Symposium examines computing needs of global communities

Robert Nesmith
Communications & Marketing

The School of Interactive Computing (SIC) and the GVU Center hosted roughly 150 attendees during the premier Computing at the Margins Symposium, held May 6 and 7 at the Tech Square Research Building.

	In 2008, computer science students and Assistant Professor Michael Best traveled to Liberia to roll out a mobile video-share system for the Truth and Reconciliation Council. Students loaded the system onto the back of a standard SUV with augmented battery power and recorded testimonies of atrocities and corruption, even in the country’s most remote areas.

SIC and GVU launched the symposium under a research agenda to better understand the technology needs of under-served communities and to advance new technologies, aimed at overcoming the digital divide. The four goals of this newly launched program are for the agenda to have an impact on communities, education, computing research and the business of computing.

Symposium speakers and panelists addressed this “digital divide” and were comprised of academic researchers and experts developing technology for the developing world, ubiquitous computing and industry representatives. Faculty members participating from Tech included International Affairs and SIC Assistant Professor Michael L. Best, SIC Associate Professor W. Keith Edwards, College of Computing Associate Dean Rebecca Grinter and School of Computer Science Chair Ellen Zegura. Laurence Konmla Bropleh, minister of Information, Culture and Tourism for the Republic of Liberia, delivered the symposium’s keynote address.

“Our goal had been for the symposium to bring together people from a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives in an environment that could facilitate rich discussions around the role that technological innovation has to play in social impact,” said College of Computing and GVU Center Associate Professor Keith Edwards. “[The 150 attendees] represented academia, industry, major foundations, non-governmental organizations and governments.”

Held over two days, four sessions addressed the basic needs of under-served and developing communities, such as scarcity, nomadicity, diversity and human capacity. All of these issues formed the framework for establishing new processes for producing and designing technology for the rest of the world.

	College of Computing Associate Professor Keith Edwards

“One of the key pieces of feedback that I heard over and over was the value of bringing different perspectives to the table—from the practitioners on the ground and organizations that fund major initiatives to academic researchers exploring new ways to address social impact through innovation,” Edwards said. “Very few events have pulled together this kind of cross section.”

Computing at the Margins rose from the College’s Computing for Good (C4G) initiative, which centers on “applying computing to social causes and improving quality of life” for society as a whole.

And, as Edwards points out, the global perspective of the conference also includes initiatives that are closer to home, including working on technology for nutrition management in low-income Atlanta communities and on systems to better connect this country’s urban homeless with support networks and organizations.

“The common theme is about driving computing innovation beyond the affluent workplace settings in which ‘traditional’ computing has its roots and seeing what opportunities are there when we look at the rest of the world—which, as it turns out, happens to represent a far larger slice of human endeavor than just the workplace,” Edwards said. “By exploring these new contexts, we can actually create new things, which have value not just to the communities that we are looking at, but potentially more broadly, as well.”

Computing and Ivan Allen College Assistant Professor Michael Best has worked with Liberia for several years. In 2008, Best and Tech students traveled to Liberia with the Mobile Story Exchange System (MOSES), a portable system to view and record stories from civil conflict survivors for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia. The project is currently under way, and Best says he hopes the resources will be there to extend the program for another three years.

The system used in Liberia needed to be useful in an area and climate not frequently thought of as conducive to computing technology. “Engineering is all about constraints,” Best said. “With MOSES, we worked with a series of constraints—many places [in Liberia] have no electric power, no Internet connectivity, security issues, an illiterate population and a [hostile climate].”

The equipment was tailored for use by the Liberian people, even in the most remote areas of the country. The titular cartoon character guides viewers—many of whom had never seen a computer or like device before—through steps to either watch recorded stories or film their own. According to Best, the system worked well with its intended audience.

	Read the interview with Dr. Laurence Konmla Bropleh, Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism for the Republic of Liberia.

“People who had never used a computer before walked up and were able to immediately engage with the cartoon character of Moses,” he said. Best says that long-term research is examining the feasibility of making the MOSES system a component of proposed Community Technology Information Centers in Liberia, which would serve to allow everyone in the country to receive news from and interact with the central government in Monrovia.

Edwards says there will definitely be a follow-up to the conference, and that the various attendees have expressed interest in forming a consortium of universities, companies, non-governmental organizations and foundations to explore how technology can improve the “human condition” outside the normal channels of the industry.

“This belief—that we can drive technological innovation by situating research in fundamentally different contexts … [with] extreme constraints that force us to come up with new solutions—is wired into the DNA of the College of Computing,” said Edwards, referring to the college’s research into the “digital divide,” key for considering unique solutions for networking poor-infrastructure locales, and pervades the Human-Centered Computing doctoral program. “The themes we focused on in the Computing at the Margins symposium will continue to be a key tenant of how we think about our research.”

Best agrees, adding that the symposium hit the goals set for the conference. “We wanted to hit the base with what it means to practice computing at the margins, and we wanted to establish Georgia Tech as the place that is working on this area,” he said. “This is the first of what has to be a dialogue, and we need to continue the dialogue.”