ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160610
A. Mahla, D. Martin, I. Ahuja, Quamar Niyaz, Aaditeshwar Seth
{"title":"Motivation and design of a content distribution architecture for rural areas","authors":"A. Mahla, D. Martin, I. Ahuja, Quamar Niyaz, Aaditeshwar Seth","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160610","url":null,"abstract":"Decreasing prices of digital cameras, phones and video cameras have made these devices accessible to low-income communities and to development organizations working in these communities. As a result, the social media revolution around user generated content on YouTube and Facebook has found equivalents in rural areas; here, community radio, community video, and interactive voice based systems are used for social media instead of Internet websites to host user generated content. We observe that there is much benefit to be gained from sharing this content across different rural locations, but it is hard due to unavailable or flaky Internet access in these areas. In this paper, we analyze a 1000+ video content production and consumption dataset from a nonprofit organization that specializes in participatory video production about agricultural best practices, and observe that solutions to connectivity in rural areas could greatly benefit from caching of content since much production and consumption tends to be local. Based on this insight, we propose a delay tolerant network architecture for content distribution, that recognizes content objects as first class entities cachable at different nodes in the network, and uses an always-on control channel on GPRS/EDGE connections to assist in the routing of data. Finally, we simulate the dataset in accordance with our architectural design to study the performance of different routing and caching algorithms in terms of delivery latency and other metrics for 6 different districts. We find that our proposed architecture is suitable to provide content distribution services with minimal investments in IT infrastructure, and we plan to do a small-scale field deployment shortly.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133932388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160629
S. Muñoz-Hernández, Maximo Ramirez-Robles
{"title":"Evaluation of an application for managing microcredits in education","authors":"S. Muñoz-Hernández, Maximo Ramirez-Robles","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160629","url":null,"abstract":"One of the major problems in developing countries is minority access to higher education. Traditional scholarships usually focus on paying eventually tuition fees or bringing brilliant students to develop countries. Additionally, these systems used to be opaque and, consequently, a corruption source. We propose a system of student loans to pay tuition fees in exchange for work. We also provide UBURYO. It is the FOSS, that we have developed, to manage this loan system in a simple, trustworthy, fair and efficient way. We deployed the loan system in the University of Ngozi (UNG, Burundi). A shallow evaluation demonstrates that system sustainability is feasible.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130112132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160628
M. Gawade, Rajan Vaish, Mercy Nduta Waihumbu, James Davis
{"title":"Exploring microwork opportunities through cybercafés","authors":"M. Gawade, Rajan Vaish, Mercy Nduta Waihumbu, James Davis","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160628","url":null,"abstract":"Microwork in cybercafés is a promising tool for poverty alleviation. Using experiments in three cafes in Pune, India, and two cafes in Nairobi, Kenya, we investigate questions of practical feasibility. In surveys, 99% of potential workers do want the work. In addition, measured typing speeds support pay rates several times the local median pay. We additionally compared typing speeds on mobile phones and computers, finding that even inexperienced users are faster using computers.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114795863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160603
Benjamin E. Birnbaum, B. DeRenzi, A. Flaxman, Neal Lesh
{"title":"Automated quality control for mobile data collection","authors":"Benjamin E. Birnbaum, B. DeRenzi, A. Flaxman, Neal Lesh","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160603","url":null,"abstract":"Systematic interviewer error is a potential issue in any health survey, and it can be especially pernicious in low- and middle-income countries, where survey teams may face problems of limited supervision, chaotic environments, language barriers, and low literacy. Survey teams in such environments could benefit from software that leverages mobile data collection tools to provide solutions for automated data quality control. As a first step in the creation of such software, we investigate and test several algorithms that find anomalous patterns in data. We validate the algorithms using one labeled data set and two unlabeled data sets from two community outreach programs in East Africa. In the labeled set, some of the data is known to be fabricated and some is believed to be relatively accurate. The unlabeled sets are from actual field operations. We demonstrate the feasibility of tools for automated data quality control by showing that the algorithms detect the fake data in the labeled set with a high sensitivity and specificity, and that they detect compelling anomalies in the unlabeled sets.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126987768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160625
Azarias Reda, D. Abebaw, Brian D. Noble
{"title":"Push notification for challenged networks","authors":"Azarias Reda, D. Abebaw, Brian D. Noble","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160625","url":null,"abstract":"Emerging economies face significant challenges in network access. While cellular network coverage is reaching a significant majority of the world population, good network connectivity remains scarce and expensive in many developing regions [2]. As a result, shared access sites, such as internet kiosks and school libraries, provide the primary alternative of network access for many internet users in these regions. However, the poor networking conditions often make even simple network tasks unpleasant.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124074339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160620
Sunandan Chakraborty, Mangala Kanthamani, Jay Chen, L. Subramanian
{"title":"On the feasibility and utility of web based educational lesson plans","authors":"Sunandan Chakraborty, Mangala Kanthamani, Jay Chen, L. Subramanian","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160620","url":null,"abstract":"The Web has a wealth of educational information across different topics, which can potentially be used to improve teaching. In an attempt to harness this potential we developed a Contextual Information Portal(CIP) for education and deployed it in schools in Kenya and India. The portal crawls the Web and tries to collect documents for different subjects and creates a repository of relevant information. In this context two very basic question arise: What is the quality of these online contents? and Can these educational web materials be effectively used to teach classes? Answering the former question is fundamentally hard since there exists no standardized measure for the utility of web-based educational resources. This paper aims to answer these two questions in this larger realm. First, using 6 expert teachers, we study the content quality problem from a teacher's perspective of whether there exists sufficient information on the Web to teach classes pertaining to the school syllabus. To investigate the second question, we accepted the help of an expert teacher. Evaluations were based on her feedback after creating lesson plans using the CIP for grade 8 mathematics and taught several classes in an after-school program. We found that in general, the Web has sufficient number of high-quality contents and lesson plans obtained from the CIP are useful in teaching a class.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115376886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160623
