- change - Mailing Lists

Heather Underwood on Improving Maternal Labor Monitoring in Kenya Using Digital Pen Technology
by Nicola Dell 22 Oct '12

22 Oct '12

This Tuesday at Change, Heather Underwood will talk about Improving Maternal Labor Monitoring in Kenya Using Digital Pen Technology. Paper-based systems for monitoring maternal labor have been shown to reduce life-threatening complications in low-resource environments; however, significant barriers exist to the use of these tools in developing countries. This paper presents the PartoPen – a digital pen system that enhances a common labor-monitoring form known as the partograph. The PartoPen system provides real-time data feedback and reinforces birth attendant training, while retaining the paper-and-pen interface currently used by most healthcare workers. In this presentation, the results from a preliminary user evaluation, and two pilot studies of the system in Kenya will be discussed. The qualitative and quantitative results collected in these studies suggest that the PartoPen system effectively addresses many of the current barriers facing effective partograph use in developing countries. Heather Underwood graduated in 2009 from the University of Washington with a degree in computer science, with a strong focus in the field of ICTD - information and communication technologies for development. In addition to interning for Microsoft, Zillow, and IBM while at UW, Heather focused her academic work on developing educational games for public schools in India. After graduating, she worked as an iphone app developer for a health-focused San Francisco startup - MedHelp - but left to continue her work in ICTD by pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder's ATLAS Institute. Heather's current work focuses on developing point-of-care health solutions for maternal and child health in developing countries, and is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Bill & Melinda Gates Global Challenge Grant. What: Heather Underwood on Improving Maternal Labor Monitoring in Kenya Using Digital Pen Technology When: Tuesday, October 23rd at 12 noon Where: The Allen Center, room CSE 203

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Youth and Technology Organizations in Africa
by Kelechi Edozie-Anyadiegwu 22 Oct '12

22 Oct '12

Hi Everyone, I was hoping some people on this list could point me towards some organizations/programs in African countries that focus on youth and technology/ICTs. Thanks! Kelechi -- *Kelechi Anyadiegwu * *MHCI, Human-Computer Interaction * *Carnegie Mellon University* *Human Computer Interaction Institute * *web* | www.kelechi.net *twitter* | @jadoreKelechi <http://twitter.com/#!/jadoreKelechi> Check out JELYPals! *"Uniting the Diaspora One Story at a Time"* *web* | www.jelypals.org *twitter* | @JELYPals <https://twitter.com/JELYPals>

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New brief - Empowering Women & Girls Through ICT at Libraries
by Melody Clark 18 Oct '12

18 Oct '12

Hello, all! Given that I had such a great response from these lists about the brief I was working on focusing on girls, women, libraries, and ICT, I wanted to share the final Beyond Access<http://www.beyondaccess.net/> publication with you. Thank you all again for your messages, examples, and interest in this work. It can be seen & downloaded here: http://www.beyondaccess.net/2012/10/18/empowering-women-and-girls-through-i… I've also attached a PDF copy here. Hope you enjoy! Melody From: Melody Clark Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2012 11:28 AM To: change(a)change.washington.edu; 'iworld(a)uw.edu' Subject: Seeking your help - how libraries help girls & women with technology access & skills Hello, all! I'm working on a policy brief about girls & women, ICT, and libraries - specifically how libraries can be a safe, reliable place where girls & women in developing countries can gain access to ICT skills and technology training. In the brief, we'd like to include 3-5 examples of libraries already filling this increasingly important need for girls & women to have safe access to gain ICT skills. Do any of you have examples of how a library(ies) you know of are doing this? If so, please email me at melclark(a)uw.edu<mailto:melclark@uw.edu> with your example(s). Thank you very much in advance, and I look forward to hearing from you! Melody -- Melody Clark Research Coordinator | Global Impact Study Technology & Social Change (TASCHA) http://about.me/melodyclark melclark(a)uw.edu<mailto:melclark@uw.edu> | 206.685.7819 Twitter: @ictimpact<http://twitter.com/#!/ICTimpact> | @melodyrclark<https://twitter.com/#!/melodyrclark> www.globalimpactstudy.org<http://www.globalimpactstudy.org/>

