Please join us for this weeks Change Seminar. CSE graduate student Aditya Vashistha will be presenting two new ideas he has for future work and looking for feedback from the Change community.

In this brainstorming session, we will talk about two projects at the intersection of ICTD and Human Computation.

Our aim is to design, build and evaluate a voice-based microtasking platform to enable low-income low-literate marginalized communities in India to perform wide range of audio micro tasks using their basic phone. The microtasking platform will run on an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service where people will call a number to perform tasks from a collection of audio tasks. For tasks that require objective response like multiple choice response, a worker will input response by pressing keys on the phone. For tasks that require subjective response like translation task, a worker will perform task by recording the audio response in an active call session. Workers will be compensated for their efforts in the form of mobile airtime top-ups which are very common in the developing countries.

In recent years, various researchers and practitioners have deployed IVR systems to collect data from and provide information to low-literate low-income marginalized communities. Some notable IVR systems include CGNet Swara for citizen journalism, Avaaj Otalo for agriculture information discussion, IBM's Spoken Web for local content creation and dissemination, Polly and Sangeet Swara for providing entertainment content, Healthline for disseminating health information, and Ila Dhageyso for civic engagement. Though these IVR systems have been successful in engaging marginalized communities in instrumental as well as non-instrumental discussions, one of the major drawback of these systems is the inability to search and index the content generated in languages spoken in the developing world. This deteriorates usability for both IVR users, and Internet users who browse these datasets.

Our solution is to create a crowdsourcing smartphone application which will play audio files one after other. Users will choose icons corresponding to the keywords they identify while listening to audio files, and thus will generate keywords for the audio content produced in local languages.

Aditya Vashistha is currently pursuing PhD in Computer Science at the University of Washington where he design, build and evaluate technologies for marginalized rural and urban communities to improve their access to information. His research focus is to build and evaluate scalable voice based communication platforms that enables the next billion people to access the Internet, social media platforms, and crowdsourcing platforms on their non-Internet-enabled mobile phones. Earlier, he also conducted research at Microsoft Research India and Infosys Labs. You can read more about him at www.adityavashistha.com