Event

Giving Farmers a Voice

Tapan Parikh

School of Information, UC Berkeley

Tuesday, October 20, 2009
12:30

Improving the productivity of small farmers is essential for economic development in most poor countries. Providing access to timely and relevant information could improve the opportunities available to farmers. However, there are significant challenges related to literacy, infrastructure, access to technology and social, cultural, institutional and linguistic gaps between producers and consumers of knowledge. The increased adoption of mobile phones is rapidly reducing the physical barriers of access. Providing voice-based services via low-cost handsets could empower farmers to become producers as well as consumers of knowledge. In this talk, I will discuss several applications my students and I are developing to explore this potential. Avaaj Otalo (Gujarati for "voice stoop") is the voice-based equivalent of an online discussion board. Farmers and agricultural experts call a toll-free line to ask questions, provide answers, and listen to each other's questions, answers and experiences. We conducted a six-month trial deployment of Avaaj Otalo with fifty farmers in Gujarat, India. Farmers found it useful to learn both from experts and other farmers, sharing advice on many topics - including the best time to sow fodder, recipes for organic pesticides, and homemade devices to scare away wild pigs at night. Digital ICS allows coffee cooperatives to monitor quality and organic certification requirements, and to be more responsive to farmers' needs. Field inspectors use mobile phones to document growing conditions and record farmers questions and comments through a combination of text, audio and images. In a six-month trial deployment, the system significantly reduced operational costs, saving the cooperative approximately $10,000 a year. The cooperative also obtained richer feedback from its members, which can be used for targeting extension, improving decision-making and reaching out to consumers. In both of these systems, voice provides not only an accessible interface to information, but a medium for aggregating and representing knowledge itself. We found this more suitable for engaging communities that are more comfortable with oral forms of communication, for whom text and structured data represent significant barriers to expression. Most importantly, we have found that rural communities have a deep desire to be "heard", and simply need the tools required to define and achieve "development" on their own terms. For this talk at ICSI, I plan to discuss some specific applications of speech recognition that could improve the usability and functionality of these tools.

Bio:
Tapan Parikh is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Tapan's research interests include human-computer interaction (HCI), mobile computing, voice user interfaces and information systems for microfinance, smallholder agriculture and global health. For the past ten years, Tapan has been designing, developing and deploying information systems in the rural developing world - initially in India, and now also in Latin America and Africa. Tapan's dissertation project, CAM, was the first integrated framework supporting the asynchronous collection of multimedia data using mobile phones, specifically designed for use in the rural developing world. While in India, Tapan co-founded ekgaon technologies (www.ekgaon.com ), a management and technology company serving rural communities. He holds a Sc.B. degree in Molecular Modeling with Honors from Brown University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where he was awarded the William Chan Memorial Award for best Ph.D. dissertation. Tapan was also named Technology Review magazine's Humanitarian of the Year in 2007, for his work bringing accessible mobile data services to microfinance groups in rural India.