Mobile papers at ICTD2007
December 18th, 2007MSR was one of the Platinum sponsors for ICTD2007—the 2nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development— which wrapped up this weekend (Dec 15-16) in Bangalore. It was a great program, and it was a treat to welcome so many researchers from around the world to Bangalore.
Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., & Toyama, K. (2007). Warana Unwired: Mobile Phones replacing PCs in a rural sugarcane cooperative. This is a project by some of my MSRI colleagues, in which an existing (and successful) agricultural information system was updated, streamlined, and extended via mobile phones. The upshot has been greater convenience at lower cost to farmers in the cooperative. While we’re waiting for the papers to go live, some details on Warana Unwired are available here.
Mpoeleng, D., Anderson, G., Asare, S., Ayalew, Y., Garg, D., Gopolang, B., et al. (2007). Towards a Bilingual SMS Parser for HIV/AIDS Information Retrieval in Botswana. This poster is an example of the kind of detailed, patient work that, in the long run, helps make mobile systems flexible and powerful, without sacrificing the appearance (to users) of intelligence, awareness, and magic. Can an SMS database ‘understand’ both English and Setswana? If it is going to be helpful in Botswana, it had better do so.
Other researchers tackled broader issues of wirelesses and/or mobility (e.g., store and forward, mesh networks interactive radio), or mentioned mobiles as part of a discussion of user centered design. I’ll update these links when the papers go live. I expect we’ll see more mobile-related papers in future conferences.
