overview

The Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India seeks to address the needs and aspirations of people in emerging-market countries, including those who are increasingly consuming computing technologies and services, as well as those for whom access to computing technologies remains largely out of reach.

The research in this group consists of both technical and social-science research. We do work in the areas of ethnography, sociology, political science, and economics, all of which help understand the social context of technology, and we also do technical research in hardware and software to devise solutions that are designed for emerging and underserved markets, both in rural and urban environments.

Our work is aligned with Microsoft's Unlimited Potential Group, although our emphasis is on rigorous research and exploratory pilots, rather than product, business, or partner development.

highlights

• Recent press coverage : New York Times, Forbes, CNET
• The Stockholm Challenge : Congratulations to Digital Green, which won the 2008 Stockholm Challenge Award, in the "Culture" category! Rikin Gandhi was in Stockholm to accept the award. 
• ACM Lawler Award : Congratulations to Randy Wang, who won the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award, for co-founding Digital StudyHall!
• MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning : The MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media & Learning awarded a grant to the "Experiment in Hand-held Philanthropy" project with which we are collaborating.
• Bill Gates has been speaking about our work recently, as his attention moves increasingly toward creative capitalism and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
  • World Economic Forum (Davos; January 24, 2008)
  • College Tour 2008, at Stanford (Stanford University; February 19, 2008))
• Design for the Elastic Mind at the MOMA : The Museum of Modern Art's Design for the Elastic Mind exhibit features our Text-Free User Interfaces work online.
• ICTD2007 : We co-hosted the Second IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Development, in Bangalore on December 15-16, 2007. Please see the conference website for more information.
• O'Reilly ETech 2008 : An overview on our work at the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, March 5, 2008. .
• A collection of presentations from April, 2007(more up-to-date versions may be available in project links below)

people

(*) Group contact: kentoy(a)microsoft.com

projects

:: Digital Green: Digital Green seeks to disseminate targeted agricultural education to small and marginal farmers through digital video. The system sustains relevancy in a community by developing a framework for participatory learning. We digitally record progressive farmers and experts, train local extension staff, and motivate other farmers to improve their practices by narrowcasting relevant content.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Rikin Gandhi, Rajesh Veeraraghavan,Kentaro Toyama, Randolph Wang

::Text-Free User Interface: The goal of the Text-Free User Interfaces for Non-literate and Semi-literate users is to devise and implement design principles such that a non-literate person can, at first contact with a PC, immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no assistance. Through extensive ethnographic study in Bangalore slums, we arrived at several design principles that could apply to many non-literate groups new to computer use.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Indrani Medhi,Kentaro Toyama, Archana Prasad

:: Research on Rural PC Kiosks: Rural PC kiosks seek to address socio-economic needs of rural villages through public, shared-access PCs. These projects have gained worldwide attention in development circles. Through site visits, longitudinal studies, and surveys, we are trying to understand how kiosk operators operate, what impact kiosks have on their communities, and how technology or policy changes could support these projects.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Kentaro Toyama, Karishma Kiri, Deepak Menon, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Aishwarya Ratan, Rajesh Veeraraghavan

:: Split-screen UI for Small Businesses: A project allowing two people to work simultaneously on the same PC, in situations where they can’t buy more PCs. This is done by splitting the screen and displaying two independent sessions simultaneously. Each session interacts with separate keyboard and mouse, and makes it seem effectively as if there are two computers in one, for only a small incremental hardware cost (~$20 for a set of mice and keyboards).
More about this project >>

> People involved: Udai Singh Pawar,Kentaro Toyama

::Warana Unwired: This is an experiment to test if PC kiosks set up for an agriculture cooperative can be successfully replaced with a less expensive mobile-phone system. The underlying technology involves a PC converted to a SMS gateway and client devices are cheap SMS enabled mobile phones. For the last six months a pilot test is running in 7 villages at Warana, Maharashtra.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Rajesh Veeraraghavan,Kentaro Toyama, Vibhore Goyal, Sean Blagsvedt

:: Featherweight Computing: The cost of an Internet-connected computer may be too high for some communities to sustain. We are investigating “featherweight” devices with inexpensive electronics that fulfill a focused function, including electronic books to deliver educational material.


> People involved: Kentaro Toyama

:: Financial Service Delivery to the Poor and Technology: We are conducting primary research on understanding the ways in which low-income households access and use financial services from formal and informal providers, including microfinance providers. We are investigating ways in which the use of technological solutions to enable various aspects of financial service delivery can result in more cost-effective operations and cheaper, better quality finance for the poor.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Aishwarya Ratan, Sean Blagsvedt, Kentaro Toyama, Jonathan Donner, Indrani Medhi, Rajesh Veeraraghavan

 :: Information Environment of Micro-enterprises:Businesses with five or fewer employees, called micro-enterprises, support many rural and urban households in developing nations. MSR India is conducting qualitative and quantitative research to explore the overall information and communication behaviors of micro-enterprises.
More about this project >>

> People involved:Jonathan Donner

:: MultiPoint: In our research on education, we noted that in a large number of schools in developing nations, a single computer is shared by multiple children, often with ratios of as many as 5-10 children to a PC. MultiPoint is a technology and an associated design paradigm that provides a separate mouse to each child around a shared computer, each with a separate cursor on screen. Our studies with using this technology in overcrowded poor schools in India indicate increased educational value, greater engagement, and social learning accruing to children using multipoint in a single shared PC.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Udai Singh Pawar, Kentaro Toyama

> Additional Links: Click here for Joyojeet's investigation of rural computer programs supported by the Azim Premji Foundation.

