The goal of my research is to design, build, and evaluate novel computing systems that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions. As computing technologies become affordable and accessible to diverse populations across the globe, it is critical that we broaden the scope of our research to study the social, technical, and infrastructural challenges faced by these diverse communities and build systems that address problems in critical domains such as health care and education. In this talk, I describe my general approach to building technologies for underserved communities, including identifying opportunities for technology, conducting formative research to fully understand the space, developing novel technologies, iteratively testing and deploying, evaluating with target populations, and handing off to global development organizations for long-term sustainability. I focus specifically on two examples of systems that I built to address challenges faced by rural health workers: one that automatically digitizes data from paper forms, and another that automatically interprets diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. Both these systems run on cheap, commercially available mobile devices and use computer vision and machine-learning techniques to automate tasks that were previously tedious or error prone. Through extensive evaluations with target populations in Sub-Saharan Africa, I highlight the potential for novel technological solutions to help new and diverse populations address global challenges.

Nicola Dell is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech in New York City. Her research interests are in information and communication technologies for development (ICTD), human-computer interaction (HCI), and mobile computing with a focus on designing and evaluating systems that improve the lives of underserved populations in low-income regions. Nicki recently completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle where she was advised by Gaetano Borriello and Linda Shapiro. At UW CSE she was a member of the Open Data Kit (ODK) research team and she also helped to organize the Change group from 2011-2015.