Next Billions

Five of the the six billion people on Earth do not have access to computing technology. But that’s changing. In Africa, for example, mobile phone subscribers jumped from 10 million to 400 million between 2004 and 2009. What does it mean to make software that specifically targets these markets? Can software empower the poor in meaningful ways? We believe social computing has a powerful role to play in the developing world, but tapping that power will require a radical rethink of how we design, build, and profit.

Projects

IBM Mobile Social Media Discussion – a mobile audio visual discussion system for low literacy populations

Community Resource Messenger – a mobile phone system that creates more effective linkage between the homeless and their case workers

Spoken Web Social Navigation – a collaborative filtering system that helps farmers in rural India navigate to  information about crops, pesticides, government subsidies, etc. provided by fellow farmers on the Spoken Web.

Related SCG Links

Publications

Farrell, R.G., Das, R., and Rajput, N. “Understanding Social Navigation through the Spoken Web: Latent Variable Models of IVR Usage by Rural Farmers in Gururat, India“, AAAI Spring Symposium on AI for Development, 2010.

Farrell, R. G., Danis, C. M., Erickson, T., Ellis, J. B., Christensen, J. E. Bailey, M. and Kellogg, W. A. A Picture and a Thousand Worlds: Visual Scaffolding for the Developing World. International Journal of Handheld Computing Research. To appear, 2010.

Catalina Danis, Mark Bailey, Jim Christensen, Jason Ellis, Thomas Erickson, Robert Farrell, Wendy A. Kellogg. “Mobile Applications for the Next Billions: A Social Computing Perspective.” Position paper for Human-Centered Computing in International Development (HCI4D) at ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2009.

Catalina Danis, Mark Bailey, Jim Christensen, Jason Ellis, Thomas Erickson,Christine Halverson, and Wendy A. Kellogg. “Social Computing Applications for the Next Billion Users.” Position paper for Designing Future Mobile Software for Underserved Users Workshop at ACM CSCW 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, November 2008.

Contact

Jason Ellis // jasone (at) us.ibm.com