September 2009 - change - Mailing Lists

change meeting tomorrow
by Yaw Anokwa 30 Sep '09

30 Sep '09

our first change meeting is tomorrow at noon in the paul allen center, room 403. hope to see you all there! yaw

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Fwd: [TIER] Mobile myths and reality in the development context
by Joyojeet Pal 30 Sep '09

30 Sep '09

Aman Bhandari to TIER show details 11:48 AM (3 minutes ago) A new series from MobileActive.org probably worth checking into: Mobile Myths and Reality: A New Series on Deconstructing Mobiles for Development http://bit.ly/4hyN3h We have been working in this field since 2005, leading the industry analysis on mobiles for development and social change. While we agree that mobile phones are revolutionizing the developing world, we think it is time to take a very honest and realistic look at the promises of mobile tech for development and social change, and where these promises are falling short -- and of, course, why, and what to do about that. -- http://globalhealthideas.org http://twitter.com/ghideas

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Fwd: [Mbamail] Global Social Entrepreneurship at UW: Fall events (2009 GSEC Competition!)
by joe michiels 29 Sep '09

29 Sep '09

Change folks, there's a couple great events/opportunities that are open to all students (not just MBAs) in the email below. I'd especially point out the *Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition *as it's open to teams made up across schools/students. Last year's top prize was $10,000, and one of last years finalists was "WapGrid", a sms service for verifying medication authenticity in developing regions. Let me know if anyone's interested in learning more. -Joe Michiels jmich(a)uw.edu Foster School of Business - Class of 2010 *[image: Foster_Horiz_Purple_with_W.jpg]*** * * *Social Change is Serious Business – Make it Yours!* * * *Join the Global Business Center this fall to learn how business can solve social problems around the world* * * *October 15, 2009* Poverty and Opportunity: Microfinance + People-Powered Development Student Internship Open House <http://careers.washington.edu/Calendar> (2:30 pm) and Public Keynote Lecture<http://www.seattlemicrofinance.org/poverty-and-opportunity-microfinance-and…>(6:00 pm) * * *November 11, 2009* Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC) Application deadline 11/11/09 (online<http://www.foster.washington.edu/centers/gbc/globalsocialentrepreneurshipco…> ) *November 11, 2009* Social Entrepreneurship Day at Foster Public Keynote with Ed Bland, President, Unitus (5:30 pm) * * * * * * * * *Event Details * * * *10/15/09 * Poverty and Opportunity: Microfinance + People-Powered Development Internship Open House <http://careers.washington.edu/Calendar> 2:30-5:30 pm, Mary Gates Hall Commons The first-ever Microfinance Internship Open House at UW! All students are invited to learn about internships with leading social businesses and non-profits that improve the lives of people around the world. Bring copies of your resumes and your passion to make a difference! *Open to current students only. Co-sponsored by the UW Career Center * Poverty and Opportunity: Microfinance + People-Powered Development Keynote with Terry Provance, Executive Director of Oikocredit<http://foster.washington.edu/EVENTMANAGER/EventDetails.aspx?eid=5443> 6:00-8:00 pm, Kane Hall 220 Join us to hear how Oikocredit, one of the world’s largest Microfinance Investment Vehicles, has challenged people to explore sustainable alternatives to global development that harness credit to empower marginalized groups. Oikocredit reaches more than 16 million people in over 60 countries. Rev. Provance leads the U.S. office of Oikocredit and will be presenting on how microfinance seeks to end global poverty by providing the poor with a means to lift themselves out of economic distress. Free, but registration required <https://catalysttools.washington.edu/webq/survey/uwciber/84174>. Seating opens at 5:30 pm. *Sponsored by Global Business Center and SeaMo, with additional support from the **UW Career Center, Center for Global Studies and Dept. of Global Health. *** *11/11/09* *Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC) *Application deadline: Apply to GSEC online<http://www.foster.washington.edu/centers/gbc/globalsocialentrepreneurshipco…> GSEC seeks innovative, commercially-sustainable business ideas that address problems of poverty in the developing world. Open to all students worldwide—and across fields of study—GSEC seeks innovative social business ideas that provide lasting solutions to global economic development. *Apply by November 11, 2009* Applications consist of an executive summary of the business idea *and* an online registration. Semi-finalist teams are selected in December 2009 and invited to participate in GSEC Week (Mar 1-5, 2010). *Apply online **here*<http://www.foster.washington.edu/centers/gbc/globalsocialentrepreneurshipco…> ** Semi-finalist teams from around the world will be travel to Seattle for GSEC Week (March 1-5, 2010), where they pitch their business ideas to judges and the UW community, visit regional companies, and *compete for up to $17,500 in prize money*, including global health awards. *Visit **GSEC **online*<http://www.foster.washington.edu/centers/gbc/globalsocialentrepreneurshipco…> * * * * *11/19/09* *Social Entrepreneurship Day at Foster* Public Keynote with Ed Bland, President, Unitus <http://www.unitus.com/> 5:30-7:20 pm, Boeing Auditorium, Foster School of Business The inaugural social entrepreneurship day, part of the second annual Global Biz Week, will feature Ed Bland, President, Unitus. We invite students to learn how Seattle-based Unitus combats global poverty by accelerating the growth of microfinance. *Free but limited seating.* * * * * * * -wren *Wren McNally* Assistant Director, Faculty & Community Programs Global Business Center/CIBER Foster School of Business, University of Washington Lewis Hall 303, Box 353200, Seattle, WA 98195 T:(206) 543-4109 – F: (206) 685-4079 Join our GSEC fanclub! www.facebook.com/GSECUW Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition<http://www.foster.washington.edu/centers/gbc/globalsocialentrepreneurshipco…>(GSEC) *Building Global Business Expertise* <http://foster.washington.edu/ciber>** _______________________________________________ mbamail mailing list mbamail(a)u.washington.edu http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/mbamail

