Designing Technology for the "Other" 5 Billion
Umar Saif (Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan)
CSE Distinguished Lecture
Tuesday, November 15, 2016, 3:30pm
EEB-105
Abstract
With the advent of $50 smartphones, we can finally design software applications to fight poverty, disease and illiteracy for the "other" 5 billion in the developing world. In this talk, I will share a series of systems we designed for the 120 million citizens in the province of Punjab in Pakistan. These systems have been used for targeting 13 million Dengue containment activities, monitoring 53,000 schools in Punjab, tracking 3,700 vaccinators and collecting feedback from 11 Million citizens. Each system highlights a unique set of challenges and opportunities for designing systems for the developing world. I will conclude by explaining the challenge of measuring socio-economic impact of projects in the developing world and present a new smartphone-based platform aimed at democratizing data collection, surveys and randomized controlled trails at a large scale.
Bio
Prof. Umar Saif works as the Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), heading all public-sector IT projects in Punjab. He is also the founding Vice Chancellor of ITU-P, a newly setup research university in Lahore. Prof. Saif received his PhD in 2001 at University of Cambridge and worked at MIT for several years before returning to Pakistan. He was named as one of the top 35 young innovators by the MIT Technology Review (TR35) in 2011 and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010. He has received a Google Faculty Research Award, MIT Technovator Award, IEEE Percom Mark Weiser Award, IDG Technology Pioneer Award and ACM CHI Best Paper Award. In 2014, Prof. Saif was awarded Sitara-i-Imtiaz, one of the highest civil awards by government of Pakistan. He was named among the 500 most influential Muslims in the world in 2015 and 2016.