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TECHNOLOGY FOR EMERGING MARKETS
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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.
:: RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
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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.
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ACM Lawler Award
: Congratulations to Randy Wang, who won the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award, for co-founding Digital StudyHall!
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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.
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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))
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Design for the Elastic Mind at MoMA
: The Museum of Modern Art's Design for the Elastic Mind exhibit features our Text-Free User Interfaces work online.
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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.
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O'Reilly ETech 2008
: An overview on our work at the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, March 5, 2008. .
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A collection of presentations from April, 2007
(more up-to-date versions may be available in project links below)
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people
Core Team:
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Principal
Researcher / Group Lead |
Researcher |
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Associate Researcher |
Post-Doc
Researcher |
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Past and Current
Interns:
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Aman
Sagar
Abhishek B.
Bharathi Pitti
Carol Savia Peters
Carolyn Wei
Chandima Patabandhige
Janaki Srinivasan
Joyojeet Pal
Mahesh Gogineni |
Molly Steenson
Naga Yasodhar
Rahul Gupta
Rajkumar Parihar
Renee Kuriyan
Russell Kondaveti
Savita Bailur
Shabnam Aggarwal
U. Vasudha |
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projects
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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
> Press:
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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
> Links:
Click here for more about the project. |
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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
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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
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:: 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.
More about this project >>
> People involved:
Kentaro Toyama |
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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.
> Press:
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:: Digital StudyHall:
The Digital StudyHall 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
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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
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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
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ViVoTe Mail
(Video,
Voice and Text Email):
ViVoTe Mail is designed to enable and empower
illiterate users and computer novices to email
their loved ones with ease. The UI is based on
principles derived from previous research at
MSRI, and allows for text-free navigation. Using
advanced GUI options that Avalon provides,
ViVoTe Mail uses a combination of graphics,
animation and voice assistance to aid users to
be completely self-reliant while using the
application. It is specifically customized to an
Indian audience and uses the metaphor of a local
postman who traditionally delivers, read out and
writes replies for people. We aim to derive
design principles of text-free communication
applications.
More about this project >>
> People involved:
Archana Prasad,
Kentaro Toyama,
Indrani Medhi, Vibhore Goyal, Sean
Blagsvedt |
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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.
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Click here for the full list of
papers
press
>> Click
here to go to the
Press
section
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