What: Cliff Schmidt from Literacy Bridge

When: Tuesday, April 1st at 12 noon

Where: The Allen Center, CSE 203

Join us tomorrow for the first Change seminar of spring quarter.  This week we will have a talk by Cliff Schmidt from Literacy Bridge.

Abstract
Reaching remote villages with agriculture training and health promotion can dramatically reduce poverty, disease, and hunger. Mobile phones offer a solution in some cases: SMS messages can reach literate users, and voice calls can reach those who own a phone and can easily keep it charged. But in villages with 10% literacy rates, no electricity, and where most women don’t own a phone, mobile solutions have failed — and this is where you find extreme poverty. Radio broadcasts address these challenges but run into others: listeners must be available during the broadcast and they must remember everything they hear.  Illiterate users, who cannot take notes, must rely on their memories when the information is needed; otherwise, they need an on-demand solution. Cloud services and smart, connected, devices are increasingly able to distribute digital information right up to the last mile, but not beyond. Join us to discuss our experience leveraging mobile devices, but reaching beyond them with a simple, durable, audio device that provides on-demand messages while capturing metrics and user feedback to send back via mobile technology to cloud-based services.

About The Speaker
Cliff started Literacy Bridge in 2007, leading the development of an audio-based mobile device called the “Talking Book” for people with minimal literacy skills living in rural areas without electricity or Internet access. Literacy Bridge now partners with UNICEF to use Talking Books to reach 40,000 people with new on-demand content every six weeks. Cliff received the Microsoft Alumni Foundation Integral Fellow Award by Bill and Melinda Gates and was awarded a Clinton Global Initiative membership by President Bill Clinton. He received the top prize at the Tech Awards in 2012 and Computerworld Honors in 2013, and was selected by the PBS Newshour as one of five Agents for Social Change in 2013.