Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can have dramatic impact on poverty alleviation for rural women and for achieving socio economic development goals. Rural women need to treat ICTs as an empowerment tool and a means to a living. The use of mobile communication devices and internet are changing the way agricultural activities are managed by farmers nowadays. Rural women’s lack of mobility and less hands-on computer experience might hinder women’s welfare and empowerment. This paper analyses how use of the telephony (both cellular and land line), internet and other ICTs can benefit rural women in educational, business and economic sector. Women in rural India and rural South Africa were marginalized partly due to their lack of ability in being vocal when it comes to empowering themselves using ICTs due to cultural norms in India, and apartheid in South Africa. Over the years, unlike other developing countries, the above-mentioned countries have its unique ICT projects meant for empowering rural women. This paper is driven from the authors’ commitment for rural development and rural women empowerment. It highlights different low-cost ICT initiatives and strategies taken by women’s organizations, various companies and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for rural women empowerment. The paper also highlights various factors influencing use of internet and mobile phone adoption by rural women. Various bottlenecks for the community projects, factors de-motivating the use of mobile phones and internet by rural women and possible solutions for these are also mentioned.

DesiCrew is a unique Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) initiative that provides high volume data related services at an affordable cost from rural areas across India. The model provides cost cutting alternatives to urban clients and new sources of income and employment to the villagers, by leveraging Internet technology. The DesiCrew central team in Chennai manages training of rural workforce, distribution and monitoring of work, quality control and client interaction all remotely. In this paper, we describe the Rural BPO model and one specific application, data entry of forms. We describe the software, Pegasus, developed for this purpose and explain the management of the distributed workforce.

At a high level of abstraction,’ social inclusion’ can be defined as the extent to which an individual or community can fully participate in society and control their own collective destiny. There are large disparities in this, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas of the world. Information and communication technologies designed to address this disparity must take into account the many barriers in the use of technology that these communities face. We define an ’inclusive technology’ as a technology which overcomes the barriers to using technology inherent within a given community and increases the opportunities available to that community. We propose a conceptual model and a set of heuristic measurements for examining the ’inclusiveness’ of a technology with respect to a given community, and illustrate their use by applying them to two real-world projects. By proposing this model and set of measurements, we hope to achieve a better understanding of’development projects’ and create a systematic process and a framework to assist software engineers in designing and evaluating software based services intended to reduce the Digital Divide.

Following worldwide tendencies, the patterns of usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Mexico are being influenced by increasing affordability. In this work we present the results of a study on the use and adoption of ICTs to support daily life in residential communities conducted in Tecamac, Mexico. There, neighbors were provided with computers and broadband internet access as part of the facilities. The study consists of analysis of interviews conducted in situ with members of the community. We mainly discuss incidents and situations beyond and around the use of technology such as the services neighbors need when moving in. This study provides some insights for the design and deployment of technology in real communities on a large scale.

Many Intelligent Tutoring Systems have been developed using different Artificial Intelligence techniques. In this paper we propose to use Reinforcement Learning for building an intelligent tutoring system to teach autistic students, who can’t communicate well with others. In reinforcement learning, a policy is updated for taking appropriate action to teach the student. The main advantage of using reinforcement learning is that, it eliminates the need for encoding pedagogical rules. Various issues in using reinforcement learning for intelligent tutoring systems are discussed in this paper.

This paper discusses active teaching and learning strategies that have been used in the TeNeT Online tutorials []. The focus of these tutorials is to enable rural students to pass the Standard X examination. The highlight of the tutorial is the use of the Question and Answer format. This problem-solving approach is evident in its three-pronged format: Learn, Practice and Test. Every module is based on questions and answers. In the learn mode, students learn the steps to answer a question and thus the concepts behind it. In the practice and evaluation modes, students can test their knowledge and understanding. This approach enhances the element of interactivity in these tutorials. Combined together, the elements of interactivity and problem-solving have made the tutorials a healthy supplement to conventional class rooms.

This paper reports on an investigation of how Awareness Systems can support communication between busy parents and young children at school. The study involved the deployment and test of a rudimentary awareness system so that surveying opinions and wishes regarding this type of technology would be grounded upon concrete experiences. The prototype was installed in a classroom for two weeks and connected five families with their children. Overall, parents appreciated receiving awareness information and did not experience it as an undesirable distraction. Both they and their children did not experience privacy problems. They raised concerns about the possibility of children becoming more dependent upon their parents from such technology and stated they would not want to receive information that they would not be able to react upon.

This is a case study of developing and using community knowledge management software. The context of the case study is a school. During a training workshop staff at a school was introduced to a community knowledge management system. The intent was for them to use it for lesson planning and discussions. Instead, they built a series of applications that they could use to make the school administration more efficient. These applications consisted of Admission, Library, Store and Personnel Management. This case study demonstrates that the ICT need for the next billion is to provide them with systems that they can customize and manage for their needs. An anticipated domino effect would be that they help customize applications for their neighbors’ needs, thereby narrowing a digital divide caused by the mystification of application development.

Awareness within work environments should not be seen limited to important work-related information, activities and relationships. Mediating somewhat casual and engaging encounters related to non-work issues could also lead to meaningful and pleasurable experiences. This paper explores a design approach to support playfully mediated social awareness within an academic environment. Using ethnographic exploration and understanding the current and aspired practices, we provide details of two broad (and some times overlapping) categories of interaction for supporting and enhancing playfully mediated social awareness amongst staff members: 1) Self-Reflections and 2) Casual Encounters. We implement these two categories of interaction in an intelligent, asynchronous, large screen display called , for the staff room of our computer science department. Panorama attempts to mediate noncritical, non-work related information about the staff-members in an engaging manner to enhance social awareness within the department. We particularly emphasize on the soft design issues like reflections, belonging, care, pleasure and playfulness utilized in our design approach. The result of a two-phase assessment study suggests that our conceptualization of social awareness and the Panorama application has the potential to be easily incorporated into our academic environment.

This paper presents critical issues concerning the community sensitive personal health information system in rural India, from an industrial design perspective. Literature in current ICT based applications, point to the fact that, current efforts related to personal health information dissemination have gained limited acceptance at community level among rural population. This is probably due to limited understanding of community sensitive information needs, societal structure and user beliefs of the rural community. To understand the underlying social values and users beliefs related to personal health information (PHI), a preliminary study including field interviews and review of currently deployed ICT projects was conducted. This paper presents the preliminary results, indicating several social and design challenges towards the development of a PHI system. Further the paper proposes a design framework, which includes design as a primary tool to shape existing user beliefs to positively influence the technology acceptance process of PHI system.