Sunandan Chakraborty

Managing microfinance with paper, pen and digital slate

Indias extensive Self-Help Group (SHG) microfinance network brings formal savings and credit services to 86 million poor households. Yet, the inability to maintain high-quality records remains a persistent weakness in SHG functioning. We study this problem and present a financial record management application built on a low-cost digital slate prototype. The solution directly accepts handwritten input on ordinary paper forms and provides immediate electronic feedback. A field trial with 200 SHG members in rural India shows that the use of the digital slate solution results in shorter data recording time, fewer incorrect entries, and more complete records. The paper-pen-slate solution performs as well as, and is strongly preferred over, a purely electronic alternative. The digital slate solution is able to comfortably move between paper and digital worlds, achieving efficiency and quality gains while catering to the preferences and budgets of low-income low-literate clients.

Shruti: an embedded text-to-speech system for Indian languages

In India, the recent increase in the number of people with physical impairments has necessitated the need for low-cost, portable, augmentative and alternative communication devices. The authors describe a text-to-speech system for Indian languages, which accepts the text input in two Indian languages, Bengali and Hindi, and produces near-natural audio output. This text-to-speech system has been ported to two common handheld platforms, namely, iPaq from Compaq and Cassiopeia from Casio, both running on a Microsoft Pocket PC.

Empowering authors to diagnose comprehension burden in textbooks

Good textbooks are organized in a systematically progressive fashion so that students acquire new knowledge and learn new concepts based on known items of information. We provide a diagnostic tool for quantitatively assessing the comprehension burden that a textbook imposes on the reader due to non-sequential presentation of concepts. We present a formal definition of comprehension burden and propose an algorithmic approach for computing it. We apply the tool to a corpus of high school textbooks from India and empirically examine its effectiveness in helping authors identify sections of textbooks that can benefit from reorganizing the material presented.

On correlation of absence time and search effectiveness

Online search evaluation metrics are typically derived based on implicit feedback from the users. For instance, computing the number of page clicks, number of queries, or dwell time on a search result. In a recent paper, Dupret and Lalmas introduced a new metric called absence time, which uses the time interval between successive sessions of users to measure their satisfaction with the system. They evaluated this metric on a version of Yahoo! Answers. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of absence time in evaluating new features in a web search engine, such as new ranking algorithm or a new user interface. We measured the variation of absence time to the effects of 21 experiments performed on a search engine. Our findings show that the outcomes of absence time agreed with the judgement of human experts performing a thorough analysis of a wide range of online and offline metrics in 14 out of these 21 cases. We also investigated the relationship between absence time and a set of commonly-used covariates (features) such as the number of queries and clicks in the session. Our results suggest that users are likely to return to the search engine sooner when their previous session has more queries and more clicks.

Shikshak: An Intelligent Tutoring System Authoring tool for rural education

Low literacy scenario in India and other developing nation demands an alternative learning environment to deal with the problem. Lack of trained teachers, high dropout rates are some of the major problems that need to be addressed. Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) or ITS Authoring tools (ITSAT) can be thought of as a possible solution to these problems. In this paper we present Shikshak, an ITSAT developed by us and discuss its deployment in the district of Paschim Medinipur, West Bengal along with its sample effect on primary education.

Quality of textbooks: an empirical study

Textbooks are the educational input most consistently associated with gains in student learning. Particularly in developing countries, textbooks are the primary conduits for delivering content knowledge to the students and the teachers base their lesson plans on the material given in textbooks. Abstracting from the education literature, we propose that well-written textbooks exhibit the following properties: FOCUS. Each section explains very few concepts. UNITY. For each concept, there is a unique section that best explains the concept. SEQUENTIALITY. Concepts are discussed in a sequential fashion: a concept is explained prior to occurrences of this concept or any related concept. Further, the tie for precedence in presentation between two mutually related concepts is broken in favor of the more significant of the two.

Characterizing dengue spread and severity using internet media sources

Pakistan witnessed one of its deadliest dengue outbreaks in 2011 resulting in hundreds of deaths throughout the country. Prior to the outbreak, dengue awareness was relatively low and hospitals in the country were not completely prepared to handle the epidemic with limited knowledge about the spread of the disease in each locality. This poster aims to build a system that automatically characterizes the spread and severity of the dengue disease at a fine-grained location granularity based on analyzing news reports from Internet media sources. Based on a detailed analysis of news reports gathered from several leading dailies in Pakistan, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our system to accurately characterize the dengue spread and severity across different locations within Pakistan.

Location specific summarization of climatic and agricultural trends

Climate change can directly impact agriculture. Failure in different aspects of agriculture due to climate change and other influencing factors, are extremely rampant in several agrarian economies, most of which go unnoticed. In this paper, we describe the design of a system that mines disparate information sources on the Web to automatically summarize important climatic and agricultural trends for any specific location and construct a location-specific climatic and agricultural information portal. We have evaluated the system across 605 different districts in India. The results revealed a pan-India scenario of different problem affected areas. The key findings from this work include, around 64.58% of the districts of India suffer from soil related issues and 76.02% have water related problems. We have also manually validated the authenticity of our information sources and validated our summarized results for specific locations with findings in reputed journals and authoritative sources.

Samvidha: A ICT system for personalized offline Internet Access for rural schools

Internet is a huge repository of quality learning materials and continues to grow in a faster rate. The school students may be benefited immensely as these learning materials may well supplement their curricular requirements. But Access to the Internet is costly, because it is very expensive to maintain a persistent Internet connection. For some schools in the developing countries like India, this cost may not be affordable specifically in rural schools. This makes way to a digital divide between the rural and urban schools which is unwanted. For these rural schools, limiting the amount of bandwidth consumed is of paramount importance. It is necessary that the schools be connected to the Internet for the least time, in order to minimize the access cost. In this paper, we present a system Samvidha that allows the rural school students to access the Internet contents in an offline fashion.

Experiences in designing a mobile GIS mapping tool for rural farmers in Ghana

The task of balancing problems associated with population growth and food production has often been impaired by a lack of accurate information on food supply availability in any given region or time. Such data has conventionally been gathered by legions of field workers who must travel to individual farms and collect information by hand. Predictably, data collection has been slow, error-prone, and difficult to maintain. There is therefore a need to develop tools and techniques that can quickly and accurately generate relevant and up-to-date information on food production.