Please join us for Change Seminar next Tuesday 2/4/2020 at 12 PM in CSE2-371. Note the room change.
Talk Title: Turn the Bus- Can We End Educational Inequality With the Help of Smartphones?
Talk Summary:
Educational inequality leads to intergenerational poverty. When young people do not have access to a quality education, they are not able to access the economic opportunities that can help them lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Education also has a deeper impact on people’s lives, health and self-esteem.
Due to insurmountable infrastructural and cultural barriers, it has hitherto been impossible to deliver the best quality education to the world’s most disadvantaged communities in remote parts of the Global South. Now, for the first time, there might be a ray of hope in being able to solve this problem in a direct and scalable way.
There are millions of people in the developing world today who do not have access to a toilet in their homes, but have access to a smartphone. In India alone, Omidyar Network reports that half a billion users are scheduled to come online for the first time through smartphones over the next few years.
Turn the Bus is creating educational solutions to reach these new Internet users via their smartphones in their local languages in a scalable and accessible way. We are also creating AI tools to enhance our efforts. Our project “AI Librarian” was a winner at the Microsoft Hack for Good Hackathon in Nov 2019.
Speaker Bio:
Bratati Ghosh is the Founder of Turn the Bus (www.turnthebus.org) She graduated from the top-ranked engineering school in India (IIT Kanpur) with an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering, and the top ranked Business School in India (IIM Ahmedabad) with an MBA in Business Strategy & Finance. Over the last twenty years, Bratati has worked in the USA in the Tech sector, including a stint as a Senior Director at Expedia (which brought her and her family to Seattle), and most recently, as the Chief Marketing Officer for a 2700 employee Blackstone LP (Private Equity) investee global tech company.
Thanks,
-Esther