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Check out my photos on Facebook
by Matthew Kam 27 Sep '09

27 Sep '09

I set up a Facebook profile where I can post my pictures, videos and events and I want to add you as a friend so you can see it. First, you need to join Facebook! Once you join, you can also create your own profile. Thanks, Matthew To sign up for Facebook, follow the link below: http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=1232464&k=Z4F54XSQT55G6BGBTGV5YPT&r change(a)cs.washington.edu was invited to join Facebook by Matthew Kam. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click on the link below to unsubscribe. http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=e54b91&u=100000325592845&mid=129a1a0G5af323… Facebook's offices are located at 1601 S. California Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304.

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Course Announcement - PhD course in Value Sensitive Design
by Batya Friedman 25 Sep '09

25 Sep '09

For those who are interested, there are still a few spots open in the Value Sensitive Design PhD course this quarter.... Autumn Quarter 2009, Wednesdays 4:30 to 7:30 pm INSC 543 / CSE 599P Instructors: Alan Borning and Batya Friedman Value Sensitive Design is an approach to the design of information technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process. On important focus of Value Sensitive Design is consideration of values that center on human well being, human dignity, justice, welfare, and human rights. Specific values include but are not limited to trust, accountability, freedom from bias, access, autonomy, privacy, sustainability, and consent. This course will provide a thorough introduction to Value Sensitive Design's interactional theory, direct and indirect stakeholder analyses, value tension analyses, and tripartite methodology of conceptual, technical, and empirical investigations. The theory and methods of Value Sensitive Design are to be used in consort with other existing technical and design methods. Ultimately, Value Sensitive Design requires that we broaden the goals and criteria for judging the quality of information systems to include those that advance human values. The most significant component of the work in the course will be a quarter-long project in which students apply Value Sensitive Design to a project of their choosing. We encourage students to bring their own projects, in particular ones that could be an aspect of their dissertation research. There are also already some students who will be in the course with some very interesting projects, and who are looking for project partners. In addition, there will be a set of readings, some short writing assignments, and some focused design activities. The course will be taught studio-style, with one 3 hour session Wednesdays 4:30 - 7:20 pm (with breaks of course!). There will be a mix of lectures, design activities, and reflection during the class. We welcome PhD and MS students from a variety of disciplines, including the Information School, Computer Science & Engineering, Human Centered Design and Engineering, DXARTS, Biomedical and Health nformatics, Geography, Psychology, and others. Information School students should register for INSC 543, and CSE students for CSE 599P. Others - take your pick (though please try to keep the enrollments even between the two course numbers.) This is a 4 credit graded course, but due to a quirk of the CSE 599 course number, CSE 599P is only 3 credits. Students can register with Alan Borning for 1 additional unit of CSE 600 to make up the difference if they want. In CSE, this course counts toward the Post-Quals Ph.D. Requirement. For more information, including some project ideas, please see http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse599p/09au/, or contact either Batya (batya(a)u.washington.edu) or Alan (borning(a)cs.washington.edu) We hope you'll join us! Batya and Alan

