adoption hierarchy.

Remote Medical Consultation for Ghana: A Social Networking Approach
Rowena Luk

The Ghana Consultation Network is a social networking platform which allows doctors from Ghana and around the world to collaborate on difficult medical cases. It challenges existing models of telemedicine programs by positing the idea of a more spontaneous, bottom-up architecture which allows for sustained self-organizing growth. Such a project faces many challenges, including limitations in the physical network, the isolation of rural doctors, and the challenges of administering a nationwide multi-partner collaboration. Our solution includes the use of delay-tolerant networking technology as well as a hybrid social-professional network model that incorporates both professional and personal contacts.

An Industry Lab View of Partnerships with NGOs and Academia
Kentaro Toyama
Assistant Managing Director, Microsoft Research India

Partnerships with both NGOs and academia have been critical for all of the developing-regions research that we do at Microsoft Research India. This talk will highlight a few lessons from these interactions, including the unsung value of small NGOs and the critical role of students as bridges between organizations.

N-SMARTS: Networked Suite of Mobile Atmospheric Real-Time Sensors
R.J. Honicky

The N-SMARTS project aims to build a large scale, distributed scientific instrument for characterizing society's relationship to its environment, using environmental sensors embedded in location aware mobile phones. I will give an overview of the platforms we have developed and are developing, the data we have acquired so far, and future deployments. I will also discuss some of the algorithms we are working, and show some preliminary results. I will also describe directions my research and the larger project is taking.

Erik Douglas

Microscopy is the gold standard for medical diagnosis, but the necessary technology are personnel demands are often too high for use in the developing world. We are developing a platform for cell phone telemicroscopy, which will enable remote image analysis for diagnosis and monitoring of diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.

Jennifer Bussell

Basic public service delivery is a common and fundamental activity of government. Yet governments in developing countries have repeatedly failed to offer effective and transparent service delivery to their citizens. Why do we observe variation in government provision of public goods to citizens? Under what conditions will governments adopt reforms to improve the delivery of public services? The emergence of new information and communication technologies in the 1990s sheds new light on these questions. Low-cost, digital technologies offered prospects for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of government. Developing country citizens in particular were expected to benefit from improved delivery of government services. In the last decade many governments have implemented policies targeted at improving service delivery and access to information through the use of computers and other information technologies in dedicated centers. But these policies differ both across and within countries, and the character of services made available to citizens has varied dramatically. What causes differences in the quantity of services offered in technology-enabled service centers? What affects the particular services governments choose to make available? Drawing on a new dataset of technology policies in the Indian states, I show that political calculations drive variation in the quantity and character of digitally-enabled services. In particular, politicians weigh expected electoral benefits from providing new goods to citizens against the expected electoral costs of reduced access to corrupt funds due to increased transparency. I find that the level of corruption in a state is a powerful predictor of how many services will be made available and whether or not services with high corruption potential will be computerized. This finding contrasts with arguments that posit economic or developmental conditions as the major drivers of technology adoption.

It's the process, stupid!
Or: how we got stuck with a Word template and learned to love it
Elisa Oreglia, Nick Rabinowitz, and Megan Finn

Humanitarian response to large-scale disasters tends to occur in a context of information scarcity, with a variety of individual and institutional actors trying to assess the changing situation and make quick decisions about the funding, planning, and execution of the relief effort. The situation report, or "sitrep", released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs plays an important role in bringing together information from disparate sources to offer a broad overview of the situation. Over the past six months, we have conducted interviews with OCHA staff and stakeholders in New York, Geneva and Kenya to identify the potential for transitioning sitreps from free-form, wildly varying Word files to consistent, structured data. Our research suggests that the institutional context of the sitrep poses special challenges for any technical implementation, and that a successful rollout of new technology must be more gradual, thoughtful, and participatory than similar initiatives in industry.

Outsourcing Development: The State, Entrepreneurship, and Information Technologies in India
Renee Kuriyan

The talk will examine how Indian states are using ICTD e-governance services to represent themselves in a new way to their citizens. It reveals how states come to be seen by the citizens through their everyday interactions at ICTD telecenters. The research finds that with e-governance services, the state is trying to recast its image to fit market-friendly principles such as economic efficiency, accountability and effectiveness.

TP4D: Telecommunications Policy for Development
Glenn Woroch
Executive Director, Center for Research on Telecommunications Policy, Institute for Management Innovation & Organization

The institutional environment can play a significant role in the deployment of telecommunications infrastructure and services, and hence, on their ability to contribute to development in economies of all types. Telecommunications policies in small, developing countries have undergone a transformation over the last two decades, tracking similar changes that occurred in the developed world. This presentation attempts to document those trends and begin to explore their causes and their effects, especially in terms of the impact on growth of the telecoms sector, and ultimately on overall economic development.

