Using Your Talents Today to Create the Global Changes of Tomorrow – Your Innovation Technology Start-Ups

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IEEE GHTC 2018 (Young Professionals/ Women in Engineering Reception) Pre-Conference Keynote – Erna L. Grasz, Founder and CEO of Asante Africa Foundation ( www.asanteafrica.org)

On Oct. 18th, 2018, a welcome reception for the IEEE GHTC 2018 attendees was co-hosted by the IEEE Santa Clara Valley – Young Professionals, and Women in Engineering chapters. The highlight of the reception was the inspiring keynote presentation by Ms. Erna L. Grasz, Founder and CEO of Asante Africa Foundation ( www.asanteafrica.org). She facilitated a thoughtful conversation on Getting Your Humanitarian Innovation Funded.

Although there have been many well-intentioned donations from the USA to Africa, some of them may not meet the needs of the local community. Many of us here in the Northern half of the globe would like to be a partner to make the world a better place for children and communities in the southern half of the globe, yet sometimes we are not approaching it in a partnership manner. For example, thousands of mosquito nets were air-dropped into locations where there was no problem with mosquitoes. Engaging the local community early and often is essential to “doing good, not just feeling good”.

Alongside the development of technologically innovative solutions for the developing countries, it would be necessary to develop a business model framework to navigate to a sustainable business. Today’s thought leaders indicate that the traditional level of business plan details are not so realistic for a new innovation in a new market, so business models are taking their place.

Business canvas model is readily being used for new entrepreneurs locally and globally. It is now a popular tool for developing the business model framework. AirBnB is one of the well-known companies that has adopted business canvas model to initially launch their business.

When deciding on what your start up business is worth, it is important to Identify and define the end game is necessary as that would impact the type of partner you would need. ( SSIR article)

 

Venture funding may be scarce for social impact businesses, as there is usually an expectation for a hockey stick growth projection. At least initially personal funding and crowdsourcing appear to be the way to go. During the offline Q&A, Erna confirmed the possibility of bringing innovations that are developed for the low resource regions back to the US, which can solve similar problems in the US – in a hockey stick shape, perhaps.

Every start-up CEO requires a team around them, with complementary skills, ideally. Thus you should know your strengths and weaknesses, and what other talents you need to make the business stronger.

The video: “Africa-your voice matters” carries an important message that the World needs new speeches and that those new speeches will come from this new young generation – to lead everyone towards building a better World for a new generation.

There are no limits on what you can do, when you are able to see yourself as that global change agent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73g8I2KebD4&t=25s

 

 

Following the inspiring keynote by Erna was the students’ poster competition award ceremony. There were three prizes awarded to:

1. People’s Choice – Hong Kong Polytechnic University, “Capacity Building in Cambodia by Technology”
2. Technical Award – (absence)
3. Judges’ Award – DeVry University, “Vision Buddy”

 

 

Acknowledgments to Ms. Erna L. Grasz for her comments and suggestions to improve the original draft of this blog.

IEEE GHTC 2017 Back in San Jose, CA

Welcome back to the Silicon Valley, GHTC !

It has been three years since the last time the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference took place in San Jose. It is so good to see the community again – organizers, speakers, researchers, volunteers and participants who are passionate in learning, sharing and applying technology to solve problems that could improve lives of many people, especially those who are underserved. Thanks to all your hard work!

The conference started officially early monring on Friday, Oct 20, with the opening remarks by Dr. Dick Willkins, 2017 General Chair. Dr. Larry Alder, VP of Product Definition, OneWeb, delivered the opening keynote on: “Connectivity Challenge and Evolving Solutions”.

While many of us reading this blog has enjoyed Internet access, similar to the electricity  – with an increasing dependency in daily lives. In a significant part of US and the World, there is still limited, or no access to the Internet at all. The digital divide has affected the economic growth in regions that has limited connectivity to the Internet, i.e. limited access to the enormous source of information, knowledge and an effective way of communicating with each other.

Dr. Alder presented an emerging solution to bridge the digital divide, by building a satellite communication system that would provide coverage to include those regions that do not have connectivity currently. The new, small satellites can be built at lower cost, as compared to the traditional ones.  A large number of these satellites can be launched into the lower orbit to circulate around the globe and provide connectivity in areas where the infrastructure for internet access are not available on the ground.

Following the opening keynote that addresses a fundamental problem in the accessibility of information and communication technology, the conference proceeded with the parallel sessions in five different tracks, after the break:

• Maternal Healthcare Issues
• Micro-Grids
• Agriculture
• Water
• IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee (HAC) workshop

Multiple papers were presented in each track, followed by questions and discussions.

