SOE Grad Students,

Spring 09 Grad Course on:
Information and Communication Technologies for Social Issues 
Tuesdays 4:30-7:30pm 
Porter Acad 245
CMPS290B - cross listed DANM 250 - see below for course number details

*Primary Topic:*
How is all this technology we invent any good for anything. Poverty, 
liberty, peace, environment? Seriously, why would we want to learn
about whatever it is we're learning? Ideally we'll cover a range of topics. 
In practice I have read most in poverty reduction, this sub area is 
starting to get called ICTD. But we will try to be broader. Privacy, games,
and assistive technologies are all things worked on by someone in SOE.
We'll read lots of papers, watch videos, etc.. Everything from cel phone 
microscopes, rural kiosks, interfaces for the illiterate, to networking 
when you have no power. Ideally, we'll come away with a 
understanding of the current state of this emerging field, and an 
answer to how each of us could apply our primary research to this area 
if we were so inclined.

*Co-teaching with DANM:*
The class will be co-taught with a DANM Project group. The DANM students 
are doing an MFA in the Art division and the film professor Sharon 
Daniels is interested primarily in 'participatory culture'. We imagine 
that the mix of Art and Engineering students will be an interesting 
experiment, and are quite conscious that these students have different 
skills and interests and plan to have both separate and together 
portions of the class. I doubt art students care about detailed 
engineering stuff, and I doubt most SOE students care about theory of 
rhetoric. We do however think that the project will work out better if 
we include you both. Note that the DANM students are taking a year long 
course Spr09, Aut10, Wtr10, which has a different name than this course. 
SOE students will be allowed, but not required to participate for credit 
over the entire time period. A formal SOE class is only confirmed for Spr09,
and Fall09.

*Course Project:*
The course project will revolve around providing consumers access to 
information on the cultural history of a product at the time of 
purchase. For example, we could use our cel phone to get not just 
competitive prices, or a social goodness score, but also an interview 
with the person who actually made the shirt you are buying. Would that 
influence buying decisions? I expect engineering students will be mostly 
interested in how we make this work from a technical standpoint and DANM 
students to be interested in exactly which content is getting shown to 
people, but we want to encourage interaction so hope you can be pushed 
out of the stereotype.

*My goals:*
1) Real impact. - At least some set of students will work on this project for 
a year (long enough). Our goal is to put our work onto 1 Million iPhones 
within 12 months AND show through measurement that it actually influences 
buying behavior.

2) Identify faculty and grad students with these interests. - Tech for social 
issues is not a research focus area at UCSC. It should be. I'm going to change
that.

3) Sub-projects are published as research papers. - In my past classes about 50% 
of project groups present their work at a peer-reviewed conference. That has 
typically been 2-4 papers per class, assuming groups of about 3 students.


*What is the deal with course number?*
This course will replace CMPS290B - Advanced topics in Graphics. i.e.,
there is no traditional 'graphics' course being taught in spring. There is 
a new course CMPS290T - Topics in ICTD in the pipeline, but I didn't
file it until this year, so its not approved yet. We are 
using the CMPS290B label since my primary background is graphics, 
and also graphics is the closest to 'digital art and new media'.

*Examples of possible readings*
This is just to provide a flavor, it will be adjusted to provide better topics
balance and to make sure the reading load is appropriate. In particular I'm 
missing 'games for education' and topics in 'assistive technology' which I 
want to include. If your research group does something appropriate, I'm happy
to include that topic as well.


