Osamuyimen Stewart

Twende-twende: a mobile application for traffic congestion awareness and routing

According to the UN-HABITAT, the city of Nairobi loses half a million USD daily due to congestion on roads designed for a city 10 times smaller. Therefore, there is a great need for traffic management and awareness solutions. Many existing solutions are unsuitable for cities like Nairobi due to economic constraints, dynamic events, uncertainty, and poor infrastructure. Recently, a novel approach called Frugal Innovation has been adopted at IBM Tokyo Research. The approach combines very low quality images (VLQI) captured by existing low-cost cameras with network flow algorithms to accurately estimate traffic flow. We extend their work to develop a mobile app, called Twende-Twende, that provides drivers with real-time traffic information and suggested routes. We incorporate locally relevant context (such as references to landmarks) to predict congestion and create traffic awareness. We deployed the app and evaluated its effectiveness, accuracy and usability. Our initial evaluation indicates that the app enhances the driving experience and can be deployed in other developing countries.

Collective Intelligence Applications in IT Services Business

IT outsourcing enables companies to contract out IT services, such as infrastructure and application management to external providers. IT services delivery relies on knowledge that is in the collective possession of application and infrastructure specialists. With recent advances in harnessing the expertise of network-connected humans, services businesses have also started to seek strategies to efficiently utilize the collective knowledge of their employees. In this paper, we present the application of collective intelligence to three different service types: 1) automation (translation solution), 2) infrastructure management (asset inventory discovery) and 3) application management (software development). We extrapolate a set of salient properties (i.e., input, output, and size of the collective input) as the key elements for employing collective intelligence within the services business. We discuss some of the differences amongst the disparate collective intelligence services and present the resulting distinctive properties as challenges that may inspire further research in services business.

Leveraging Raspberry Pi for interactive education

This paper describes our ongoing project whose goal is to combine existing technologies in order to make secondary school curriculum more interactive and practical.

Transition relevance place: a proposal for adaptive user interface in natural language dialog management systems

In this paper, we describe how users transfer language behavior commonly associated with directed dialog to natural language systems: they respond to the initial prompt with a single word (holophrase) instead of the naturally occurring unit of conversation (a sentence). We evaluate two solutions to this problem and offer a conversational turn-taking method together with a discourse clause tutorial as the effective way to get repeat callers to adapt to the natural language dialog style.

Monitoring water scarcity risk in Africa

Water scarcity threatens food security, public health and economic development in Africa. Lack of coordination and cooperation between actors in the water ecosystem drives scarcity and threatens use and management of the shared resource. Access to relevant information that facilitates awareness of water scarcity risks over familiar geographic scales is an important first step to addressing this challenge. In this paper, we describe the development of community-level water scarcity risk estimates along with the initial architecture of the proposed system for estimating these risks.

Cultural voice markers in speech-to-speech machine translation systems

Current implementations of real-time speech-to-speech (S2S) translation systems for intercultural collaboration have mainly focused on the accuracy of the recognition and translated content. Typically, the translated utterance is presented to users through text-to-speech (TTS), without projecting cultural nuances in the tone of voice. This study investigates whether there are cross-cultural markers of variations in voice dynamics, and, if these have any impact on user satisfaction. Based on subjective user evaluations (Chinese and English), we conclude that there are salient cross-cultural voice markers relevant to the interaction of culture and system design; with noticeable impact on user satisfaction in TTS and S2S systems.

Towards a 2-Way Communication and Analytics Platform for Emergency Response and Post-Emergency Recovery Efforts in Sierra Leone

At the peak of the West African Ebola outbreak in December 2014, the only prospect for containing the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) was through behavior change to reduce transmission pathways. However, deeply ingrained beliefs, social systems, and cultural practices, combined with a lack of knowledge of the disease, made containment difficult. IBM Research - Africa, in collaboration with Sierra Leone Open Government Initiative (OGI), set up a call and SMS hotline to engage with citizens and understand issues on the ground using free text responses, which started on 19th Sept 2014 (during the first national lockdown). Localized versions of Centre for Disease Control (CDC) public health messages were broadcast on public radio along with a short question on Ebola, and listeners were encouraged to call or SMS the OGI hotline in reply to the question, or to report the current situation in their locality. Messages were categorized using a basic keyword search approach, based on categories that were determined manually, and the results of the analysis were communicated to the government via OGI. The initial deployment showed the potential of using a 2-way communication platform utilizing natural language responses to provide valuable feedback on behaviors and attitudes during a health emergency. Our presentation will describe the original platform, the outcomes of the analysis performed to date and the current work being undertaken to extend and scale the platform in Sierra Leone.

Rethinking agribusiness models in Africa

This paper couples the agriculture scenario in Africa with requirement engineering method to develop a new business model that is configurable and scalable.

Traffic 411: a traffic congestion routing and awareness platform for Nairobi

According to UN-HABITAT, the city of Nairobi loses half a million USD daily due to congestion on roads designed for a city 10 times smaller. To address the traffic congestion problem in Nairobi, we develop a platform called Traffic 411 that provides drivers with real-time traffic and routing information. Traffic 411 incorporates locally relevant context (such as references to landmarks) to predict congestion and create traffic awareness. Our work extends a novel approach called Frugal Innovation developed at the IBM Tokyo Research Lab (TRL), where Web cameras covering only 3.5% of the roads in Nairobi are used to estimate traffic conditions. We deployed the Traffic 411 platform in Nairobi and our initial evaluation indicates that Traffic 411 enhances the driving experience and can be deployed in similar cities.