The panel session on Energy was moderated by Joe Decuir, with panelist: Alexander Anderson, Peter Michael, Sarah Majok, Dr. Henry Louie & Bruce Nordman.

The afternoon was filled with two sets of parallel tracks, separated by a coffee break:

• Physical and Neurological Health Issues
• Solar Energy
• Agriculture and Food Security
• Water and Sanitation
• Humanitarian Challenges and Opportunities

and:

• mHealth
• Panel (1): Social and Economic Development of Rural Women in Rwanda and Uganda through Solar Energy for Productive Use Panel; Panel (2): Opportunities and Challenges of Distributed Manufacturing for Humanitarian Response
• Agriculture
• The IEEE MOVE: Disaster Relief Project “in a box” Workshop
• Humanitarian Challenges and Opportunities

Finally, the evening session was completed by Ms. Sayre White’s talk about the great work that she and her colleagues at the non-profit AnnieCannons has been doing to train the survivors of human trafficking to be software developers and engineers.

Looking forward to the next 1.5 days of exciting programs and interesting discussions at GHTC 2017!

IEEE GHTC 2015 Launched

IEEE GHTC 2015 Call-for-Papers Extended Due Date

IEEE GHTC 2015 Call-for-Papers

Abstract Due Date: Extended – April 14, 2015

The Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC) is the flagship IEEE conference for presenting, discussing, and developing technological solutions to global humanitarian challenges. GHTC invites presenters and attendees who work to meet the needs of populations affected by poverty, disaster, conflict, environmental change, and other impacts resulting in their needs being unmet or underserved. The conference’s focus is to create and promote appropriate, sustainable, and holistic solutions to humanitarian challenges by integrating technical science with broader disciplines such as economics, policy, culture, and environment. GHTC encourages practice and research oriented engineers, scientists, and practitioners with both technical and non-technical backgrounds. We welcome a diversity of participants from academia, for-profit and non-profit business, governmental and non-governmental organizations to present research, lessons learned, case studies, ideas, and other considerations for the creation of effective humanitarian technology.

The Conference theme of “Technology for the Benefit of Humanity” is presented in eight focus areas:

Energy—Electrification, renewable energy technologies, energy and power infrastructures, off-grid power, lighting, cooking, heating
Health—Medical technology, telemedicine, mobile care, primary care, nutrition
Disaster Management—Disaster preparedness and planning, early warning, response systems, needs analysis and assessment, community mobilization, monitoring and evaluation
Connectivity & Communication—Information networks, information technologies and systems, communication technologies, social media
Humanitarian Challenges & Opportunities—Logistics and transportation, security (infrastructure, information, human), shelter, interagency coordination, human-centered system design, participatory methods
Water & Sanitation—Clean water, sanitation, solid waste management, vector control, drainage, hygiene
Agriculture—Agricultural technologies, irrigation, farming practices
Education—Training and capacity building, programs and methods, service learning

Authors may submit content in the form of a technical paper, poster, or special session (panel, workshop, or demonstration). We especially encourage the inclusion of practitioner’s case studies to be included in this year’s practitioner forum, and are seeking proposed technical challenge statements for this year’s hackathon. Please see the links below for more information.

* All submissions require an abstract for review
* At least one author of the submission must attend and present at the conference
* All submissions must be submitted online at http://www.ieeeghtc.org/author-central
* All submissions must follow content & length guidelines available at http://www.ieeeghtc.org/author-central
* Necessary revisions must be completed before final acceptance
* Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent via email
* International attendees are responsible for obtaining the proper visas; the conference will send a standard invitation letter on request.

Accepted and presented papers will be published and included in IEEE Xplore. Electronic media containing all accepted GHTC abstracts and papers will be distributed to registered attendees.

More information on session submission requirements and deadlines, registration for the conference, hotel reservations and exhibiting is available on the GHTC website. http://www.ieeeghtc.org/

Plenary (12 Oct) – IT Innovations for Human Rights, Civic Engagement and Humanitarian Development – Camille Crittenden, PhD – Deputy Director, CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society)

Dr. Camille Crittenden introduced the work by her organization CITRIS (http://citris-uc.org/) which is a collaboration between four UC campus in the SF Bay area: Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz, on humanitarian technology innovations and applications, in four core initiatives:

• Data and Democracy
• Health care
• i4Energy
• Intelligent Infrastructures

Under those initiatives, Tech applications have been developed to solve problems in  various areas, e.g.,

