IT Enablement for Developing Regions. Pradipta De SUNY Korea

Transcription

1 IT Enablement for Developing Regions Pradipta De SUNY Korea

2 Outline Key Statistics Mobile Market Indicators Mobile Technology Enablers From different perspectives: Outlook economic, educational, social empowerment, information flow, e-governance An Inter-disciplinary future?

3 Key Statistics influencing Mobile Technology in Developing Regions

4 Few definitions and facts Smartphones are common in developed economies, but multimedia phones and feature phones are still very popular in many countries 80% of phones in India are feature phones Use of smartphone provides higher functionality, but demands higher data usage and bandwidth Cost of data plans and missing infrastructure in many countries does not help in adoption of smartphones

5 Mobile Phone Usage

6 Gender and Age Bias in phone usage Australia has the least gender bias in phone usage. In India, feature phones are preferred choice among most, and of them the women prefer feature phones

7 Cost of Mobile Service? For India, the fairly high cost of data plans leads consumers to use pre-paid plans, or use free Wi-Fi, if possible.

8 Broadband Connectivity Akamai is the largest globally distributed Internet content provider Every quarter Akamai publishes a report called The State of the Internet Definition: High Broadband > 10 Mbps, Broadband > 4 Mbps Broadband connectivity in India lags behind most countries Vietnam, Philippines, China also lag in broadband connectivity

9 In India, Mobile usage is rising

10 Use of Financial Services In India, only 240 million out of 1.2 billion have access to banking facilities Worldwide: 2.5 billion of adults do not have access to banks Source:

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12 Enabling Technologies

13 Economic Mobile Money Beam Money: startup by Anand Srivastava focuses on unbanked population of India Helping migrant workers save and send money bkash in Bangladesh (operated by BRAC) MPESA in Kenya: highest mobile money transactions by volume of transactions Many more across the world

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15 Empowering Semi-literate and Non-literate Users SMS-based Mobile Payments Mobile Payments without Typing A Mobile Payment system where users are not required to type in multiple information, like authentication pin, amount to pay, merchant id.

16 Educational Nickolas Negroponte One laptop per child project Sugato Mitra: hole in the wall Taking education to the unschooled Can a child learn on his own without guidance Theme of minimally invasive education

17 Social Empowerment Spoken Web: connecting people using voice based websites Spoken Web helps people create voice sites using a simple telephone, mobile or landline. Avaaj Otalo: Farmer Information Exchange (NGO) Voice Based Employment Exchange (Govt)

18 E-governance National E-Governance Plan (NeGP) is building the Framework for Mobile Governance Provide access to public services from mobile devices UID or Aadhar: Unique Identification can enable several services Enables biometric authentication Can be used in govt welfare programs Financial inclusion and electronic payments Source:

19 Information Access Slow growth of broadband connectivity leads to content-connectivity gap In rural areas, data connectivity is largely absent SMS and voice is the prevalent mode of usage SMS is used as the main data channel for information dissemination

20 Information Access SMS alone can do a lot!! GoogleSMS, SMSFind: search text by sending SMS to search portals

21 Bridging the Digital Divide KioskNet: Rural Internet Kiosks which provide basic internet services to the poorer sections of the society with low/no access to broadband services RuralNet: A project to connect villages using long range WiFi

22 Outlook

23 Inter-disciplinary Approaches? Computational Social Science Application of computational approaches to social sciences Recently, a large body of literature relates to analysis of Twitter, Facebook, other online groups leading to re-investigation of hypothesis and claims from social sciences Point to ponder? Computer scientists or technologists are not experts on social science methodologies Often the results derived are mathematically or computationally interesting, but carry low impact From Nature (Vol 488, Issue 7412) Computational social science: Making the links, Jim Giles From s to social networks, the digital traces left by life in the modern world are transforming social science.

24 Inter-disciplinary Approaches? Affective Computing The study and development of systems that can recognize, interpret, analyze human affect (emotional states or behavioural patterns) Smartphones has opened a new non-intrusive way of studying human beings But the affective computing apps are often heavily influenced by technologists Inter-disciplinary approach can help design what is really important Behavioural Change Interference (BCI) work from University of Cambridge a cross disciplinary approach to cure addictions using technology From Sociological Methods Research 2009; 37; 426 Smartphones: An Emerging Tool for Social Scientists, Mika Raento, Antti Oulasvirta and Nathan Eagle We foresee a promising avenue for research utilizing smartphones in various fields in the social sciences, but particularly sociology, social psychology, urban studies, technology assessment, and media studies.

25 Sources Akamai The State of the Internet Report, KioskNet: Daknet: Mary Meeker, Liang Wu, 2013 Internet Trends, internet-trends Nielsen Report, The Mobile Consumer: A Global Snapshot, Feb Nielsen Global Smartphone Insights, first half of 2012; Nielsen Mobile Insights, 2012 Unique Identification Authority of India, Aadhar Enabled Service Delivery, Feb 2012

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