Please join us tomorrow at the Change seminar where Nicki Dell will be
talking about her work designing and building mobile technologies for
low resource environments.
*When: *12pm Tuesday October 27
*Where: *CSE 203
*Abstract:*
The goal of my research is to design, build, and evaluate novel
computing systems that improve the lives of underserved populations in
low-income regions. As computing technologies become affordable and
accessible to diverse populations across the globe, it is critical that
we broaden the scope of our research to study the social, technical, and
infrastructural challenges faced by these diverse communities and build
systems that address problems in critical domains such as health care
and education. In this talk, I describe my general approach to building
technologies for underserved communities, including identifying
opportunities for technology, conducting formative research to fully
understand the space, developing novel technologies, iteratively testing
and deploying, evaluating with target populations, and handing off to
global development organizations for long-term sustainability. I focus
specifically on two examples of systems that I built to address
challenges faced by rural health workers: one that automatically
digitizes data from paper forms, and another that automatically
interprets diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. Both these systems
run on cheap, commercially available mobile devices and use computer
vision and machine-learning techniques to automate tasks that were
previously tedious or error prone. Through extensive evaluations with
target populations in Sub-Saharan Africa, I highlight the potential for
novel technological solutions to help new and diverse populations
address global challenges.
*Bio:*
Nicola Dell is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell
Tech in New York City. Her research interests are in information and
communication technologies for development (ICTD), human-computer
interaction (HCI), and mobile computing with a focus on designing and
evaluating systems that improve the lives of underserved populations in
low-income regions. Nicki recently completed her Ph.D. in Computer
Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle where
she was advised by Gaetano Borriello and Linda Shapiro. At UW CSE she
was a member of the Open Data Kit (ODK) research team and she also
helped to organize the Change group from 2011-2015.
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