Please join us for the Change Seminar this week on *Tuesday 10/17/2017 in CSE 203 from 12-1 pm*. We will be covering two shorter conference style talks this week, so please try and arrive on time! *Who:* Samia Ibtasam (UW CSE) *What: **An Exploration of Smartphone based Mobile Money Applications in Pakistan* *Who: *Kushal Shah (UW CSE) *What: **An Investigation of Phone Upgrades in Remote Community Cellular Networks* *When: *Tuesday Oct 17 *Where:* 12pm in CSE 203 (Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering) *Kushal: An Investigation of Phone Upgrades in Remote Community Cellular Networks* In the last decade, billions of people worldwide have upgraded from basic 2G feature phones to data-enabled 4G smartphones. In most cases, people upgrade in areas with 4G coverage (typically cities and large towns), but increasingly, people choose to upgrade in areas that only have 2G coverage or no cellular coverage at all. This counterintuitive behavior – upgrading your phone despite living in an area that does not actively support many of the features of that new device – is the focus of this work. We investigate the rates and reasons for 4G upgrades and adoption in two extremely remote areas in Indonesia and the Philippines. Our mixed-methods approach combines the quantitative analysis of several years of mobile phone registration logs with the qualitative analysis of multiple interviews in one of these communities. *Bio:* Kushal is a Masters student in the Information School at UW. He is working as a Research Assistant with the ICTD lab to analyze different datasets to find ways to improve Financial Services for the Poor. He also works on projects in other domains such as Telecom Connectivity, Crisis Informatics and Urban Computing. --- *Samia: An Exploration of Smartphone based Mobile Money Applications in Pakistan* Worldwide, two billion people remain unbanked, the majority of whom reside in resource-constrained environments. While banks have limited reach due to high overhead costs of physical expansion, the global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS). However, access to mobile applications alone is insufficient to ensure their trial, adoption, or continued usage. In this paper, we report a three-phase learnability evaluation (N=118) of smartphone-based mobile wallet applications conducted in Pakistan. We discuss ways in which previous exposure or domain knowledge improve learnability, and we recommend that metrics for learnability should include effectiveness and help sought, independent of usability. We also identify DFS adoption opportunities such as user readiness, interface improvements, and women's independence. All of these opportunities stem from awareness and understanding of relevance, which in our case occurred as a consequence of exposure to the application under evaluation. *Bio: * Samia is a second a second year Ph.D. student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and is advised by Richard Anderson. Previously, she worked as the founding co-director of Innovations for Poverty Alleviation Lab (IPAL) at Information Technology University, Pakistan and taught courses like DLab: Global Development, Human Centered Design, Design thinking, and Technology for Global Development. She has been working as a researcher in using Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) since 2010. She started her work with speech interfaces for low-literate users with Umar Saif, Roni Rosenfeld and Agha Ali Raza. At IPAL, she worked to design Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health (MNCH) solutions including information systems, diagnosis applications etc. She also worked with Government of Punjab, Pakistan to redesign the Immunization card and creating digital health records for the province of Punjab. Currently, she is using her knowledge in Human-Computer Interaction to work with unbanked to design and adapt financial technologies and to expand the financial inclusion. She is Acumen Fund Regional Fellow for 2015 and sometimes tweets at @SamiaRazaq *Subscribe to the Change mailing list:* http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change *Google Calendar link: * https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/uwchange%40gmail. com/public/basic.ics