University of Washington College of Engineering will award School of Information assistant professor Tapan Parikh its 2010 Diamond Award for early career achievement.
The Early Career Achievement award recognizes outstanding graduates of the UW College of Engineering who demonstrate exceptional achievement during the first ten years of an engineering career. Parikh received his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington in 2007.
Tapan Parikh is transforming the world’s poorest areas by harnessing and translating technology. Parikh has worked in both rural India and Guatemala to address problems that hinder the open market. Working collaboratively with communities, he designs, evaluates, and deploys appropriate information systems that support sustainable economic development.
In India, Parikh realized that the efforts of microfinance groups suffered from poor paper-based record keeping. He developed cell phone software that allows a user to take a bar code picture. The interface then automatically prompts the user, with voice prompts for the illiterate, to input the numbers. The result is greater transparency, accurate record keeping, and a higher loan success rate. It's a technique he also used in Guatemala, where he retrofitted cell phones so coffee growers can find the best bean prices and document their aid needs.
At the I School, Parikh teaches courses in Social Enterprise using ICTs for International Development , User Interface Design and Development, and Designing Rural Computing Applications. He also helps lead the school's program in Information and Communication Technologies and Development, and led a project in summer 2009 that sent students to East Africa to research the use of information & communication technologies to improve smallholder agriculture.
MIT’s Technology Review in 2007 named Parikh “Humanitarian of the Year” and a top innovator under the age of 35. He has received Intel and NSF fellowships and in 2008 was recognized as one of Esquire's “Best and Brightest.” Parikh is an assistant professor at the School of Information and holds an affiliate appointment in the UW’s Computer Science & Engineering department. He has 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.
A dinner ceremony honoring Parikh and the other Diamond Award winners will be held on Friday May 7, 2010, at the University of Washington.
