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United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Harnessing digital technologies to promote the inclusion and well-being of older persons.
Technological advances are becoming entrenched in many aspects of our societies and hold the potential to create opportunities towards an inclusive and sustainable development and provide tools to surmount the challenges faced by many to fully participate in the development process. However, where access to ICTs is limited and not inclusive, it can intensify existing inequalities and even create new ones.
Using Mobile, Social and Crowd Sourcing to Spot Geese and Learn About People
PhD candidate Osarieme Omokaro brought her mobile, social – and goose spotting – expertise from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to her summer internship at IBM Research. A Smarter Planet caught up with her recently to talk about her innovative Goose Spotter Android app and how the participatory nature of mobile computing can impact everything from the location of a goose to molding a country’s social policy
An App to Track Geese on Campus, Not as Silly as it Sounds
This week, I went on a mission. A mission to find geese. Osarieme Omokaro came with me. She's a doctorate student from Nigeria who's in her fourth year at UNC Charlotte. We drove around campus in the rain trying to find the geese that are usually hard to miss....
So, what’s the point of the app? It’s not really to learn about geese. It’s to learn about us. We can leverage the mobile phones of people to collect data for a scientific or a civic purpose. One thing we're interested in is: what motivates people to contribute data in these volunteer scenarios?
Making a Difference in Haiti
Spring Break for many college students conjures up images of warm sandy beaches and the roar of the waves. However, that wasn’t the case in April of 2012 for 12 undergraduate and Ph.D. students from UNC Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics (CCI) and five other universities that included Florida A&M University, the University of Delaware, North Carolina A&T, Johnson C Smith University and Indiana University/Bloomington. They had their sights set on three rural schools in northern Haiti as they embarked on a volunteer effort to share their computer expertise with teachers and mentors of young Haitian girls.
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GooseSpotter app assists researchers in understanding the effectiveness of incentives
Geese.
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They seem to be everywhere on campus. Walking, sitting, eating, pooping and attacking students.
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Now using a mobile application designed for smartphones by members of the UNC Charlotte community called GooseSpotter, it is possible to track when and where students see geese in the campus area. Dr. Jamie Payton, a professor in the College of Computing and Informatics and her research team, consisting of doctorate students Osa Omokaro and Scott Heggen, are the people behind this app.
Mad Science: Leveraging Research in Participatory Sensing to Broaden Participation in Computing
Imagine a group of sixth graders, armed with mobile phones and a desire to help their community, making bold changes to their world all through the power of the scientific method. No need to imagine; this is exactly what they do in the Mobile Application Development (MAD) Science apprenticeship at Citizen Schools. The kids get out of their seat and into their community, and instead of making them learn science, we let them learn science by doing science.