Two I School junior faculty members, Kimiko Ryokai and Tapan Parikh, have been awarded a total of $130,000 by the Nokia Research Center to support three new research projects exploring innovative new applications of mobile technology.
Tapan Parikh
Assistant Professor Tapan Parikh is part of the I School's program in ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies and Development); his research focuses on information systems to support sustainable economic development across the world, including microfinance, smallholder agriculture, and public health.
Parikh was awarded $60,000 to explore the use of mobile phones for agricultural knowledge sharing, in collaboration with the "Context, Content and Community" research group at Nokia Research Center Palo Alto. His project will combine community radio with the use of mobile phones to facilitate on-demand, contextualized information for local farmers.
Kimiko Ryokai
Daniela Rosner
Assistant Professor Kimiko Ryokai was awarded a total of $70,000 for two projects that she will be leading to design tangible user interfaces for creativity and communication, especially for young children.
Ryokai is an assistant professor in the I School and the UC Berkeley Center for New Media; she researches tangible user interfaces, builds new expressive tools that take advantage of people's familiarity with the physical world, and studies how new media expand the interaction space.
In partnership with I School doctoral student Daniela Rosner, Ryokai will be working with the NRC's "Social Proximity Networks" research group to explore innovative mobile information services to foster creativity and sharing in people's everyday environments. Daniela Rosner is a first-year doctoral student who completed her MIMS degree at the I School in 2008; she has a background in both graphic design and computer science. Rosner also collaborated with the SPN team as an intern in the summer of 2008.
Ryokai will be working on another project, with theNRC's "Innovate, Design, Experience, Animate" research group, to design and evaluate new communication tools for young children. She will investigate how tangible user interfaces can help make the concept of long-distance communication more concrete for young children.
The Nokia Research Center (NRC) is an independent unit within Nokia, not attached to any specific product development unit. Nokia Research Center seeks to explore and develop technologies that will be available in the marketplace in five to ten years – not just novelties, but technologies that will see mass market demand from consumers and enterprises. It includes more than 1100 researchers, engineers and scientists, working on issues relating to mobility of voice and data, management and communications.
More information:
"Mobile Phones for Agricultural Knowledge Sharing"
Tapan Parikh
Community radio (CR) offers a promising tool for the dissemination of scientific research and new agricultural practices to local communities, because of its capability to reach large, remote audiences at a low cost. However, it is still a challenge to provide this information on-demand, and to adapt the information to local needs and experiences.
Our goal is to develop a model for on-demand access and contextualization of information that we call interactive community radio. This system will allow for accessing and providing feedback to radio content using various mechanisms, including SMS and a dial-in IVR system. Listeners can request specific content segments using the date and time, or specific access codes provided during the radio broadcast. By sending an SMS with this information, the appropriate audio content will be delivered automatically to the phone. Listeners will also be able to access the same information using a dial-in IVR system.
Similarly, listeners will be able to text questions, comments or feedback about the program to the producers, again providing metadata to link the query to the related content. Responses can be sent back to the phone as audio or text messages. The ability to provide feedback, questions and comments will also be provided via the dial-in system. Later, the producers of the radio show can use the questions, comments and feedback of farmers to inform the next show. In this iterative fashion, top-down knowledge can be locally vetted, contextualized and appropriate.
"New Mobile Services to Support Interactive Everyday Creativity"
Kimiko Ryokai
Through our design research collaboration, we will explore the potential of new services to enhance people’s interactions with physical objects, the spaces around them, and the other people they encounter. People increasingly use mobile devices to connect, collaborate, and share ideas and feeling with others. Leveraging the infrastructure developed by the SPN (Social Proximity Networks) team, we will investigate how new mobile services can foster creativity and sharing within our everyday environments. More specifically, we will consider how mobile devices can extend social activity involved in ordinary creative actions, such as taking a snapshot of the family on vacation or preparing for a meal with friends.
We will illustrate this vision with a set of designs that incorporate sensor data collected by mobile devices. These designs will explore how mobile devices can support the strengthening of social ties around creative practice. Additionally, we will explore how these intuitive and personal devices could support non-technical users such as young children and elderly, so that they can stay connected with not only the people they love but also with new people they encounter.
"Multimodal Communication Tools for Children"
Kimiko Ryokai
Our goals are to invent new tangible tools for children that support their multimodal creations via variety of media (photos, drawings, voices, motions, etc.), a collaboration along the themes of creating and evaluating interactive tools that support children and families to create and share media. Through our design research, our hope is to propose a next generation of personal technologies that are intuitive and fun to use, and bring family members closer together. The project focuses on several themes of sharing, including co-present creation and collaboration, as well as developing more immediate and concrete ways for children and families to share their ideas and creations across time and space.