Aditya Vashistha

Sangeet Swara: A Community-Moderated Voice Forum in Rural India

Interactive voice forums have emerged as a promising platform for people in developing regions to record and share audio messages using low-end mobile phones. However, one of the barriers to the scalability of voice forums is the process of screening and categorizing content, often done by a dedicated team of moderators. We present Sangeet Swara, a voice forum for songs and cultural content that relies on the community of callers to curate high-quality posts that are prioritized for playback to others. An 11-week deployment of Sangeet Swara found broad and impassioned usage, especially among visually impaired users. We also conducted a follow-up experiment, called Talent Hunt, that sought to reduce reliance on toll-free telephone lines. Together, our deployments span about 53,000 calls from 13,000 callers, who submitted 6,000 posts and 150,000 judgments of other content. Using a mixed-methods analysis of call logs, audio content, comparison with outside judges, and 204 automated phone surveys, we evaluate the user experience, the strengths and weaknesses of community moderation, financial sustainability, and the implications for future systems.

Accurate speed and density measurement for road traffic in India

Monitoring traffic density and speed helps to better manage traffic flows and plan transportation infrastructure and policy. In this paper, we present techniques to measure traffic density and speed in unlaned traffic, prevalent in developing countries, and apply those techniques to better understand traffic patterns in Bengaluru, India. Our techniques, based on video processing of traffic, result in about 11% average error for density and speed compared to manually-observed ground truth values. Though we started with intuitive and straight-forward image processing tools, due to a myriad of non-trivial issues posed by the heterogeneous and chaotic traffic in Bengaluru, our techniques have grown to be non-obvious. We describe the techniques and their evaluation, with details of why simpler methods failed under various circumstances. We also apply our techniques to quantify the congestion during peak hours and to estimate the gains achievable by shifting a fraction of traffic to other time periods. Finally, we measure the fundamental curves of transportation engineering, relating speed vs. density and flow vs. speed, which are integral tools for policy makers.

Social Media Platforms for Low-Income Blind People in India

We present the first analysis of the use and non-use of social media platforms by low-income blind users in rural and peri-urban India. Using a mixed-methods approach of semi-structured interviews and observations, we examine the benefits received by low-income blind people from Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp and investigate constraints that impede their social media participation. We also present a detailed analysis of how low-income blind people used a voice-based social media platform deployed in India that received significant traction from low-income people in rural and peri-urban areas. In eleven-weeks of deployment, fifty-three blind participants in our sample collectively placed 4784 voice calls, contributed 1312 voice messages, cast 33,909 votes and listened to the messages 46,090 times. Using a mixed-methods analysis of call logs, qualitative interviews, and phone surveys, we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the platform and benefits it offered to low-income blind people.

Educational Content Creation and Sharing by Low-Income Visually Impaired People in India

Low-income visually impaired people face a wide variety of educational challenges which are magnified in the developing world. Digital assistive technologies (such as screen readers) are typically out of reach, so individuals depend on Braille and audio recordings to access educational content. Unfortunately, there are acute shortages of Braille and high quality audio books for many subjects, leaving students scrambling for ways to continue their education. We present a formative study that examines the educational landscape for low-income visually impaired communities in rural and peri-urban India, the challenges they face in accessing educational content, and the solutions they have invented. We conducted interviews with 16 stakeholders, including students, teachers, and content producers, to understand the education ecosystem in their communities and how they use technologies such as basic mobile phones to consume, create, and share educational content. In particular, we found that these communities have established an informal network of peer-produced audio content that is shared via Bluetooth, memory cards and CDs. Our analysis suggests ways in which technology can improve access to professionally authored materials and augment these informal networks of peer-production.

Ila Dhageyso: an interactive voice forum to foster transparent governance in Somaliland

In many developing countries, it is challenging for remote communities to access reliable and accurate sources of news. This paper examines the case of Somaliland, where there is a fragmented media landscape that is subject to tribal biases and manipulations. Often, exaggeration or misrepresentation of facts prompts conflicts and hostility towards authorities, especially in remote areas. To foster more transparent communications between governmental institutions and the public, we built and deployed an interactive voice forum, accessible to anyone with a basic mobile handset. Called Ila Dhageyso, this forum enables callers to listen and respond to official recordings from the Presidential Ministry, as well as to the responses of other callers. Audio messages are also threaded and posted on YouTube to involve Somaliland people in diaspora. From December 2012 to April 2013, Ila Dhageyso logged 4,300 posts from callers. This paper reviews the media climate and geopolitical circumstances in Somaliland that motivated the formation of Ila Dhageyso. It also describes the design, implementation, and experiences gained in the first exploratory deployment of the service.

