News and Blog
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30 June 2022
Lisa Orii was selected into the inaugural cohort of the Quad Fellowship as a representative from Japan. She was also awarded MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan 2022.
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04 May 2022
The Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) and ACM Computing and Sustainabile Societies (COMPASS) conferences will be hosted at UW this June!
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01 May 2022
Esther Jang, Spencer Sevilla, Firn Tieanklin, and Innocent Obi have been instructors at the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp over the past year!
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10 March 2022
In partnership with the Black Brilliance Research Project, API Chaya, and the Breakfast Group, we taught a 12-week Youth Digital Stewards program as a STEM educational initiative of the Seattle Community Network.
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10 March 2022
Matt Ziegler traveled to Ol Pejeta Conservancy to conduct a feasibility and needs-finding assessment for a potential anti-poaching hotline, sponsored by a grant from the UW Center for Environmental Forensic Science.
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15 February 2022
Waylon Brunette travelled to Kampala Uganda for launch of the ODK-X Cold Chain Information System (CCIS). This is a joint project between the ICTD Lab, PATH (a Seattle based NGO), and the Ugandan ministry of health. The system allows immunization workers to track the status of the country’s vaccine cold chain and to provide information to the immunization system to help manage national logistics. The system was built on the ODK-X mobile data management platform. Waylon went to Uganda to work on system integration and to participate in the national training for district level immunization managers.
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05 January 2022
Esther Jang, Matt Johnson, and Kurtis Heimerl led an undergraduate Community Networks Capstone. We had 4 great project teams developing a project to Teach The Internet Better, VPNize Routers, Visualize the NYC Mesh Network, and Survey The Coverage of the Seattle Community Network.
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24 October 2021
We won a NSF Smart & Connected Communities grant ($1.3 million over 3 years) for participatory design of community-focused applications on top of the Seattle Community Network! Our community partners include the Black Brilliance Research Project, the Tacoma Cooperative Network, and the Tacoma Public Libraries.
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23 October 2021
Philip Garrison and Esther Jang won best paper at CSCW! Check out their work: ‘“The Network Is an Excuse”: Hardware Maintenance Supporting Community’
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01 October 2021
Four new students are joining the ICTD lab this year! We’ll be joined by Lisa Orii, Innocent Obi, Nussara (Firn) Tieanklin and Ananditha Raghunath.
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28 July 2021
Matt Ziegler, Manasi Shah, Lauren Vreeken, and Zage Strassberg-Phillips won an honorable mention at ACM Computing and Sustainable Societies 2021! Their paper explores wildlife-tracking maps and environmental communication with EarthRanger, the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.
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12 July 2021
Sudheesh Singanamalla won a Best Student Paper award at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium for his work “Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH): A Practical Privacy Enhancement to DNS”
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01 June 2021
Kurtis Heimerl and Esther Jang taught another quarter of their Computing for Social Good course. This blog showcases speculative fiction writing from the course, which were used to investigate potential impacts of technology!
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04 January 2021
Emmanuel Azuh Mensah has joined the lab!
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04 December 2020
Allen School News ran a feature about Esther Jang, Kurtis Heimerl, and team’s efforts deploying community networks in the Puget Sound region.
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12 November 2020
We won a PIT-UN Grant to build distributed cellular infrastructure!
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14 June 2020
Matt Ziegler and team won best paper at ACM COMPASS 2020 for “Can Phones Build Relationships? A Case Study of a Kenyan Wildlife Conservancy’s Community Development”
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04 May 2020
Jenny Liang, an undergraduate working on community LTE, was recognized as one of the Husky 100.
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01 April 2020
Tim Althoff, See-Kiong Ng and Kurtis Heimerl were awarded an NSF EAGER grant to study social good with Grab in Southeast Asia. Thanks NSF!
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11 November 2019
Esther Jang and team won a diversity and inclusion award for “Trust and Technology Repair Infrastructures in the Remote Rural Philippines: Navigating Urban-Rural Seams” at CSCW 2019.
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28 October 2019
Galen Weld (w/ Esther Jang and team) won the best student paper award for “Deep Learning for Automatically Detecting Sidewalk Accessibility Problems Using Streetscape Imagery ” at ASSETS 2019.
