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
<http://www.literacybridge.org/>.
*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.
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