1:30 pm, Friday, June 2, 2006
CSE 691 Paul Allen Center
The Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India (http://research.microsoft.com/research/tem/) seeks to address the needs and aspirations of people in emerging-market countries, including those who are increasingly consuming computing technologies and services, as well as those for whom access to computing technologies remains largely out of reach. The research in this group consists of both technical and social-science research. Work is done in the areas of ethnography, sociology, political science, and economics, all of which help us understand the social context of technology. Technical research is also done in hardware and software to devise solutions that are designed for emerging and underserved markets, both in rural and urban environments.
A series of five, short talks will present an overview of work being done in the Emerging Markets Research Group.
Did you know, 26% of the world’s adult population is illiterate and 98% of all illiterates live in the developing countries! The world is experiencing a substantial ‘Digital Divide’ in terms of the gap in access to information and communication– illiteracy playing a significant role in widening this gap. Hence the need arises for a platform which enables free flow of information by surpassing the barriers of literacy and computer skills.
Text-free user interfaces for illiterate and semi-illiterate users is an application designed at Microsoft Research India such that even novice illiterate users require absolutely no intervention from anyone at all to use. It is based on many hours of ethnographic design conducted in collaboration with a community of illiterate domestic laborers in 3 slums in Bangalore, India to understand what kind of application subjects would be interested in, how they respond to computing technology and how they react to UI elements. The UI eliminates the need for text, uses unabstracted cartoons versus simplified graphics, provides voice feedback for all functional units and provides consistent help features and a movie dramatizing the purpose of the application. Results show that the text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text –based interfaces by the communities which we address.
Prior to the usability tests, most subjects had never seen a computer and none of them had ever touched one. Because of the unique nature of the subject group, for me the user studies were very different from traditional user studies I had done earlier. My talk will describe the design process, the design principles which evolved out of the process, the final application design, and results from initial user testing.
Indrani Medhi is an Assistant Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. She has a Master's degree in Design from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA. She received her Bachelor's in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India. Her research interests include using extensive ethnography methods in designing applications for emerging markets and the BOP; identifying social and cultural factors in UI design. She has done ethnography at a variety of places such as post offices, railway stations, nationalized banks, coffee cafés and urban slums.
Building Educational Software that Utilizes Multiple Input Devices: Multi-mouse for Education in Developing Countries
Udai Singh Pawar
Around any computer in a poor school in a developing country, you see the same thing: two, five, even ten children crowding around a single PC. Because all current software and UIs are designed for single-person use, the dominant child takes over the mouse and the keyboard, and the greatest learning gains accrue primarily to that child. To solve this problem, we provide a mouse to each child (with as many plugged into a PC as needed), each with a separate cursor on screen. As a result, children are more engaged, and it’s seeming possible to extend this to design better models of learning interaction than one-to-one, for computers in education anywhere in the world.
Udai Singh Pawar is a graduate from the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he received an integrated Masters in Science Degree. His research interests are all over the place - from using IT for rural education, where he has worked on interfaces for rural kiosks as well as conducted workshops for school children; to experimental laser pulse-shaping, quantum computing and other obscure things. Currently working in the Technologies for Emerging Markets group at MSR India, he is interested in understanding how technology can aid the major effort required to educate the millions of students in underserved communities in developing countries.
Using SMS enabled mobile phones as an alternative to connected PC kiosks in developing countries?
Rajesh Veeraraghavan
Several initiatives are underway in bringing computing to developing regions. Specifically, lot of these projects have been installing computer kiosks in villages with some connectivity and running customized applications. The sustainability of these projects is increasingly under scrutiny; various approaches like new business models are been attempted to help make these initiatives sustainable, while those are laudable, we believe that the fundamental technology needs to be cost effective and sensitive to the local conditions, (viz. availability of electricity, access to available infrastructure).
In this talk, I will share details of a particular project in rural Maharashtra that we at Microsoft Research India have begun. We are attempting to manage existing information needs of a sugarcane cooperative by proposing a SMS enabled mobile phone solution as a cheaper alternative to their existing connected PC kiosks based solution.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan is an Associate Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. He has Masters degrees in Computer Science and Economics from Clemson University and Cleveland State respectively. He worked as a senior software developer at many groups in Microsoft for several years. He also volunteers with the Association for India's Development (AID) - a non-profit organization that supports community based projects in Indian villages. His research interests include developing cost-effective computing systems for the developing regions of the world; evaluating existing ICT projects through methods from the social sciences and using software based tools.
Consumption Patterns among the Urban Indian Middle Class
Nimmi Rangaswamy
This project is focused around learning about consumption patterns and aspirational behavior from an ethnographic study of India's emerging urban middle class households. We hope to map attitudes and actual spending of households that reflect their motivations to constantly push their socio-economic status forward. Using socio-economic and cultural indicators, we want to arrive at an understanding of how families make use of opportunities that promote upward mobility. We use several consumer portraits to focus on actual lifestyles and consumption patterns.
Nimmi Rangaswamy is a social anthropologist by training and received her Masters in Philosophy from the Delhi School of Economics and Ph.D from the University of Mumbai. At MSR India, she is with the Technology for Emerging Markets group, focusing on populations who are marginal to the ICT revolution in India and ways in which they might meaningfully engage with it. Her current projects are attempts to understand emerging-market communities and spaces in terms of their responses to computing and communication technologies and the value it holds for their everyday living.
Information Environment of Micro-businesses
Jonathan Donner
The talk will focus on Information Environment of Micro-businesses in Rwanda and India
Jonathan Donner is a researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore.
He is particularly interested in understanding the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) small and informal businesses throughout the developing world.
Previously, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Center for Global Health and Economic Development (CGHED), at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. While at Columbia, he conducted a series of studies exploring the ways microentrepreneurs in Rwanda use mobile phones for both business and personal reasons. In addition, he participated on a project called TRACnet, to use mobile phones and the Internet to build an HIV/AIDS public health information system for Rwanda.
He has also been a consultant with Monitor Company in Cambridge, MA, and with its spin-off, The OTF Group, where he worked on economic competitiveness projects in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Communication Theory and Research.