My research group studies how information and communication technologies can empower communities to address shared challenges and determine their collective futures. To do this, we develop, deploy and evaluate the impact of new community information platforms for agriculture, education, finance, health, governance and other areas, both locally, and around the world.

I am currently an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell Tech. I share some of my periodic thoughts and musings here.

Projects

2022- MVC: Participatory and Qualitative GIS
2020- Virtual Farm: VR for Agricultural Extension
2014- Represent Bihar: Traditional and Folk Stories of Bihar
2010- Local Ground: Using Digital Maps to Engage Youth in Civic Advocacy
2010- Awaaz.De: Giving Communities a Voice using Voice Social Media
2018-20 Word2RI: Community Oral History on Roosevelt Island
2010-19 Captricity: Turning Paper Forms into Data using the Cloud and Crowd
2015-16 FarmView: Land Access for New and Aspiring Farmers
2014-16 Code 510: Creative Coding for Middle and High School Youth
2012-15 Endaga: Small-scale Community Cellular Networks
2011-12 Umati: Grading CS Exams with a Crowd-sourcing Vending Machine
2009-11 Metamouse: Equitably Sharing Multiple Mice for Collaborative Learning
2008-11 Usher: Adaptive Forms for Improving Data Entry Accuracy and Efficiency
2007-11 OpenRosa: Open Source Standards and Tools for Mobile Data Collection (with UW, Dimagi, and others)
2007-11 CommCare: Mobile Tools for Community Health Workers (with UW, Dimagi and D-Tree)
2007-11 e-IMCI: Automated Mobile Phone Protocols for Diagnosis of Childhood Illnesses (with UW, Dimagi, D-Tree and IHRDC)
2006-11 Digital ICS: Inspection, Monitoring and Quality Control for Rural Coffee Cooperatives (with CEPCO and Asobagri) video
2003-11 Self-Help MIS: Management Information System for Self-Help Groups (SHGs) (with ekgaon and CCD) video
2003-7 CAM: Mobile Data Collection using a Camera-equipped Mobile Phone (Ph.D. Thesis) video
2002-3 Hisaab: User Interface Design for Rural, Less-educated Users (with Media Lab Asia, Human Factors International and CCD)
2002-3 Indic Computing: Open Source Standards and Tools for Indic-language Computing
2000-2 Knownet-Grin: Knowledge Network for Grassroots Innovators (with SRISTI and IIM-Ahmedabad)
1997-9 WIL: A Compiler Intermediate Language with Explicit Support for Representations (Master's Thesis)
1994-6 Cation Binding Selectivity of EF-Hand Sites: Perturbation Dynamics of Galactose Binding Protein (Undergraduate Honors Thesis)

Teaching

2017- Remaking the City: Graduate course at Cornell Tech
2017- Revolutionary Technologies: Graduate course at Cornell Tech
2009-15 ICT for Social Enterprise: Graduate course at the UC Berkeley School of Information
2008-15 User Interface Design and Development: Graduate course at the UC Berkeley School of Information
2008-15 ICTD Research Seminar: Graduate seminar at the UC Berkeley School of Information
2013 Alternative Visions of Technology: Graduate seminar at the UC Berkeley School of Information
2013 Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure: Graduate course at the UC Berkeley School of Information
2003-7 Computing in the Developing World: Graduate seminar at UW CSE (occasionally with Intel Research Seattle and Microsoft Research)
2000-1 Gujarat Vidyapith: Lecturer in Master's program in Computer Applications