A May 2010 inventory documented over 100 field projects currently deployed using mobile data collection on themes ranging from agriculture to civic participation and human rights. Around the world, cellphones are being used to report and document events in real time. This panel will focus on mobile technology as a data collection tool, highlighting the challenges in implementing such projects and ensuring the security of those using it.
Panelists:
Tapan Parikh (InformationSchool, UC Berkeley)
Neil Hendrick (Human Rights Center)
Katrin Verclas (MobileActive)
Gaetano Borriello (Open Data Kit/ University of Washington)
Bio
Gaetano Borriello
Gaetano Borriello is an Adjunct Professor of EE, HCDE, and ISchool at the University of Washington. Borriello is known primarily for his work in automatic synthesis of digital circuits, reconfigurable hardware, and embedded systems development tools. Recently, Borriello was PI for the Portolano Expedition, a DARPA-sponsored investigation on invisible computing. He was on partial leave from 2001 to 2003 to found and direct the Intel Research Seattle laboratory which is engaged in ubiquitous computing research.
The focus of Borriello's research interests are in location-based systems, sensor-based inferencing, and tagging objects with passive and active tags. Borriello has served as program chair of numerous conferences and workshops. His most recent community activities include being program chair for the 4th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp02), serving on the editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine, and contributing to a study, called "Embedded, Everywhere" commissioned by the Computer Science Technology Board of the National Research Council on Networked Systems of Embedded Computers.
Borriello has a BS in EE from the Polytechnic Institute of New York (1979), an MS in EE from Stanford University (1981), and a PhD in CS from the Unversity of California at Berkeley (1988). He was a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1980-87. He joined the Department in 1988.
Neil Hendrick
Neil Hendrick is a Mobile Technology Specialist at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley. Hendrick has worked with technology for Human Rights and International Development since 2001 when he co-founded Communication Integration, a non-profit dedicated to providing computers for education in developing countries. Working with the NGO Companeros en Solidaridad, he helped to set up a series of computer labs in rural schools near Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.
As an HRC research assistant in Uganda, he fielded the proof-of-concept to use mobile technology for social sciences, adapting paper-based surveys to PDAs and testing them researching transitional justice issues. As an HRC Fellow, he worked at the International Criminal Court in the Hague providing database development. He is currently working to develop an easy-to-use, open source, mobile data collection system.
Tapan Parikh
Tapan Parikh is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the use of computing to support sustainable economic development across the World. His interests include microfinance, agriculture, public health, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and distributed information systems.
Katrin Verclas
Katrin Verclas is the co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones for social impact.
Verclas is currently working on mobile projects in governance, accountability, and political participation in emerging democracies. She is also leading a team focused on mobile security tools.
A native of Germany, she has written widely on mobile phones in citizen participation and civil society organizations, mobile phones in health and for development.
Verclas has previously led several nonprofit organizations, including as the Executive Director of NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network, the national association of IT professionals working in the more than one million nonprofit organizations in the United States.
Verclas is the editor of Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, published by Wiley & Sons. She is a frequent speaker on ICTs in civil society at national and international conferences and has published numerous articles and publications on technology for social change in leading popular and industry publications. Verclas was a 2009 TED Fellow, a 2010 fellow at the MIT Media Lab, and was named by Fast Company one of the most "Influential Women in Tech" in 2011.
Katrin Verclas, co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, discusses the insecure nature of mobile devices and how they endanger human rights activists.
Rights that belong to an individual as a consequence of being human. The term came into wide use after World War II, replacing the earlier phrase “natural rights,” which had been associated with the Greco-Roman concept of natural law since the end of the Middle Ages. As understood today, human rights refer to a wide variety of values and capabilities reflecting the diversity of human circumstances and history. They are conceived of as universal, applying to all human beings everywhere, and as fundamental, referring to essential or basic human needs. Human rights have been classified historically in terms of the notion of three “generations” of human rights. The first generation of civil and political rights, associated with the Enlightenment and the English, American, and French revolutions, includes the rights to life and liberty and the rights to freedom of speech and worship. The second generation of economic, social, and cultural rights, associated with revolts against the predations of unregulated capitalism from the mid-19th century, includes the right to work and the right to an education. Finally, the third generation of solidarity rights, associated with the political and economic aspirations of developing and newly decolonized countries after World War II, includes the collective rights to political self-determination and economic development. Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, many treaties and agreements for the protection of human rights have been concluded through the auspices of the United Nations, and several regional systems of human rights law have been established. In the late 20th century ad hoc international criminal tribunals were convened to prosecute serious human rights violations and other crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The International Criminal Court, which came into existence in 2002, is empowered to prosecute crimes against humanity, crimes of genocide, and war crimes.
