Invited Technical Speaker M. Bernardine Dias: TechBridgeWorld and Computing Technology for Developing Communities
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Bernardine Dias, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon
Most developing communities have not benefited from technological advancements to date. In cases where technology has benefited these communities, the benefits are often highly asymmetric. While many organizations continue to focus on enabling sustainable development, few organizations have studied the role of technology in this process. TechBridgeWorld at Carnegie Mellon University is spearheading the innovation of computing technology solutions relevant and accessible to developing communities.
Designing and implementing technology that can enhance suitable and sustainable development presents unique challenges in creativity and resourcefulness. TechBridgeWorld capitalizes on the collective experience and talent of faculty, staff, and students at Carnegie Mellon University, and joins forces with partners from around the world to extend the benefits of computing technology to developing communities.
Central to our vision is encouraging locally suitable and locally sustainable technology solutions by adhering to each community’s vision of progress, thus preserving their ownership of the benefits and consequences of the realized development. As with any bridge, the technology “bridges” we create will benefit participants on both sides of each bridge, enhancing technology skills and increasing awareness about sustainable development and global cultures. By increasing meaningful access to computing technology in developing communities, TechBridgeWorld envisions enhancing not only the development process, but also the creativity and diversity of technological innovations accessible to all.
In this talk I will share some of our experiences, stories, and lessons learned in five years of TechBridgeWorld work in partnership with several communities around the world.
Note Taker: Eshe N Pickett
Contents |
Introduction
Found keynote speaker Megan Smith, of Google, extremely encouraging and relevant. It is only recently that technologists have begun tosaying that "we have a role to play in this." Assistant research professor of Robotics. Born and raised in Sri Lanka.
A commonly asked question is: Why are you in robotics? Bernadine took a Nontraditional path getting to robotics, she had never touched a computer until college, wher she double majored in Physics and Computer Science. Bernadine is a passionate Sri Lankan Dancer. Growing up in Sri Lanka, one chooses a path very early, so she found it great to be able to explore different things. Like Megan Smith (who's college entrance essay involved explaining what animal you would be and why), Bernadine ahd to talk about why she wanted to do robotics. She didn't have a background in robotics, so she wrote about wanting to change the world using technology in Sri Lanka. She chose Carnegie Mellon because of the interview process. Very few robotics questions were asked, the question was "How are you going to change the world in 20 years?" That is what made the decision concrete. Bernadine's advisor suggested thinking bigger, and doing so not just for Sri Lanka, but other places in the world. For her job talk, Bernadine spoke about how Computer Science needed to play a role in eliminating global poverty and all of the attending academics enthusiastically supported her because she had proven herself as a technologist and was respected.
How do you get started
For about 1 1/2 years, Bernadines team talked to people. Not about technology, just about their lives and the challenges, problems, and visions for the future. It is very important that you do not go in and tell people how to live their lives, but give help on living life the way they want it to be lived.
- Understand the needs
- Understand the challenges
- Innovate new solutions
- Customize existing solutions
- Sometimes trying to create new things, you increase price, don't make new things just for the sake of doing so.
- Increase global relevance
- Empower the next generation (This is why Bernadine stayed in academia)
- Advising students, giving the same opportunities to students talented within communities, because they will innovate solutions far better than we (as outsiders could)
Why
- Chance to connect back to roots
- Giving back to the community
- The great need
- The path less trodden
- Making the world a better place
- finding your unique niche on how to do this
Understanding TechBridgeWorld
A Research organization at Carnegie Mellon University, spanning education, research, development, deployment and outreach. Dedicated to defining the role technology can play in the developing world techbridgeworld.org.
Guiding Principles
- Respect
- Never go into a community uninvited, there must be "an ask"
- We reach out, inform the communities about what we do, but wait for the invitation from the community.
- Sharing
- End up learning from the communities
- Always work with a local partner
- Need to be informed on the local community: goals, challenges
- Important to choose the right partner that truly represents the community, and does not attempt to exclude any group.
- Empowerment
- Teaching communities leads to sustainability
- You must be less interested in the 6 month demo that is flashy
- Think through "how will this live after we leave"
- Sometimes this means sacrifice because the simpler solution is more sustainable
Programs
- V-Unit: Independent study
- iStep: Undergrads and grads. Meant to give participants experience in fielding this work, a guided experience.
