My research group studies the design and use of information and communication technologies for sustainable development. We have designed and implemented several new community information platforms supporting applications in agriculture, health, education, microfinance, governance and other areas.
I am an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. I also work with and advise several startup companies, including Awaaz.De, Captricity, NextDrop, ekgaon and Acopio.
Projects
| 2011- |  |
Umati: Grading CS Exams with a Crowd-sourcing Vending Machine |
| 2010- |  |
Local Ground: Using Paper Maps to Collect and Share Local Knowledge |
| 2010- |  |
Awaaz.De: Giving Communities a Voice using Voice Social Media |
| 2010- |  |
Captricity: Turning Paper Forms into Data using the Cloud and Crowd |
| 2009- |  |
Metamouse: Equitable Sharing using Multiple Mice for Collaborative Education |
| 2008- |  |
Usher: Adaptive Forms for Improving Data Entry Accuracy and Efficiency |
| 2007- |  |
OpenRosa: Open Source Standards and Tools for Mobile Data Collection |
| 2007- |  |
CommCare: Mobile Tools for Community Health Workers (with UW, Dimagi and D-Tree) |
| 2007- |  |
e-IMCI: Automated Mobile Phone Protocols for Diagnosis of Childhood Illnesses (with UW, Dimagi, D-Tree and IHRDC) |
| 2006- |  |
Digital ICS: Inspection, Monitoring and Quality Control for Rural Coffee Cooperatives (with CEPCO and Asobagri) video |
| 2003- |  |
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
| 2013- |
|
Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure: Graduate course at the UC Berkeley School of Information |
| 2009- |
|
ICT for Social Enterprise: Graduate workshop at the UC Berkeley School of Information |
| 2008- |
|
User Interface Design and Development: Graduate course at the UC Berkeley School of Information |
| 2008- |
|
ICTD Research Seminar: Graduate seminar 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) |
| 2004 |
 |
Information Technology and Public Policy: Graduate course at UW CSE (with Berkeley, UCSD and Microsoft) |
| 2000-1 |
 |
Gujarat Vidyapith: Lecturer in Master's program in Computer Applications |