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Need for translation
by judy wawira 16 Oct '12

16 Oct '12

Hello I am doing a brief needs assessment for need of translation of languages for s student project around ICT4D i am helping out My questions are !) Have you had a need for translation , and for what purpose? II) How did you access translation services III) What could better improve your utilization of translation services IV) Would you pay for translation services? If yes, what would you prefer, pay per translation or a subscription fee? Thank you -- Judy -- Judy

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CFP: Networked Healthcare Technology (NetHealth), Workshop co-located with COMSNETS 2013
by Nicola Dell 16 Oct '12

16 Oct '12

Apologies for multiple postings NetHealth 2013 Call for Papers --------------------------------------------- The human body is being increasingly instrumented and connected. The emergence of networked information technology for healthcare has already shown benefit in moving away from episodic to pervasive care. The availability of rich, perpetual, multi-modal data about physiological and psychological factors provides an opportunity to make critical real-time inferences not just about health but also behavior, beyond what is possible with infrequent clinical visits. We imagine future networked information systems will support, for example, clinical workflow, remote diagnosis and consultation, e-prescribing, and mobile data collection and surveillance, disease outbreak identification and patient participation in the comfort of familiar surroundings and care. Mobile technology can be a key enabler in improving access to healthcare (in terms of geography, economics and information), by encouraging personal health management, and by facilitating patient and provider mobility. Wearable medical devices are emerging, to measure essential vital signs like pulse, respiration, ECG, blood glucose level, and patient mobility. Handheld devices support clinicians in urban hospitals, and portable diagnostic kits allow remote healthcare teams to more easily reach rural villages. The widespread availability of mobile phones, and recent experiments with low-cost, long-range broadband wireless networks, bring connectivity to all these opportunities. We encourage papers that present novel ideas for networked computing technology in support of healthcare, and which are likely to invoke thoughtful discussion at the workshop. Research papers should focus on all aspects of networked healthcare technologies. Of interest, though not exclusively, are the following topics: - Remote diagnosis and remote consultation - Assistive medical technology - Clinical applications of mobile or networked healthcare - Mobile and wearable medical sensing applications - Design of wearable and home-care health devices - Sensor networks for public health monitoring and surveillance - Networked mobile technology for rural healthcare - Security and privacy in networked healthcare - Experience from technology deployments - Usability of mobile health applications and devices - Applications to emergency response and disaster response - Cost-efficient and energy-efficient networking for remote healthcare - Remote access to electronic health records - Assistive robotics and prosthetics - Rehabilitation engineering and assistive rehabilitative technology - Smart homes for tele-home healthcare and telemedicine Formatting Guidelines for Submitted Papers ---------------------------------------------------------------- The NetHealth workshop solicits paper submissions of up to 6 pages in length, including all figures, tables, and references. All papers must be electronically submitted via the NetHealth submission site http://comsnets13.cs.umass.edu/nethealth/ in PDF. The proceedings will be published by IEEE Xplore and will include the final papers of up to 6 pages in length. All NetHealth technical papers must be associated with an author registration at the full rate. For authors presenting multiple papers, one full registration is valid for up to three papers. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the workshop (e.g., removal from IEEE Xplore) if the paper is not presented at the workshop. Overall appearance: Submitted papers should adhere to the appearance of the standard IEEE twocolumn format that is used for IEEE Transactions. Margins: Papers must use a 10pt font on US Letter paper with margins no smaller than 0.75in for the top margin, 1.0in for the bottom margin, and 0.625in for side margins. Templates: Depending on whether you are using LaTeX or Microsoft Word for formatting your paper, you can download the following templates thatincorporate the formatting specifications: LaTeX: Paper http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEEtran2.tar.gz , Bibliography http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEEtranBST1.tar.gz Word : Paper and Bibliography http://www.ieee.org/documents/MSW_A4_format.doc Demo Session ---------------------- In addition, NetHealth 2013 will feature a demo session on the day of the workshop to allow industry and academic researchers to showcase their latestapplications andprototypes in all related topics. Demo proposals are invited for both mature or innovative systems and prototypes developed for commercial use or for research purposes, from industries or universities. The submitted demo proposal should include all relevant technical content in a maximum of 2 pages in double column format. Each paper acceptance is subject to the conditions that the paper does not contain any plagiarized material and that the authors do not submit thepaper material inparallel to another publication venue. Violations of these conditions will most likely result in rejections of the violating submissions or evenalready accepted papers. Important Dates ----------------------- Paper Submission: October 28, 2012 Notification of acceptance: November 19, 2012 Camera-ready submission: December 2, 2012 Demo submission: December 7, 2012 Workshop date: January 7, 2013 Technical Program Co-Chairs -------------------------------------------- Zainul Charbiwala IBM Research, India (zainulcharbiwala(a)in.ibm.com) Anish Arora Ohio State University, USA (anish(a)cse.ohio-state.edu)