R. Agrawal, Sunandan Chakraborty, Sreenivas Gollapudi, A. Kannan, K. Kenthapadi
{"title":"Quality of textbooks: an empirical study","authors":"R. Agrawal, Sunandan Chakraborty, Sreenivas Gollapudi, A. Kannan, K. Kenthapadi","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160623","url":null,"abstract":"Textbooks are the educational input most consistently associated with gains in student learning. Particularly in developing countries, textbooks are the primary conduits for delivering content knowledge to the students and the teachers base their lesson plans on the material given in textbooks. Abstracting from the education literature, we propose that well-written textbooks exhibit the following properties:\u0000 FOCUS. Each section explains very few concepts.\u0000 UNITY. For each concept, there is a unique section that best explains the concept.\u0000 SEQUENTIALITY. Concepts are discussed in a sequential fashion: a concept is explained prior to occurrences of this concept or any related concept. Further, the tie for precedence in presentation between two mutually related concepts is broken in favor of the more significant of the two.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115417027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160615
Azarias Reda, Brian D. Noble
{"title":"Tackling vehicular fraud in Ethiopia: from technology to business","authors":"Azarias Reda, Brian D. Noble","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160615","url":null,"abstract":"Several forms of vehicular fraud cause significant losses to the transportation and freight industry in Ethiopia. For a land-locked country that mostly relies on ground shipping and public transportation for connectivity, vehicular fraud is an important problem in the Ethiopian context. In order to start tackling this problem, this paper presents the design and implementation of a commercial grade GPS tracking system for nationwide deployment in Ethiopia, and the process of building a business around the technology. The paper makes three contributions. First, we present vehicular fraud, an important problem in developing regions, with a case study from Ethiopia. Second, we discuss the process of building an ICT system in developing regions for a practical and wide-scale deployment beyond experimental pilots. Compared to conducting research projects, this process often involves stringent requirements and considerations such as scalability, sustainability and security. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of building technology based businesses in Africa. We discuss entrepreneurship as a model for delivering ICT services in developing regions, and present some of the hurdles we faced and lessons learned in building a tech business in Ethiopia. We have deployed the system on the ground, and currently support an initial set of clients who are trying the system.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114173743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160619
A. S. Grover, Karen Calteaux, E. Barnard, G. V. Huyssteen
{"title":"A voice service for user feedback on school meals","authors":"A. S. Grover, Karen Calteaux, E. Barnard, G. V. Huyssteen","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160619","url":null,"abstract":"Research using voice-based services as a technology platform for providing information access and services within developing world regions has shown much promise. The results for design and deployment of such voice-based services have varied depending on the application domain, user community and context. In this paper we describe our work on developing a voice-based service for obtaining feedback from school children, a previously unexplored user community. Through a user study, focus group discussions and observations of learners' interaction with multiple design prototype versions, we investigated several factors around input modality preference, language preference, performance and overall user experience. Whilst no significant differences were observed for performance across the prototypes, there were strong preferences for speech (input modality) and English (language). Focus group discussions revealed rich information on learner's perceptions around trust, confidentiality and general system usage. We highlight several design changes made and provide further recommendations on designing for this user community.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125059467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ACM DEV '12Pub Date : 2012-03-11DOI: 10.1145/2160601.2160612
Z. Koradia, C. Balachandran, Kapil Dadheech, Mayank Shivam, Aaditeshwar Seth
{"title":"Experiences of deploying and commercializing a community radio automation system in India","authors":"Z. Koradia, C. Balachandran, Kapil Dadheech, Mayank Shivam, Aaditeshwar Seth","doi":"10.1145/2160601.2160612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2160601.2160612","url":null,"abstract":"Community Radio (CR) stations are short range FM stations that seek to meet the needs of their listeners by involving them in content creation, feedback, and station management. In India, the community radio movement took off in 2008 when the first set of CR stations became operational. During that period we began design and development of the Gramin Radio Inter-Networking System (GRINS), an automation system designed to meet the ICT needs of CR stations. Over the last 2.5 years we have commercialized GRINS and deployed it at 19 CR stations in India and South Africa. In this paper, we present our experiences of software feature design, installation, training, technical support, and commercialization of GRINS in India.\u0000 We demonstrate a number of aspects: Building a small feature set at first, and then adding features on-demand ensures that utility of the software is maintained and imposition of developers' assumptions is avoided. The common notion of keeping costs low for developing regions should not come at the sacrifice of stability of the solution. Standardization of deployments, even at the loss of flexibility for the customers, is important to keep the costs of technical support low. Through technical support data collected over one year, we show that physical moving parts are easy targets to introduce faults. Although identification of most faults can be done over the phone, remote Internet access is needed to resolve many faults. Finally, we highlight that selling to NGOs is hard; the best way is to club the sale as a part of a larger project for which the NGO is being funded. We believe these insights will be useful to guide others who want to commercially provide ICT solutions in developing regions.","PeriodicalId":153059,"journal":{"name":"ACM DEV '12","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116322192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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