    * Digital Green: Participatory Video for Agricultural Extension Rikin Gandhi, Rajesh Veeraraghavan and Kentaro Toyama (Microsoft Research India) and Vanaja Ramprasad (GREEN Foundation) ICTD2007
    * Mobile phones and Economic Development: Evidence from the Fishing Industry in India Reuben Abraham ICTD2006
    * Bornstein, How to Change the World, Ch. 3 "Rural Electrification," and Ch. 7 "10-9-8 Childline"
    *
         1. Prahalad - The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid - E-Choupal &  Voxiva & ITC
    * James Surowiecki, Philanthropy's New Prototype in MIT Tech Review (about One-Laptop-Per-Child)
    * Chris Carroll, High-Tech Waste in National Geographic
    * Code is Law, by Laurence Lessig
    * Assassination Politics
    * What is PGP? & Why I wrote PGP, by Phil Zimmermann
    * Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners - Proc. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 2009
    * Arteaga, S., Chevalier, J., Coile, A., Hill, A. W., Sali, S., Sudhakhrisnan, S., and Kurniawan, S. H. Low-cost accelerometry-based posture monitoring system for stroke survivors. In Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2008), pp. 243-244. ACM Press.
    * Pawar, U.S., Pal, J., Gupta, R., and Toyama, K. (2007). .Multiple Mice for Retention Tasks in Disadvantaged Schools.. Proc. of CHI 2007, ACM Press.
    * Providing Web Search Capability for Low-Connectivity Communities. Libby Levison, William Thies, and Saman Amarasinghe. Proceedings of the 2002 International Symposium on Technology and Society. Raleigh, North Carolina, June, 2002.
    * Kuriyan, R. Toyama, K. and Ray,I. (2006). .Integrating Social Development and Financial Sustainability: The Challenges of Rural Computer Kiosks in Kerala.. International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, May 2006, Berkeley, California.
    * Medhi, I., Sagar, A. and Toyama, K. (2006). .Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users.. International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, May 2006, Berkeley, USA.
    * Veeraraghavan, R., Singh, G., Toyama, K. and Menon, D. (2006). .Kiosk Usage Measurement using a Software Logging Tool.. Poster at International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, May 2006, Berkeley, USA.
    * Secure rural supply chain management using low cost paper watermarking A Sharma, L Subramanian, EA Brewer - Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Networked
    * Tapan S. Parikh, Engineering Rural Development: Improving the Performance and Accountability of Civil Society Organizations, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 52, No. 1, January 2009
    * Tapan S. Parikh, Using Mobile Phones for Secure, Distributed Document Processing in the Developing World, IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 2, April 2005
    * Neil Patel, Sheetal Agarwal, Nitendra Rajput, Amit Nanavati, Paresh Dave and Tapan S. Parikh, A Comparative Study of Speech and Dialed Input Voice Interfaces in Rural India, Note, ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), April 6-9, 2009, Boston, MA
    * Brian DeRenzi, Neal Lesh, Tapan Parikh, Clayton Sims, Marc Mitchell, Werner Maokola, Mwajuma Chemba, Yuna Hamisi, David Schellenberg and Gaetano Borriello, e-IMCI: Improving Pediatric Health Care in Low-Income Countries, ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), April 7-10, 2008, Florence, Italy
    * Tapan S. Parikh, Paul Javid, Sasikumar K., Kaushik Ghosh and Kentaro Toyama, Mobile Phones and Paper Documents: Evaluating a New Approach for Capturing Microfinance Data in Rural India, ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), April 24-27, 2006, Montreal, Canada
    * Iterative Design of A Braille Writing Tutor Tom Lauwers (Carnegie Mellon University), Nidhi Kalra (RAND), M. Bernardine Dias (CMU),  Daniel Dewey (CMU) and Tom Stepleton (CMU) ICTD2007
    * Offline Internet Access at Modem-speed Dialup Connections Umar Saif, Nabeel Butt, Shakeel Butt, Ahsan Chudhary and Ghulam Murtaza (LUMS) ICTD2007
    * Warana Unwired: Mobile Phones replacing PCs in a rural sugarcane cooperative Rajesh Veeraraghavan (UC Berkeley), Naga Yasodhar (Cognizant Technologies) and Kentaro Toyama (Microsoft Research India) ICTD2007
    * HealthLine: Speech-based Access to Health Information by Low-literate Users J Sherwani, Roni Rosenfeld, Rahul Tongia (CMU), Nosheen Ali (Cornell University), Sarwat Mirza (Health and Nutrition Development Society), Anjum Fatma (Health and Nutrition Development Society), Yousuf Memon, Mehtab Karim (Aga Khan University) ICTD2007
    * Computing Devices for All: Creating and Selling the Low-Cost Computer Rodrigo Fonseca, Joyojeet Pal ICTD 2006
    * COMMON-Sense Net: Improved Water Management for Resource-Poor Farmers via Sensor Networks Jacques Panchard, Seshagiri Rao, Prabhakar T.V, H.S. Jamadagni and Jean-Pierre Hubaux ICTD 2006

Best,
James