COMPASS

Many countries across the globe are engaged in efforts to promote a cashless society. In India, there is a strong top-down push by the government and the private sector for mobile payments. In this work, we examine the benefits and pitfalls people ...

The developing world has increasingly relied on data driven policies. Numerous development agencies have pushed for on-ground data collection to support the development work they pursue. Many governments have launched their own efforts for frequent ...

Mental illness is rapidly gaining recognition as a serious global challenge. Recent human-computer interaction (HCI) research has investigated mental health as a domain of concern, but is yet to venture into the Global South, where the problem exhibits ...

Based on 46 in-depth interviews with scientists, engineers, and CEOs, this document presents a list of concrete machine research problems, progress on which would directly benefit tech ventures in East Africa.

Recent work in networked systems has shown that using aerial imagery for farm monitoring can enable precision agriculture by lowering the cost and reducing the overhead of large scale sensor deployment. However, acquiring aerial imagery requires a drone,...

Fluctuations in food prices can cause distress among both consumers and producers, and are often exacerbated by trading networks especially in developing economies where marketplaces may not be operating under conditions of perfect competition for ...

Accurate weather data is important for improving agricultural productivity in developing countries. Unfortunately, weather sensors can fail for a wide variety of reasons. One approach to detecting failed sensors is to identify statistical anomalies in ...

Programs that reward people for referring their friends are increasingly being used to raise awareness about important topics. With a fixed budget for referral incentives, a natural goal for such referral programs is to maximize the number of people ...

Low levels of childhood literacy in global contexts may be mitigated by educational technologies, however, these technologies often rely on parents of sufficient literacy to effectively support their children. Given low levels of adult literacy in many ...

Tablet-based educational technologies provide a supplement to traditional classroom-based early literacy education, especially in regions with limited schooling resources. Prior work has probed how children generally interact with and learn from these ...

For people with disability living in low-income neighborhoods, access to technology is compounded by inaccessible designs and relative isolation in poverty. To bring together this segment of population, an NGO in India built Enable Vaani, a voice-based ...

Home health aides (HHAs) increasingly being used by adults with heart failure for long-term assistance and post-hospitalization care. Despite being heavily involved in numerous aspects of heart failure management, most HHAs have not received heart ...

The vision of sensor systems that collect critical and previously ungathered information about the world is often only realized when sensors, students, and subjects move outside the academic laboratory. However, deployments at even the smallest scales ...

High-quality roads are the scaffolding for prosperous and healthy societies, and accordingly garner huge investments from governments every year. However, current techniques to monitor those investments tend to be time-consuming, laborious, and ...

The road freight sector is responsible for a large and growing share of greenhouse gas emissions, but reliable data on the amount of freight that is moved on roads in many parts of the world are scarce. Many low- and middle-income countries have limited ...

Citizen science programs have been instrumental in boosting sustainability projects, large-scale scientific discovery, and crowd-sourced experimentation. Nevertheless, these programs witness challenges in submissions' quality, such as sampling bias ...

Little attention has been paid to how the infrastructural designs of crowd mapping platforms can result in limited participation and fewer contributions. To this end, we utilize a critical lens to study how OpenStreetMap's (OSM) techno-structure limits ...

Internet topology reflects economic and political constraints that change over time. Although autonomous systems (AS) topology has been measured and modeled for many years, focusing primarily on economic relationships, earlier studies have not ...

SMS fraud has become a growing concern for those working toward financial inclusion, however, it is often unclear how widespread such threats are in practice. This multi-method study investigates SMS fraud in Pakistan through identification and ...

This paper examines refugees' experiences with and perspectives on the digital identity systems used by humanitarian organizations to collect, manage, and share their personal data. Through a qualitative study with 198 refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and ...

While a growing body of literature in HCI is focusing on the initial needs of the refugees soon after their migration, most challenges associated with the long-term process of their integration with the host communities using technology have still ...

The parliament, media, and citizens, are key stakeholders in any democracy. We study their priorities pertaining to four economic policies in India - Demonetization, Aadhaar, GST, and Farmers' Protests - by examining the content of questions asked by ...

To keep housing affordable, the City of New York has implemented rent-stabilization policies to restrict the rate at which the rent of certain units can be increased every year. However, some landlords of these rent-stabilized units try to illegally ...

Models for socio-economic development are useful for planners to build appropriate policies. Such models are ideally constructed based on empirical data, and we take up the problem of working towards a district development model for India by using two ...

Disease surveillance is critical for mobilizing health care resources and deciding on isolation measures to contain the spread of infectious diseases. Because ground truth signals of rare and deadly diseases are sparse, it can be useful to enrich ...