Rural Wireless Technologies: Past, Present and Future
Sergiu Nedevschi and Rabin Patra

The key challenges for affordable wireless technologies in developing regions are performance, spectrum and cost. In this talk, we will describe our work on using WiFi to increase performance, increase spectrum efficiency and decrease cost of rural wireless deployments using a combination of network planning and protocol modifications. Finally, we will also briefly look at how other recent technological trends in the field of wireless could shape the future directions for research in wireless for developing regions.

Message Phone: A system for asynchronous communication in developing regions
Kurtis Heimerl

We explore the value and utility of voice messages for cellular users that live in areas of poor or intermittent coverage. Voice messages have the potential to be much lower cost than traditional live calls and should work well in areas of intermittent coverage. To explore these questions we built a prototype cellphone system with voice messaging capability, performed trials with rural Ugandan users, and then did qualitative group unstructured interviews to understand their reactions.

Bowei Du, Assane Gueye and Cedric Festin

TierDB is a system for building simple database distributed database applications in Delay-Tolerant Networks and builds on earlier TIER work in distributed storage. TierDB makes it easy to build shared database applications which are linked by diverse types of available low-cost communications: wireless, SMS, GPRS and sneaker-net.

We have been using the system in two projects, a proposed medical records system for schools in Senegal and a medical information system in the Philippines. This talk will give an overview of the capabilities of the system and the status of the projects we are working on.

Rural Power: Issues and Solutions
Sonesh Surana

Electricity in rural areas can exhibit surprising characteristics in additon to the well known problems of outages. Prolonged periods of low voltages and surprisingly high spikes lead to downtimes and damaged IT equipment in ICT projects. In many cases even uninterrupted power supplies (UPSes) are not enough. In this talk, we describe our experiences with rural power, and also discuss a few potential solutions that we have used in our projects at Aravind in Theni and Air Jaldi in Dharamsala.

Mobilizing Community Health Workers to Improve Maternal Health in India
Divya Ramachandran

99% of all maternal deaths due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth occur in developing countries. In India, the government employs community health workers to motivate women to adopt preventive practices that improve maternal health. Over two rounds of qualitative field work, we have studied the efficacy of these health workers and found that many barriers affect their training, acceptance, accountability and influence. We discuss the potential for using mobile technology to deliver health information in persuasive and innovative methods to improve health worker efficacy.

Cellphone and Landline Telephone Use in Rural Mexico: Emerging Practices from a Migrant Sending Village

Tricia Wang, Sociology, University of California, San Diego

Drawing on fieldwork that focuses on emerging practices around cellphone usage in Bicuhuini, a rural, indigenous village in Oaxaca, Mexico, this study asks who are the first technology adopters of cellphones and what are the emerging practices around cellphone usage? This presentation will discuss preliminary findings and methodological considerations of using ethnography and survey methods as a first step in technology co-development work in non-Western settings. A strong emphasis is given to the social context of cellphone usage in a geographically isolated village with no local economy and where at any point in time, at least half of the village's population (pop. 900) are working as immigrants in the United States. The findings suggest an alternative path for cellphone adoption in towns such as Bicuhuini and point to a deep co-existence of older and newer technologies that map onto the town's migratory flows.

Mobile Phones, Health Information Management, and Output-Based Aid
Melissa Ho

Especially in rural health clinics, where power can be unreliable, and security is minimal, mobile phones offer a viable computing and communications platform for information management and data collection. However, we are still learning how people in these health clinics use, store, share, and manage information. Through our implementation of a mobile-phone-based claims management system for the Uganda OBA project, we hope to gain a more deeply insightful view into how information flows play a role in the healthcare ecosystem (financially and otherwise) of rural and urban western Uganda, while also making key improvements in the efficiency and sustainability of the OBA project itself.

Classroom Computing, Aspiration and Globalization in Rural India
Joyojeet Pal

Computers are welcomed in rural India even in places where there is little or no past direct contact with technology. Our examination of computer-aided learning programs in schools suggested that even outside of learning, there may be second-order impacts relating to the children's and parents' interest in school quite simply through the presence of computers in the schools. Using parents' narratives on the value and potential of technology, we look at how computers have come to be viewed in rural India, and how in turn these could have consequences for the adoption of technology.