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Subject: CommCare workshops in Dakar and Maputo. Applications due Nov 9.
by neal lesh 16 Oct '12

16 Oct '12

Hi everybody, Dimagi is holding workshops in Dakar and Maputo in which we'll introduce CommCare and show people have to design CommCare applications using our online authoring tools. Please feel free to forward to any organizations you think might be interested. Thanks! neal ----------- *Are you an organization looking to improve your community worker programs through the use of mobile phones? *Dimagi is pleased to announce two upcoming workshops on using CommCare, Dimagi’s open source, mobile phone-based software application:** · Nov 28-29, 2012: Hôtel Sokhamon, Dakar, Senegal (in French, and in partnership with Mobile Senegal) · Dec 4-5, 2012: Tivoli Hotel, Maputo, Mozambique (in Portuguese and English) *Why CommCare?* With CommCare, anyone can deploy their own mobile application modules that can be loaded into inexpensive phones and used by community-based workers in the field. CommCare is being deployed in 25 countries and is used by thousands of community workers to track and support their clients with registration forms, checklists, SMS reminders, and multimedia. This leads to better data collection, reporting, management, community education, and community-level service provision. *What will the workshop cover? *Each workshop will last two days. The first half of the first day will be a general overview of mHealth and Dimagi’s open source tools. The rest of the workshop will focus on building people’s technical capacity to use CommCare’s online authoring tools to create CommCare applications. Workshop participants will be walked through the basic steps of how to use these freely available, online tools.** * * *What will it cost? *All workshops are free, however Dimagi will not provide per diems or travel stipends. Lunch and coffee will be provided daily.** * * *Who should attend? *Staff with basic computer literacy from NGOs, IGOs, funding organizations, research institutions, and government agencies. *How to apply? *Please fill out the forms available online at http://www.commcarehq.org/workshops/2012/ and email them to workshops(a)dimagi.com *by November 9, 2012.* Attendance may be limited depending on space available. Please contact workshops(a)dimagi.com with any questions.

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DEV 2013 call for posters: Deadline Oct 19th 2012
by Aaditeshwar Seth 16 Oct '12

16 Oct '12

ACM DEV 2013 3rd Symposium on Computing for Development Co-located with COMSNETS January 11-12, 2013 Bangalore, India http://dev2013.org/ Important Dates: Poster abstracts due: October 19, 2012 (11:59pm UTC) - firm deadline Author notification: October 26, 2012 Camera-ready: December 7, 2012 Conference: January 11-12, 2013 Submission instructions: http://dev2013.org/submissions.html DEV 2013 provides an international forum for research in the design and implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for social and economic development. In particular, we focus on emerging contexts where conventional computing solutions are often inappropriate due to various contextual factors - including, but not limited to, cost, language, literacy, and the availability of power and bandwidth. The poster deadline for DEV 2013 is still open. Poster abstracts are limited to 2 pages and should describe original and previously unpublished research, innovative experiments, and work in progress. All DEV poster submissions should either provide or directly motivate a novel technical solution that has direct implications for development. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Networks/Systems/Security/Architecture Low-cost wireless connectivity Intermittent networks and systems Power-efficient systems Low-cost computing devices Mobile systems and applications Mixed networks, e.g., telephony and IP Special-purpose sensor systems Security challenges in developing regions HCI/Applications User interfaces for low-literacy populations Multi-lingual computing User-interfaces for low-cost devices Participatory methods and user-centered design Accessibility to disabled populations in developing regions Design and evaluation of applications for health, microfinance, education, agriculture, entertainment AI/NLP/Data Mining/Speech/Vision Machine learning techniques for large-scale data analysis in development contexts Adapting content and applications to local languages and education levels Understanding social relationships and information flows in disadvantaged societies Speech interfaces and speech recognition for low-resource languages Development of new AI-centric tools/solutions for development Computer vision challenges in development We also welcome submissions outside of these topics that address the DEV focus on computing innovations supporting social and economic development. Conference co-chairs: Bill Thies, Microsoft Research India <thies(a)microsoft.com> Amit Nanavati, IBM India Research Labs <namit(a)in.ibm.com> PC co-chairs: Richard Anderson, University of Washington <anderson(a)cs.washington.edu> Aaditeshwar Seth, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi <aseth(a)cse.iitd.ernet.in>