Mobile Video Dissemination for Community Health

We examine the dissemination of mobile phone videos in the context of Projecting Health - a community health project in rural India. Our research objective was to identify the most effective means of promoting the distribution of health videos on a largely offline network of mobile phones in a resource-constrained environment. We compared three different distribution channels: mobile shop owners, laptop owners, and community health workers in a fourteen-week intervention that relied on data collected via missed calls from viewers and callbacks made to them. We present the design of our experiment, describe the challenges in deploying this experiment, and discuss overall findings. All three distribution channels were successful in targeting the community; mobile shops had access to most community members but the community health workers were most successful in getting videos out to those who were most interested in viewing them. Many participants were motivated to distribute the videos for the benefit of community. However, the number of missed calls received decreased over time, suggesting the exploration of alternative mechanisms to extrinsically motivate intermediaries and viewers for broader video distribution.

Respeak: A Voice-based, Crowd-powered Speech Transcription System

Speech transcription is an expensive service with high turnaround time for audio files containing languages spoken in developing countries and regional accents of well-represented languages. We present Respeak - a voice-based, crowd-powered system that capitalizes on the strengths of crowdsourcing and automatic speech recognition (instead of typing) to transcribe such audio files. We created Respeak and optimized its design through a series of cognitive experiments. We deployed it with 25 university students in India who completed 5464 micro-transcription tasks, transcribing 55 minutes of widely-varied audio content, and collectively earning USD 46 as mobile airtime. The Respeak engine aligned the transcript generated by five randomly selected users to transcribe Hindi and Indian English audio files with a word error rate (WER) of 8.6% and 15.2%, respectively. The cost of speech transcription was USD 0.83 per minute with a turnaround time of 39.8 hours, substantially less than industry standards. Using a mixed-methods analysis of cognitive experiments, system performance and qualitative interviews, we evaluate Respeaks design, user experience, strengths, and weaknesses. Our findings suggest that Respeak improves the quality of speech transcription while enhancing the earning potential of low-income populations in resource-constrained settings.

A Mobile Application for Interactive Voice Forums: Design and Pilot Deployment in Rural India

This paper describes the design and pilot deployment of a mobile application to support interactive voice forums, in which users can record messages and listen to messages that others have recorded. While such forums have typically relied on voice calls for participation, participation through a mobile application (and mobile Internet) can offer benefits in terms of costs, offline access to downloaded content, and supplements with other media types, such as photos. Using the Android platform, we implement an application to support CGNet Swara, a voice-based citizen journalism platform. We describe an early-stage pilot deployment that is already seeing unsupervised usage in rural India.

BSpeak: An Accessible Voice-based Crowdsourcing Marketplace for Low-Income Blind People

BSpeak is an accessible crowdsourcing marketplace that enables blind people in developing regions to earn money by transcribing audio files through speech. We examine accessibility and usability barriers that 15 first-time users, who are low-income and blind, experienced while completing transcription tasks on BSpeak and Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Our mixed-methods analysis revealed severe accessibility barriers in MTurk due to the absence of landmarks, unlabeled UI elements, and improper use of HTML headings. Compared to MTurk, participants found BSpeak significantly more accessible and usable, and completed tasks with higher accuracy in lesser time due to its voice-based implementation. In a two-week field deployment of BSpeak in India, 24 low-income blind users earned rupee 7,310 by completing over 16,000 transcription tasks to yield transcriptions with 87% accuracy. Through our analysis of BSpeaks strengths and weaknesses, we provide recommendations for designing crowdsourcing marketplaces for low-income blind people in resource-constrained settings.

Examining Security and Privacy Research in Developing Regions

Prior research suggests that security and privacy needs of users in developing regions are different than those in developed regions. To better understand the underlying differentiating factors, we conducted a systematic review of Human-Computer Interaction for Development and Security & Privacy publications in 15 proceedings, such as CHI, SOUPS, ICTD, and DEV, from the past ten years. Through an in-depth analysis of 114 publications that discuss security and privacy needs of people in developing regions, we identified five key factors---culture, knowledge gaps, unintended technology use, context, and usability and cost considerations---that shape security and privacy preferences of people in developing regions. We discuss how these factors influence their security and privacy considerations using case studies on phone sharing and surveillance. We then present a set of design recommendations and research directions for addressing security and privacy needs of people in resource-constrained settings.