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29 May 2019
ISIF Asia recently published a blog post about our work building a Community LTE network in Papua. Read more about it here!
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02 April 2019
Two of our fantastic undergrad researchers, Pat Kosakanchit and Rowan Phipps, both earned a Honorable Mention from the Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards! Congratulations Pat and Rowan!
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02 April 2019
Lab members Richard Anderson and Matt Ziegler won a UW EarthLab Innovation Grant with the Vogt lab. The project will investigate collaborative digital tools for analyzing and communicating Indigenous environmental knowledge.
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26 February 2019
Congratulations to Kurtis and Matt J. on winning the NSDI’19 Community Award in collaboration with Shaddi Hasan (UC Berkeley), Mary Claire Barela (UP Diliman), and Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley). More information can be found here via USENIX.
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12 February 2019
ICTD PhD students Esther Jang and Philip Garrison traveled to rural villages in Oaxaca, Mexico and Quintana, Argentina to study the dynamics of community management and governance of community wireless mesh and cellular networks. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Michael Lithgow of Athabasca University and Nicolas Pace from Altermundi and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC).
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05 February 2019
ICTD Lab members Spencer Sevilla, Esther Jang, and Pat Kosakanchit went to Oaxaca, Mexico to deploy a Community LTE (CoLTE) network in collaboration with local telecommunications organizations Rhizomatica and Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias (TIC). We deployed a test network in the town of Santa Inez, Oaxaca.
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10 January 2019
The ICTD research group visited Ahmedabad where Matt Ziegler presented his work on the ecosystems surrounding price information systems. The paper is Fresh Insights: User Research Towards a Market Information Service for Bihari Vegetable Farmers. Take a look!
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27 September 2018
Spencer and Matt recently wrote a post on the Internet Society’s blog about their work in Papua.
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18 May 2018
The ICTD lab has six papers appearing in the ACM Compass Conference, great work everybody! The papers describe Rowan’s study of security vulnerabilities in ThinSims, Aditya and Shri’s overview of security and privacy, Samia’s work on Gender and Financial Services in Pakistan, and Sarah’s study of mobile money in Ghana, Trevor’s work on SMS for health messaging, and (Google) Sam’s work on content distribution. The papers are:
- Male Partner Engagement in Family Planning SMS Conversations at Kenyan Health Clinics, Trevor Perrier (University of Washington), Elizabeth Harrington (University of Washington), Keshet Ronen (University of Washington), Jennifer Unger (University of Washington), John Kinuthia (University of Washington), Grace John-Stewart (University of Washington), Richard Anderson (University of Washington)
- Siskin: Leveraging the Browser to Share Web Content in Disconnected Environments, Samuel Sudar (Google, Inc), Matt Welsh (Google, Inc), Richard Anderson (University of Washington)
- What would you add?: A Qualitative Exploration of Mobile Money in Ghana,
Sarah Yu (University of Washington), Samia Ibtasam (University of Washington) - Gender and Financial Inclusion in Pakistan, Samia Ibtasam (University of Washington), Lubna Razaq (Information Technology University), Haider W. Anwar (Northeastern University), Hamid Mehmood (Information Technology University), Kushal Shah (University of Washington), Jennifer Webster (University of Washington), Neha Kumar (Georgia Institute of Technology), Richard Anderson (University of Washington)
- ThinSIM-based Attacks on Mobile Money Systems, Rowan Phipps (University of Washington), Shrirang Mare (University of Washington), Peter Ney (University of Washington), Jennifer Rose Webster (University of Washington), Kurtis Heimerl (University of Washington)
- Examining Security and Privacy Research in Developing Regions, Aditya Vashistha (University of Washington), Richard Anderson (University of Washington), Shrirang Mare (University of Washington)
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07 May 2018
Check out our new blog!
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01 April 2018
Second year graduate student Matt Johnson and incoming graduate student Matt Ziegler have both been awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship awards. See the school’s blog post for more details.