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Pascal Schuback from the UW Office of Global Affairs
by Nicola Dell 15 Oct '12

15 Oct '12

This Tuesday at Change we will host Pascal Schuback from the UW Office of Global Affairs. Pascal is responsible for security and emergency management of international activities for the University of Washington. Part of his responsibilities include developing the Global Emergency Management Plan and supporting those traveling for UW business and operations overseas. Pascal will talk about the the different travel assistance programs UW has and how he is there to support the international safety of UW. He will also be mentioning some additional projects that he is or will be working on to support his efforts for UW. Pascal has served in the local and regional public sectors as an emergency manager. He has a BS in Public Health and an MPA focused on public administration and emergency management/public safety. Pascal is also a board member of CrisisCommons, a global organization connecting people, tools and resources to support crisis response, and helping people to better prepare, plan, respond and recover from all types of disasters. Pascal’s focus is on the integration of technology, open data, emergency management/public safety arena and global crisis and humanitarian aide. He has worked on a variety of projects that support the technical integration and development public safety and humanitarian aid. What: Pascal Schuback from the UW Office of Global Affairs When: Tuesday, October 16th at 12 noon Where: The Allen Center, room CSE 203

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Interesting motivation for geo-tagged photo collection: Costal Fishing
by Gaetano Borriello 11 Oct '12

11 Oct '12

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: James Fogarty <jfogarty(a)cs.washington.edu> Subject: Costal Fishing Interesting motivation for geo-tagged photo collection http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/11/west-africa-fishing-pirat… "A group of 23 impoverished west African fishing communities has driven off a fleet of illegal, unreported & unregulated "pirate" trawlers by filming & reporting them when they are found in their waters. 9 of the 10 ships identified were found to have licences to export catches to Europe." there's also a discussion going on here: http://reddit.com/comments/11b14p

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Fwd: 2013 PTC Young Scholar Program
by Nicola Dell 11 Oct '12

11 Oct '12

Aloha , We have an application form and webpage up and running for our PTC Young Scholar Program 2013. The objective of this program is to help support a few promising Ph.D. students/post-docs in telecom/ICT and engage them with PTC. (links are below) Applicants who are selected will be invited to present their research at PTC - we will give them opportunities to network, get feedback and general experience and exposure. (Travel expenses are covered by PTC). Please help publicize this opportunity to your students, department and contacts at other institutions. We want to encourage applicants from emerging economies to submit - so please share this info with your contacts that could help in this regard. Link to the webpage: http://www.ptc.org/?page_id=2055. Link to the application form: http://www.ptc.org/images/pdf/2013%20PTC%20Young%20Scholar%20Program%20Appl… . For additional info, here's the contact email: youngscholars(a)ptc.org. If you are interested in being involved with the program, please contact Mark Chun or myself. Best Regards, Elizabeth Elizabeth Fife, Ph.D. Associate Director of Industry Studies Institute for Communication Technology Management (CTM) Marshall School of Business University of Southern California email: fife(a)marshall.usc.edu www.marshall.usc.edu/ctm/ ------------------------------

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