:: Digital StudyHall: We supported Digital StudyHall in its first three years of research and operation. DSH is an educational project that seeks to help poor children in slum and rural schools in India. Technically, it's Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa. We digitally record classes by good teachers, send them by post, store them in a large distributed database, and use "mediation-based pedagogy" to train village teachers and allow poor kids to teach themselves.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Randy Wang, Paul Javid

:: Social Enterprises for the Poor: Social Enterprises is a project that seeks to provide small start-up businesses to the poor and homeless in India. Social Enterprises partners with non-profits in Calcutta to (1) identify and evaluate candidates' likelihood of success, (2) provide them with the necessary training through a video database of job skills, and (3) connect them with an online and off-line social and digital network of "mentors," who provide training, and "donors," who provide the initial start-up capital.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Paul Javid

:: Mapping Household Well-Being and Socio-Economic Mobility: We are developing a statistical method to identify groups of households that exhibit similar combinations of socio-economic-cultural characteristics (e.g., assets owned, level of education, type of occupation, etc.) in society. Knowing these “well-being” clusters will enable us to identify particular mobility factors separating one cluster of well-being from another, thereby producing a map of upward mobility from various levels of poverty.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Aishwarya Ratan, Kentaro Toyama, Nimmi Rangaswamy

:: Digital Mixing in Photography in Low-Income Settings: There is an increasing occurrence of people paying significant amounts for Photoshop-based image editing services - to modify images, to replace backgrounds, add characters such as film stars, or even attempt to change ‘realities’, overall termed ‘mixing’. We are looking at some aspects how digital technology is affecting the consumer market for photography.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Nimmi Rangaswamy, Udai Singh Pawar

:: Health Worker Project: The goal of this project is to understand the role of computing technology to aid health workers in effective health information gathering and transmitting process. We are currently working with preventive and social medicine centers and health workers, doing ethnography on field; studying existing information and communication materials; checking the possibility of designing innovative tools for collecting health information.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Indrani Medhi, Kentaro Toyama, Archana Prasad

:: Ethnographic Study of Public and Shared-access PCs: Shared access centres for computers like cyber cafés and rural PC kiosks are main access points for a majority in India. Through site visits, longitudinal studies, and surveys, we are trying to understand how café and kiosk operators manage, adapt and sustain services in particular social contexts.
More about this project >>

> People involved: Nimmi Rangaswamy

:: Domestic Media Consumption amongst Urban Indian Middle India: Through an ethnographic study of the “middle class” in emerging markets like India, we are hoping to understand patterns of usage of domestic media focusing on the home computer and the ‘shared’ mobile phone.
More about this project >>


> People involved: Nimmi Rangaswamy

selected papers

Donner, Jonathan., Rangaswamy, N., Steenson, M. W., & Wei, C. (in press). "Express yourself" / "Stay together": Tensions surrounding mobile communication in the middle-class Indian family. In J. Katz (Ed.), Handbook of mobile communication studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Medhi, I. and Kuriyan, R. (2007) “Text-Free UI: Prospects for Social Inclusion.” International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing countries, May 2007, Brazil.

Pawar, U.S., Pal, J., Gupta, R., and Toyama, K. (2007). “Multiple Mice for Retention Tasks in Disadvantaged Schools.” Proc. of CHI 2007, ACM Press.

Rangaswamy, N. (2007). The Aspirational PC: Home Computers and Indian Middle class Domesticity, 9th International Workshop on Internationalization of Products and Systems, June 2007, Merida, Mexico.

Ratan, Aishwarya. (2007). “Lessons from Low-income Workers in Bangalore on the Value of Information Technology.” Paper presented at the Conference on Living the Information Society: The Impact of ICT on People, Work, and Communities in Asia, April 23-24, Manila, Philippines.

Bailur, S. (2006) "Using Stakeholder Theory to Analyze Telecentre Projects." Information Technology and International Development, 3 (3), pp.61-80.

Donner, Jonathan. (2006). “The use of mobile phones by microentrepreneurs in Kigali, Rwanda: Changes to social and business networks.” Information Technologies and International Development 3 (2): 3-19.

Kuriyan, R. Toyama, K. and Ray,I. (2006). “Integrating Social Development and Financial Sustainability: The Challenges of Rural Computer Kiosks in Kerala.” International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, May 2006, Berkeley, California.

Medhi, I., Sagar, A. and Toyama, K. (2006). “Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users.” International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, May 2006, Berkeley, USA.*
*(Selected for the best paper edition of the ITID-Information Technologies and International Development journal)

Pawar, U. S., Pal, J., and Toyama, K. (2006). “Multiple mice for computers in education in developing countries.” International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, May 2006, Berkeley, USA.

Veeraraghavan, R., Singh, G., Toyama, K. and Menon, D. (2006). “Kiosk Usage Measurement using a Software Logging Tool.” Poster at International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, May 2006, Berkeley, USA.