- Project areas
- Project Kane (literacy)
- Education e-village
- Assistive technology (special needs communities and how they can benefit from this)
- Exploring the space of computing technology for developing communities
Projects
Braille Writing Tutor
Gives audio feedback to blind children as they learn to read Braille. Blind students have to learn two alphabets: 1 to read and 1 to write. Teachers often read and give feedback, and many of the teachers are visually impaired as well. The device gives audio feedback as the child writes. The teacher hears what's going on and the student hears what's going on. It becomes much more engaging for them. Initially deployed in Matru in India, and one of the students who the teacher said would never learn to write Braille because they only wrote 6 embossed dots no matter what the assignment, started using the tutor. They found that the child had never learned to go from cell to cell and so was always wrting in the same box, resulting in only the six dots. Field use showed that the Braille Tutor could also serve as a diagnostic tool. It is currently deployed in 3 countries, 5 languages (English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Swahili, forthecoming: Bengali). Includes games and a variety of curriculum. A 3rd version is in development that eliminates the need for a computer by moving to an onboard computer and using battery power. A reliable power source is critical in the developing world moreso than the onboard computing. It has proven to be a transformative device, hoping to do larger scale tests and deploy once the new tool is released.
Literacy Tools
Started with project Kane. Started as an English language tool wher the child reads to the computer and it listens and gives feedback. The computer acts as a patient listener. Took the tool to Ghana for teaching English, but the problem was that most communities have no power and no computers. In Tanzania, there was no power, blackboards had large holes, children did not have books, and could not write notes. The children had to go get books from the previous class, and share 5-6 students to a book. The team had to think about the needs and adapt for that location. All teachers had cell phones. Decided to build the tool on cell phones. Used futbol, (girls love as much as boys) and made an English literacy tools game where, if you get the question right it scores a goal, if wrong you miss. An important component was an authoring tool for the teachers. A partnership with the University and teachers was made so teachers could go to the University lab and add new content. The tool to add content is available on the web, so they can go anywhere to add new content. Have categories, levels (hard, medium, easy). Using simple animation to capture the imagination of the students. Solved the power and lack of computers issue by deploying the tool on cell phones which hold a charge much longer. Teachers can take the cell phones home at the end of the day and recharge. Something similar for adults is being worked on now for use with refugees in Pittsburgh, and also the school for the deaf.
E-Village
Empower people teaching technology. Give more resources and ability to teach cutting edge technology. Creating a social network for teachers and Universities to share course information. A network where professors for both developing and developing communities to share information.
iStep Internship
Training people to do this work. The goal is to empower top students to be able to go into these environments and think creatively and address the needs of people in these communities. Motto is "We improve the world one community at a time." If you try to look at the whole world, it becomes very daunting and then you don't want to do anything. There are so many problems in a single community that you must start small, and grown into larger projects that can have longer lasting impact. There is a very tangible reward. You create something, go into the field, and see the impact. Last summer students travelled to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to assist social workers who were finding orphans and vulnerable children left behind because of the AIDS epidemic. Adults are dying, leaving pockets of children raising children, or grandparents raising whole villages. The challenge is trying to place orphans with limited resources and depending entirely on foreign aid, the foreign aid is coming in, but how do they decide who to give it to, and what projects to implement. It is hard to get information to donors. There are not enough social workers. The team spent time with social workers, found out about the forms, chain of command, expensive and timely trips from villages to Dar Es Salaam and created an SMS based system that could be used to send information directly to the database, and the DB performed simple error checking and sends confirmation of receipt. Very exciting project, working w/different ministry groups to figure out how to take it forward.
Impact
Celebrating 5th year anniversary this year. Started looking back and looking for lessons
- Our Bridges
- Tanzania
- Bangladesh
Why not focus and go into only one community? If we are to understand at a large scale, we must understand what problems cross over. Finding those projects and problems that cross cultural boundaries is very important to moving this work forward. Only work at the community level.
Our Students
At the end of the day, training students to give the opportunities to create the next companies and have these experiences, the technology they create will be more globally relevant and can change the world. If you talk to the students, they will tell you that it is a life changing experience.
ICTD 2009
A conference on Information Communications and Technologies and Development. Keynotes given by Bill gates and Dr Carlos Braga (Economist from the World Bank). Highly Successful, it sold out a month ahead. Awarded 250 scholarship applicants giving out $120k in awards.Included 18 oral presentations, 27 posters, 4 panels, 43 workshops, and 40 demos.