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FW: AAAI Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D)
by Gaetano Borriello 24 Sep '09

24 Sep '09

-----Original Message----- From: Nathan Eagle [mailto:nathan@MIT.EDU] Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 12:00 PM To: Shawndra Hill; Ravi Jain; Saleema Amershi; Gaetano Borriello; Ferguson, Neil M; Ashish Kapoor; Roni Rosenfeld; John Quinn; Kentaro Toyama; Peter Waiganjo Wagacha Cc: Eric Horvitz Subject: CFP: AAAI Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D) Hello AI-D Organizing Committee - Please forward the AI-D call for papers around to the relevant people and lists. Also, take a look at http://ai-d.org and let us know where you may be able to provide additional content related to shared data, sample research projects, and relevant publications. It should be quite an interesting symposium and we look forward to receiving submissions from yourselves and your students. Thanks! -Nathan and Eric ------ AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D) Call for Papers There has been great interest in information and communication technology for development (ICT-D) over the last several years. The work is diverse and extends from information technologies that provide infrastructure for micropayments to techniques for monitoring and enhancing the cultivation of crops. While efforts in ICT-D have been interdisciplinary, ICT-D has largely overlooked opportunities for harnessing machine learning and reasoning to create new kinds of services, and to serve a role in analyses of data that may provide insights about socioeconomic development for disadvantaged populations. The unprecedented volume of data currently being generated in the developing world on human health, movement, communication, and financial transactions provides new opportunities for applying machine learning methods to development efforts, however. Our aim is to foster the creation of a subfield of ICT-D, which we refer to as artificial intelligence for development (AI-D), to harness these opportunities. To this end, we hope the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford will serve as a focal point to bring together a critical mass of researchers who are interested in applying AI research to development challenges. The goals of the symposium will be to (1) identify a core set of AI-D researchers, (2) explore key topics and representative projects in this realm, and (3) to lay out an ontology of AI-D research challenges and opportunities. We are seeking original contributions in the form of both full papers and position papers on a wide range of related topics. For example, papers could address the potential for machine reasoning to make valuable off-line and real-time inferences from the large-scale mobile phone data sets currently being generated in the developing world. Such analytics could provide a better understanding of social relationships and information flows in disadvantaged societies, as well as guiding and monitoring ICT-D interventions and public policy, and giving insight into population responses to crises. Other topics would include exploring how machine learning and inference could help us understand human mobility patterns, yielding, for example, real-time estimates of the progression of disease outbreaks and guiding public health interventions. Machine reasoning could also provide remote areas with medical support through automated diagnosis, along with guidance for the effective triaging of limited resources and human medical expertise. Additional potential topics include instant machine translation for better communication and coordination among people who speak different languages, user modeling for online tutoring, investment advisory tools, and simulation, modeling, and decision support for agricultural optimization. The AAAI Artificial Intelligence for Development Spring Symposium at Stanford will help define this new research area, and identify the next steps to establishing a sustainable and vibrant AI-D research community. In conjunction with Symposium, we are working to build a community of researchers with interests in AI-D, as well as to identify and make available case libraries of data (such as communication logs, financial transactions, and local market prices) for research. A site has been created for AI-D researchers at http://AI-D.org . Submissions: Interested participants should submit full papers (6 pages) and position papers (2 pages) in AAAI format to submissions(a)AI-D.org. Selected papers from the symposium will be published as an AAAI technical report. Organizing Committee: Nathan Eagle, cochair (Santa Fe Institute), Eric Horvitz, cochair (Microsoft Research), Shawndra Hill, data cochair (Wharton), Ravi Jain data cochair (Google), Saleema Amershi (University of Washington), Gaetano Boriello (University of Washington and Google), Neil Ferguson (Imperial, UK), Ashish Kapoor (Microsoft Research), John Quinn (Makerere University, Uganda), Roni Rosenfeld (Carnegie Mellon University), Kentaro Toyama (Microsoft Research), Peter Waiganjo Wagacha (University of Nairobi) Dates: * Submissions for the symposia are due on October 31, 2009 * Notification of acceptance will be given by November 27, 2009 * Camera-ready material must be received by January 22, 2010 * Symposium at Stanford University will be held on March 22-24, 2010