1. Human Rights
   • Crisis mapping, remote sensing, video, forensic analysis, DNA, demographic data collection & analysis
2. Governance & Democracy
   • Open data for transparency in International Aid (http://data.Worldbank.org)
   • Access to open database to support the monitoring of:
     • Global health conditions
     • Climate changes
     • Anti-corruption (http://www.antigraft.org)
     • Election
3. Economic development
   • Microfinance through crowd-sourced loans (http://www.Kiva.org)
   • SMS – popular tool to support agricultural decision-making
4. Healthcare
   • mHealth: mobile applications for remote diagnostics  and care, use of SMS for medical advice
5. Infrastructure
   • Rural electrification using renewable source, e.g., solar (http://www.GramPower.com)
   • Mesh network architecture for Internet access in lieu of a conventional cellular network with extensive coverage (TiER)
     • https://ieeeghtc.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/technology-and-infrastructure-for-emerging-regions-tier-community-cellular-eric-brewer-professor-computer-science-division-university-of-california-at-berkeley/
   • In locations where mobile networks are available, crowd-sourced data can be used to monitor climate change, food security (UN World Food Programme)
     • Example: drought sensor data collected and transmitted via Mobile network in Sahel
6. Monitoring & evaluation
   • Surveys, remote data collection for feedbacks

Innovative Technologies for participatory assessment, e.g.:

• The California Report Card (http://californiareportcard.org)
• Uganda Cafe
• Opinion Space
• World Bank’s Citizen Report Card, since 1993

Current challenges include:

• Poor literacy rates
• Regional conflicts
• Climate changes
• Health emergencies – Ebola, H1N1 etc.
• Uneven access to the Internet and ICTs across the World

Growing number of communities involving in ICT:

• Research funded by government and private investors
• New programs by:
  • USAID
  • UCB Blum center
  • Development Impact Lab
  • Development engineering
• GHTC and similar conferences

For more information on CITRIS and their projects, please contact the speaker at:

ccrittenden@citris-uc.org

GHTC2014 mission accomplished!

Thank you everyone for attending and/or following us during the course of GHTC 2014. We could not have achieved so much without your support! See you in 2015!

A Different Type of Technology Conference

Robert Melich, co-President of Agile3D Technology, has attended a lot of conferences.  A lot.  This was his first time at GHTC.  What did he experience and how does GHTC differ (in a good way) from other conferences on similar same topics.

Health Track – A Scalable mHealth System for Non-Communicable Disease Management – Prof. Gari D. Clifford

Co-authors:  Carlos Arteta,  Tingtin Zhu, Marco Pimentel, Mauro Santos, Joao Domingos, Ali Maraci,  Joachim Behar, Julien Oster – University of Oxford

• Very low Physician-Patient proportion
• Healthcare Spending  in 2002 < $40 per person/year
• Healthcare not becoming more accessible today
• How to get the technology to people?
  • unreliable supply chains & infrastructure
  •  info not portable
  • compliance
  • false alarm ~ 90%
  • human errors ~40% not atypical
• mHealth solution
  • allow healthcare & non-healthcare expert to look at the info
  • low cost sensors
• Use of non-expert opinion to assist in the diagnosis
  • For example,
    • Specific characteristics of ECG data can be determined based on crowd-sourced opinion
  • Well-designed algorithm is critical in filtering out noisy opinions

Health Track – Efficacy of Knowledge Transfer and Exchange Between CHWs and Community Members in Low Resources Settings – Grace Warkulwiz

Co-authors: Laurel Paul, Khanjan Mehta – Penn State University (HESE program)

• Community Health Workers (CHW) are part of the sustainable solutions
• Low cost devices are provided to CHW for diabetes detectiion
• Goal of the project is to find the more effective approach for Knowledge Transfer and Exchange (KTE)
• General challenges
  • Language barrier
  • Information overload
  • Mistrust
• Oral communication based in developing world

Technical challenges
1) infrastructure & resource limitations

• not constant power source all the time
• no Wifi

2) security

• not open to have record put on the computer

3) lack of expertise
4) start up cost

• all monthly wages on a smart phone not feasible

5) equipment reliability and theft

•  implemented project on the ground in Kenya
• team of 4 students project: KTE in low resource settings

1) oral script to train locals

– mimics time spent between CHW with a household ~5 min hypertension risk factors basic

– provided paper visuals

2) ask followed up questions to patients after an hour

– Most of them cannot remember about numerical info but other health info

• Try to see the most effective way to train them
  – need a trust relationship so train the local translator – mimics the CHW not the actual

 

Bottled water and soda cans nowhere be seen in GHTC 2014!

As we try to become a more sustainable conference, you won’t find any bottled water or soda cans here. Besides the usual fare (coffee, iced tea, water (dispenser, filtered)), today we have Horchata non-dairy rice drink and watermelon juice