- UC Berkeley
- Bangalore Microsoft
- Third year at Carnegie Mellon
Next conference 2010 in the UK at Royal Holloway
Conclusions
Lessons Learned:
- Build a great team
- You can't do anything without a good team
- Hard but rewarding work
- It is not a picnic
- No vacation on the beach
- you will learn a lot and it will be incredibly rewarding
- Incredible experiences and stories
- It will change your life
- A lot of people listen to stories and experiences and saying "this is not what I thought comp sci was" especially powerful for mid school and high school students who may not have considered CS before, cross-gender
- Trying to do better capturing and disseminating these stories these stories
- Be patient, persevere and focus on needs
- Choose something manageable
- Be humble and learn so that you end up doing the right thing
- There is a balance to be struck, you cannot expect that you will go in and everything will be solved in 2 weeks. Some of the partnerships have taken 2-5 years just to get settled. Persevere.
- Empower students
- Dare to live the dream and enjoy the journey
- Dream big
- Really go after them, do not be afraid
- do not get caught up in the destination or you may miss the learning's along the way
Future Work
- New Projects
- Scaling up in many ways
- How do we do bigger projects, what infrastructure
- Expanding beyond Carnegie Mellon
- Building more bridges
- Disseminating Lessons Learned
Questions
- Q:You have devices that you're taking into these communities, prototypes and tweaking them, how do you then manufacture them?
- A: Goal is to get them under open source licenses, talking to people who are manufacturers, but be careful not to become limited. Allow innovation so that everyone gets access to the basic functionality
- Q:How do you pick a community and how do you build the partnerships, has anything gone badly?
- A:It's nontrivial, there are things that go wrong, the key is patience. In the beginning very eager and wanted to jump on everything, slow down, evaluate your strength and their needs, if it is not a good match, be willing to walk away. Walk away correctly, sometimes you can refer to someone else working in that field, they appreciate that. Make sure that something you undertake you can deliver on. Very important, they are making crucial decisions, for a school, in some the school had to decide when they get donations, and then they had no idea what to do with them. Then they realized they had to dedicate a whole classroom to the computers, the school had so many students that they ran 5 shifts per day, then they have to invest in security, then paying for electricity and finding the right adapters, ended up having to give up the phone line for the school and used the headmasters cell phone so that they could sustain the computers. You have to be very sensitive to them. Engage them. Key is ownership, convince them that it is their project, otherwise they expect that you fix everything. Establish ownership from the very beginning, what is the problem, potential solutions, and guide a solution so they feel ownership as well. Learning how to do this takes time. Sometimes places have a lot of bad experiences, and become jaded because so many people have come through. Live and work with the people, travel as they do, live as they do. People pay attention to things like that. Some NGOs travel in immaculately clean SUVs in areas where it is hard to keep dust off of your clothes.
- Q: You are a research lab and have to give results. How do you define goals and success?
- A: Depends on the sponsor, sometimes there are unrestricted gifts and you don't have to results. Some are interested in technology and they want the AI, sometimes the sponsor doesn't know, they just want you to make an impact. You have to be careful try to have leeway to talk to the community and define what is a reasonable criteria for success. Report on both short and long-term. A lot of projects you get short term funding, but it helps to show long term results. At the end of the day, defining success is really a personal decision. Depending on the context it becomes very different. Do the best to touch as many lives, through students who go on to create new and different things.
- Q: Explain your logo, especially the dots
- A: Designer was tasked with using "technology," "the world" "bridging" people were talking about the technical divide, but wanted to focus on the bridge, not the divide. The dots are supposed to be the technology...data packets, perhaps?
- Q:You said you do a lot of outreach, what do you do in Pittsburgh?
- A: We've done things in the US and in Pittsburgh, very few countries have no poor communities. Broadened the definition to include "technologically underserved" the number of technology tools available to address their needs are very low. Ex: Schools for the blind and deaf, to make a science textbook in Braille costs $11,000. Tactile graphics are expensive. You have to graphs, that must be explained, and it becomes very complex. The assisted technology project is trying to address these type of issues. Refugee populations that come to Pittsburg: integration issues: jobs, language, finding doctors, communicating, working on projects to help refugees in the community. Work hard to share stories with schools and organizations and demo tools to promote computing, CS and what it can do for the world.