September 28, 2010 - Kentaro Toyama, University of California at Berkeley

Title: Computing for Global Development

Abstract:
How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? Can you keep five rural schoolchildren from fighting over one PC? What value is computing technology to a farmer earning a dollar a day? These kinds of questions are asked by the technical side of an multidisciplinary field called "information and communication technology for development" (ICT4D), in the expectation that computing and communication technologies can contribute to the socio-economic development of the world's poorest communities.

In this talk, I'll discuss the potential, as well as the limitations, of computer science as a research field to contribute to global development. The context will be MultiPoint, where multiple mice plugged into a single PC allows multiple children to interact, thus reducing the per-child cost of PCs in schools.