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

Big themes in ICTD  Mobile phones are the thing There are more mobile phones (6B in 2014) in the world than toothbrushes 1B Android phones sold in % mobile penetration in Africa +10% mobile penetration +.6% GDP  Leverage limited numbers of highly trained people Use technology to empower less-trained people 7

General Challenges  Diverse languages and scripts 22 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 time But they have less spare time!  Armed conflict, unstable governments The war in the DRC has killed 5.4 million since

Challenges  Some are technological Power  Some are social Literacy  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 patients Environmental surveying Fraud monitoring elections  Data Reporting: FoneAstra ColdChain maintenance Human breast milk banking 014/11/10/ /a-smartphone- gadget-pumps-up-breast-milk-banks 014/11/10/ /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 16 Photos: dsh.cs.washington.edu,

One Approach: Facilitated Video 17 Excellent educator Recorded at one site Video shown to students at another site by a Facililtator who leads interaction 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 18 Photos: 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 globally For 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 signs ASHA = Accredited Social Health Activist Persuading family as well Ashas’ 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 useful Cache 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-$9000 OR $  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 development Remittances Getting goods to market  The cellular network is the biggest network in the world ~6B users But ~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, BUT a 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  Facilitators Recruited from the village Local-language literate Compensated First point of contact for potential adopters 38 Photo: 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 facilitator Interaction is vital The 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 interaction support to the facilitator 40

Contributions of this work: 41  Identifying the kind of support that is helpful to the facilitator Targeted facilitation advice  Building two different technological solutions to provide support  Field testing and evaluating these solutions With 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 investigation Tried several interventions Understand facilitator’s needs using low-tech prototypes  The most successful was providing information to the facilitator using subtitles Advice 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 video What to say On 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 materials Longer 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 better Evaluate 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 microphone Listens to audio Uses 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 system Our study will be exploratory Will focus on understanding “best practices” Will be an in-depth study of small user base This is more useful to Digital Green  If success is: rigorous evaluation of technology and deployment strategy Our study will involve randomized assignment Have rigid up-front design Be a less detailed study of large user base Yield 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 system Our study will be exploratory Will 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 shows Log data from the devices Facilitator surveys after each show Semi-structured interviews with facilitators 55

User response In interviews, all users said:  They liked using the device  It helps them remember the points they should highlight  Without 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 device But 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 facilitators Encourage questions Learn timing Gain confidence 58 Experienced facilitators Expand repertoire Allow more multi-tasking during show Reminder of details

Lessons Learned – Audio codes  Acoustics affect recognition of audio codes Mistakes did not decrease trust in the device We would like to design a more sophisticated, robust coding system  People didn’t mind noise from codes Likely because videos are of generally low production quality 59

Lessons Learned - Remote  Not an extra device Replaces existing remote  Remote can get out of sync with DVD player 60 Remote control commands don’t always reach DVD player As with audio codes, mistakes did not decrease trust in the device

Conclusions  Support for the facilitator has a number of benefits Improved interaction Increased confidence Facilitation training Making facilitation easier  Context matters Affects which benefits are realized The setting and the users matter 61