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22 February 2018
Graduate student Esther Jang and postdoctoral researcher Spencer Sevilla have both won awards in the Mozilla/NSF’s Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society (WINS) Challenges. Esther’s rural repair work won an honorable mention in the “Smart Community Networks” while Spencer won a third-place position in the “Off-the-Grid Internet”. Both will compete for the grand prize later this year. See the Mozilla site for more details.
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07 February 2018
The paper Computer security for data collection technologies with lead authors Camille Cobb and Sam Sudar has just been published in the Development Engineering journal. The work, a collaboration between computer security and ICTD researchers, explores security and privacy attitudes, practices, and needs within organizations that use Open Data Kit (ODK), a prominent digital data collection platform.
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18 January 2018
Congratulations Kurtis!
Kurtis Heimerl recognized with College of Engineering Diamond Award for Early Career Achievement for work on cellular connectivity for remote regions. See the school’s blog post for details.
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22 December 2017
The ICTD Lab had five papers accepted at CHI! Fantastic work everybody.
- eKichabi: Information Access through Basic Mobile Phones in Rural Tanzania, Galen Weld, Trevor Perrier et al.
- BSpeak: An Accessible Voice-based Crowdsourcing Marketplace for Low-Income Blind People, Aditya Vashistha et al.
- "You Can Always Do Better!" The Impact of Social Proof on Participant Response Bias, Aditya Vashistha et al.
- "Only if you use English you will get to more things": Using Smartphones to Navigate Multilingualism, Naveena Karusala, Aditya Vishwanath, Aditya Vashistha, Sunita Kumar and Neha Kumar
- Crowdsourcing Rural Network Maintenance and Repair via Network Messaging Esther Jang, Mary Claire Barela, Matt Johnson, Philip Martinez, Cedric Festin, Margaret Lynn, Josephine Dionisio, Kurtis Heimerl
Jennifer Webster and Ruth Anderson will offer a graduate course, CSE 599, Gender in ICTD & HCI Research Winter 2018. THe course meets Monday and Wednesdays 3:30-4:50 pm.
This graduate seminar explores the topic of gender as related to computer science research, especially in the fields of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Students will engage in close readings of foundational texts on gender, as well as the emerging ICTD and HCI literature that uses gender analysis as a framework for research in both the West and in resource-constrained regions of the world. Through discussion and written assignments students will build a strong foundation for incorporating gender analysis into their research. They will also be able to more effectively evaluate the current work being conducted in the fields of ICTD and HCI as related to gender. Some of the topics under consideration will include gender as related to feminist HCI, design, health and safety, financial services, and mobile technologies and connectivity.
Welcome new ICTD students! We are very happy to have Naveena Karusala from Georgia Tech and Philip Garrison from CMU via UNU join the research lab.
Open Data Kit 2.0 released! See the ODK forum post for details.
Congratulations Sam Sudar on successfully defending his PhD Thesis “Leveraging the Mobile Web in Resource-Constrainted Environments.”
Waylon Brunette presented his paper Open Data Kit 2.0: A Services-Based Application Framework for Disconnected Data Management at this years Mobisys conference. The paper describes experiences building, deploying, and refining the Open Data Kit (ODK) 2.0 tool suite. ODK 2.0 is a modular application framework that facilitates organizations with limited technical capacity to build application-specific information services for use in disconnected environments
Ph.D. student Aditya Vashistha has earned the 2017 Graduate Student Research Award from the UW College of Engineering. Vashistha, who is advised by professor Richard Anderson in the Information & Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, earned the award for his work on social media technologies for the developing world. See the Computer Science and Engineering news article for more information.
The ICTD group takes to the pitch for a first ever cricket match!
Aditya Vashistha, Pooja Sethi, and Richard Anderson wins Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2017 for their paper titled “Respeak: A Voice-based, Crowed-powered Speech Transcription System.”
Fahad Pervaiz and Samia Ibtasam presented papers at the 2016 ACM Dev conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Fahad presented work on evaluating security challenges for mobile money in the developing world, and Samia presented work, done at ITU prior to her arrival at UW on Immunization Information Systems. Trevor Perrier presented a poster on the UW-Pesa DemoLab project.
