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MIT Sidney Pacific Presidential Fellows Distinguished Lecture "Designing Technologies for Global Social Inclusion" by Dr. Bill Thies and Dr. Indrani Medhi Thies
Designing Technologies for Global Social Inclusion
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Abstract
The benefits of novel technologies are often out of reach for the poorest billion on the planet. In addition to making things faster, bigger, and more complex, can we make things radically cheaper, simpler, and more inclusive? In this talk, we will describe some of our successes, failures, and lessons learned in designing such "frugal technologies" in India over the past ten years. Drawing on projects in health and other domains, we will synthesize our experiences into a set of recommendations for anyone seeking to have social impact via technology.
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Bio
Dr. Bill Thies and Dr. Indrani Medhi Thies are researchers at Microsoft Research. Bill was trained as a computer scientist, earning his B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from MIT. His distinctions include the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. Indrani was trained in architecture and design, earning her Ph.D. from IIT Bombay. She has been recognized with an MIT TR35 award as well as the ACM SIGCHI Social Impact award. After living and working in India, Bill and Indrani recently shifted to Cambridge and are excited to re-engage with the MIT community.
CoSI is a graduate student organization dedicated to stimulate and foster intellectual exchanges among the MIT community. We contribute to the MIT's Office of Graduate Education's vision to foster academic excellence and quality of life for MIT's community of graduate students. Over the decade, the CoSI have had the privilege of hosting a diverse set of distinguished speakers, including Rafael Reif (MIT President), Dr. Rai Weiss (Nobel Laureate), Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor Emeritus), and others.
