I am a software engineer at Google.
I'm working with the Access Strategy & Operations team
(formerly part of Google.org)
on sustainable solutions to access problems in developing regions.
Examples of the team's projects (in collaboration with many other teams
at Google) include deploying metro fiber networks
(in Uganda)
and pilots of mobile data tools
(SmartBrowse) and
TVWS (in South Africa).
Briefly, the facts of my life as are follows:
Research Interests:
I work in the areas of technology and international
development, human-computer interaction
and computer systems.
Technology and International Development
At Google, my current team develops plans for network deployments
(access strategy) and helps execute those that move forward (operations).
These have ranged from the highly conventional
(metro fiber
backhaul, urban
Wi-Fi networks) to the
highly
risky. We
have to model everything from wireless link budgets and network
traffic up to local consumer economics.
At Intel, I worked on
TIER, a
project in which Intel Research collaborated with U.C. Berkeley on the design of
appropriate technology for emerging regions. Various TIER
sub-projects had connections with Intel's former Emerging Markets Platforms
Group (EMPG). My published
research was based on fieldwork in Ghana and Kenya
and a field visit to Chile.
Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
My work in HCI has been highly interdisciplinary, mostly sitting in
the intersection of mobile computing and
human interaction.
I still participate in a project on mobile participatory
sensing called Common Sense. The
team at Intel Research
explored some technical issues in sensing environmental
air quality using mobile phones, but the key problem of interest for
us as HCI researchers has been to work with partners such as the
West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) to understand
how and why people become
engaged in citizen science and environmental activism. (Note that
environmental degradation is a key concern in emerging regions.)
I collaborated for many years with PARC researchers in the sociological
discipline of conversation analysis; their detailed understanding of
human conversational structure have helped us understand how
(technologically) minor differences in a system can have dramatic
effects on interaction.
| ... | An example of this work
is a system we nicknamed Mad Hatter, a mobile
audio space designed for use by small gelled social groups. This work
applied machine learning techniques to produce a conferencing system
that adapts to human conversation. |
| ... | As part of this work, Allison Woodruff and I
analyzed some fieldwork on young
adults using push-to-talk cellular radios, drawing on several
perspectives in computer-mediated
communication. |
| ... | Another example is Sotto Voce, a
networked electronic guidebook system that delivers audio information
in a way that facilitates face-to-face human interaction instead of
inhibiting it. |
All of this work on interaction has also lead to a renewed interest in
wide-area collaborative systems. I spent a lot of my
time at
sea sitting in front of networked tactical command-and-control
consoles.
Finally, I have some background in visualization:
information display technology, information visualization techniques
and visualization system architectures. This came through
working
with members of the Tioga
DataSplash database visualization project at Berkeley.
Data Management
|