Prof. Umar Saif, the Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board and the Vice Chancellor of ITU Pakistan, will be giving a Distinguished Lecture, Designing Technology for the Other 5 Billion, in the UW Computer Science and Engineering department on Tuesday, November 15, 2016 at 3:30 PM in EEB-105. This talk is open to the public. For more information see the UW Distinguished Lecture announcement.
We are excited to welcome new grads in ICTD lab: Samia Ibtasam, Esther Jang, and Matt Johnson! Samia will be working with Richard Anderson, and Esther and Matt will be working with Kurtis Heimerl.
Welcome Shrirang! Shrirang Mare has joined UW CSE as post doc in ICTD and Security working on the BMGF sponsored Digital Financial Services project. Shrirang Mare received his PhD from Dartmouth College, Hanover where he developed authentication techniques for personal computing devices (desktops and smartphones) levaraging wrist wearables. Before Dartmouth he worked at IBM India for two years and at Indian Institue of Science (IISc), Bangalore for one year. He received his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from BITS-Pilani, India in 2006. He is interested in security and privacy issues in healthcare and digital financial services, and HCI. His current research focuses on usable authentication methods for smartphones.
A paper, Let’s talk money: Evaluating the security challenges of mobile money in the developing world has been accepted for publication at the 2016 ACM Dev conference. The paper was authored by Sam Castle, Fahad Pervaiz, Galen Weld, Franziska Roesner and Richard Anderson. The paper assesses security vulenerabilities for Android mobile money applications and reports on interviews of software developers to give insights into current practices.
Fahad Pervaiz is a co-author on a paper on dengue surveillance in Pakistan appearing in Science Advances. The paper shows how calling patterns to a hotline can help in forecasting dengue outbreaks. The work was led by Lakshmi Subramanian of NYU and involved collaborators at NYU, University of Washington, and Information Technology University, Pakistan. See the UW CSE News posting for more information.
A big showing by UW at the 2016 ICTD Conference in Ann Arbor. The UW contingent had three papers, presented by Sam Sudar, Aditya Vashista, and Genevieve Gebhart, and two demos, presented by Trevor Perrier and Waylon Brunette. A poster displayed some interesting statistics on UW prominence in publishing at ICTD and Dev.
UW senior Krittika D’Silva has been named a 2016 Gates Cambridge Scholar, one of the most prestigious international scholarships in the world. D’Silva, who will graduate from the UW this June with a degree in computer engineering and bioengineering, will pursue her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Cambridge’s Jesus College starting in the fall. Krittika collaborated with the late CSE professor Gaetano Borriello and CSE Ph.D. alum Nicki Dell on the development of mobile health apps for use in low-resource settings.
Two full papers from the research group will appear at ICTD, a paper studying ODK Security by Camille Cobb and Sam Sudar, and a paper studying the spread of mobile videos in Projecting Health by Aditya Vashistha.
Aditya Vashistha gets married! Congratulations. Lillian de Greef, Waylon Brunette, and Richard Anderson travelled to Jaipur to attend the wedding.
UW CSE will form a Digital Financial Services Research Group with support from the Gates Foundation. This effort will be led by Richard Anderson in Computer Science and Engineering, and Josh Blumenstock in the Information School.
Aditya Vashistha wins 2016-17 Facebook Graduate Fellowship. More details here!
Aditya Vashistha wins best student paper at ASSETS 2015 for his paper “Social Media Platforms for Low-income Blind People in India”
The ICTD lab co-organized the Gaetano Borriello Feet on the Ground Humanitarian Symposium at this year’s GHTC conference.
Three papers from our lab got accepted in ACM DEV.
Aditya Vashistha, in collaboration with IIT Bombay, won a USD 70,000 grant by the government of Maharashtra.
Aditya’s paper, Social Media Platforms for Low-Income Blind People in India, is accepted at ASSETS 2015.
Aditya’s paper, The Whodunit Challenge: Mobilizing the Crowd in India, is accepted at INTERACT 2015.
Aditya Vashistha wins best student paper award at CHI 2015 for his paper “Sangeet Swara: A Community-Moderated Voice Forum in Rural India”.