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change meetings are back!
by Yaw Anokwa 23 Sep '09

23 Sep '09

hey all, hope everyone had a great summer. as school starts, so do the weekly change meetings. our first will be next week thursday, october 1st at noon. we'll be in the cse building, room 403. as always, you can follow all the change events at http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=uwchange%40gmail.com or on twitter at http://twitter.com/uwchange see you all next thursday! yaw

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Blog Update: OpenMRS Now Installable With A Double Click
by Yaw Anokwa 20 Sep '09

20 Sep '09

OpenMRS is an open-source framework for building electronic medical record systems in developing countries. It enables organizations to build and manage health care systems where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions. While the framework is quite powerful, it can be difficult for non-expert users to install. I have developed the OpenMRS Appliance to simplify the process. The virtual appliance (also known as a virtual machine) is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment. All users do is double click it to start using OpenMRS. Uninstalling is even easier, simply delete the virtual appliance folder. If you wanted to try the newest OpenMRS 1.5 release, it is now only a few clicks away. http://change.washington.edu/2009/09/openmrs-now-installable-with-a-double-…

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new course (Mobile/Cloud Applications for Emerging Regions)
by Gaetano Borriello 18 Sep '09

18 Sep '09

Announcing a one-time course offering this fall...... Title: Mobile/Cloud Applications for Emerging Regions Description: A project course aimed at creating modules for Open Data Kit (http://code.google.com/p/open-data-kit) for immediate application in projects around the world ranging from public health to deforestation monitoring. Undergraduate students should view the course as a way to learn about programming on Android and AppEngine platforms while having the ability to quickly field test their work. Graduate students will find quals project candidates that could lead to longer-term research projects in HCI, networking, vision, embedded systems, software engineering, etc. Credits: 4 credits for undergraduate students as CSE490Y(SLN 20583), 3 credits for graduate students as CSE599Y(SLN 20584). Pre-requisites: CSE326 or extensive experience with Java programming. Caveats: 5th year Masters students can choose either 490Y or 599Y but must keep in mind that the course will not count toward their 5 course requirement at the 500-level. The course does not count as a "capstone" course for undergraduate CompE majors. It can be used to meet the CSE Senior Elective requirement for undergraduates. Syllabus/Schedule: MW 5:00-6:20 (note time schedule may say 6:00, it is 6:20) in CSE403. Week 1: Goals, Objectives, Projects, Intro to ICTD Week 2: Android overview - tutorial assignment with extension Week 3: AppEngine overview - tutorial assignment with extension Week 4: Tying mobile and cloud together - challenging assignment to demonstrate how the clients/cloud communicate Week 5: Project selection Weeks 6-10: Project meetings with instructors, get feedback from collaborators, design documentation - project group size up to 2, possibly 3, not 4 Week 11: Final demos Grading: based on Week 2-4 assignments and project (including documentation, design rationale, interaction in group meetings, and demonstration) Instructors: Yaw Anokwa and Carl Hartung, CSE graduate students and ODK developers (supervised by Gaetano Borriello)

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Talking Book Pilot Results
by Trina Gorman 18 Sep '09

18 Sep '09

For those of you who are interested in Literacy Bridge's Talking Book, below are some newly posted documents that outline the results from the first pilot in Ghana: * Results. This document contains the details including an executive summary: http://literacybridge.org/images/Talking_Book_2009H1_Pilot_Results.pdf * Case studies. These two highlight the effects on a teacher and a farmer: http://literacybridge.org/images/Case_Study-Literacy.pdf http://literacybridge.org/images/Case_Study-Agriculture..pdf ~Trina

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