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The ICTD Chicks

Introducing Elizabeth, Melissa, Revi, and Ruth


Elizabeth Basha, PhD Candidate, CSAIL M.I.T.
Elizabeth Basha studies predictive environmental sensor networks as a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work in the ICTD area began in January 2004 with a trip to Honduras where she met a local organization working on disaster mitigation. She began a project designing and implementing an early warning system for river flooding in the region. This system, which she will discuss in the panel and is now her PhD project, uses autonomous sensor networks to measure and predict the river level in advance, warning the government, relief agencies and the communities of the need for evacuation.


Melissa Ho, PhD Candidate, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley
Melissa Ho is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, and holds a BA in Computer Science from Cornell University, and an MSc in Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems from University College London. Recipient of the 2008 Yamashita Foundations for Change Prize, she has been doing ethnographic fieldwork, systems design and deployments with the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group in Ghana, India, Mexico, Rwanda, and Uganda since 2004. She is currently investigating how the introduction of mobile phone-based forms changes formal and informal social processes around health information management in Uganda.

Melissa:


Revi Sterling, PhD Candidate, ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado at Boulder
Revi Sterling studies the intersections of gender, technology and development. A doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, Sterling spent a prior decade at Microsoft leading efforts to promote women’s participation in IT. She will describe issues of gender and technology in a development context, and then will briefly discuss her research, Advancement through Interactive Radio (AIR), which aims to increase the status of women in developing communities. She will discuss her work in Africa and India, including strategies to empower women through technology, and the role that technology can play in alleviating gender imbalances.


Ruth Anderson, Lecturer, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle
Ruth Anderson is a recent PhD graduate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle where her thesis was in educational technology (classroompresenter.cs.washington.edu). Currently she is a part time lecturer in the CSE department at UW. For five years, she served as a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. Ruth’s perspective is that of an educator interested both in using work in ICTD to motivate and engage students and in educational initiatives in the developing world. She will discuss an undergraduate course where students worked on projects related to the developing world.