Green Dorm

I am a Lecturer in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University where I teach CEE124/224a: Sustainable Development Studio, a multidisciplinary student research course centered on the new Living Lab residence on Stanford Campus. I served as a science adviser to the Green By Design exhibit at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose by appointment through the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford and taught green design, social robotics and entrepreneurship at Yale University. I am the founder of Vestal Design Atelier, a multidisciplinary ecodesign firm specializing on web design, human factors and product design and a presenter as part of Al Gore's project on the Climate Crisis.

We want to enable residents of the new Living Laboratory (aka the green dorm) to see and understand their natural resource consumption (water, natural gas, electricity) as well as act to maximize their resource efficiency. We have green dorm student researchers ready to give help and feedback.

Digital Hero Book Project

HIV/Aids, poverty, violence and unemployment affect a large proportion of youth in Southern and Eastern Africa. An indication of this is an estimated orphan population of 12 million in 2001. To help address these issues, REPSSI (Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative) provides psychosocial (social and emotional) technical support to over 60 implementing partners, including those in the Western Cape province of South Africa (SA). A hero book is a low-cost, simple and effective form of psychosocial support (PSS) where a child is the author, illustrator, main character (hero) and editor of a paper-based book that is designed to help them deal with life’s challenges.

For various reasons, current hero booking and digital storytelling efforts
are limited in reach; by operating through existing ICT facilities the DHBP
helps to address this issue. Khanya, the Western Cape Education Department’s
award-winning “Technology in Education” initiative, has recognised digital
hero booking as a way to improve e-literacy levels, teach related issues
such as web publishing and child safety on the internet, build social
inclusion by giving the youth a voice and, by sharing stories online, help
foster community development.

Learn, Play, Act

I am developing an educational CD to contextualize subject matter (like geography, math, chemistry) with everyday life issues (like water). WaterWorks is a fun, interactive educational simulation game on water issues based on real data. This game will be played by 8th - 12th grade students (13-17yrs old) in rural government schools in India. The game is divided into 5 missions - each on a different water related topic. The goal of this game is make students LEARN, PLAY AND ACT - They will learn about water issues (conservation, pollution etc), play the game (missions of the game correlated to learning topics like conservation, pollution etc) and act by taking water samples and submitting the results to government officials.

The reality in India is that there are at least 5 students per computer. Microsoft Research has agreed to the use of their MultiPoint technology for my project. Through this technology one computer can be connected to multiple mouse. I would like HCI students in building an application for the game using MultiPoint technology. If we comeup with a fantastic application, we can participate in Imagine Cup - this year's them is "Education"! More at imaginecup.com/multipoint/default.aspx. Although the competition is outside the purvue of the HCI class, it could be fun.

Y-Fi

Y-Fi's mission is to foster lasting positive change in the financial preparedness of marginal youth worldwide. Y-Fi accomplishes its mission by working with marginal youth as co-creators of mobile games that have a financial literacy educational component. Thus far Y-Fi has created one mobile game, Fine$Ball, and is in the process of creating who additional games.

Our first product is Fine$Ball is a Flash Lite mobile game developed collaboratively by Y-Fi, a Stanford based start-up and 6 high school students from BUILD (www.build.org), an after school program based in East Palo Alto that motivates underserved students to succeed in school by helping them start their own businesses. Fine$Ball teaches the twin concepts of risk/reward and compound interest by allowing the player to manage the finances of a basketball team. Round after round the player must allocate funds to pay off debt, invest in short term advertising and long-term team development while choosing team strategy and playing key shots.

Mobile Disease Surveillance System

Disease surveillance is an important aspect of any public health-care programme that serves two essential purposes, one of which is monitoring the progress of ongoing medical interventions for disease reduction, and the other is for the early detection of outbreaks to initiate investigative and control measures. Disease Surveillance is also a basic tool for the field epidemiologist as surveillance data provide a scientific basis for implementation of an appropriate health-care policy, disease control decisions, the evaluation of the efficacy of surveillance initiatives, and for the allocation of resources in the primary health-care system.

An active surveillance system must be designed to prevent and localize outbreaks, and provide timely and appropriate response where most needed. As our world shrinks with the constant trans-border movement of people, our ability to prevent, detect, respond and contain infectious diseases is key to managing global health.

The Government of India runs disease surveillance programmes that deploy a large number of health workers to survey over 700 million rural population for communicable diseases. However, according to published data there are annually over 2 million cases of malaria, 1.8 million new cases of TB, and many cases go undetected due to inadequate health surveillance data. Health- care workers visit target communities at periodic intervals to conduct surveys, enter data in pre- formatted registers and manually generate reports. Inaccuracies in data collection and latencies in the manual process of transmission of data often result in long response times and consequent loss of human life. An integrated disease surveillance programme (IDSP) is now being rolled out in phases but field data collection continues to be pen-and-paper based. This is where we see a major gap that can be addressed through the use of mobile technologies.

Project VIEW

Project VIEW uses digital storytelling with cameraphones for cross-cultural
connections. It encourages thoughts about a particular issue or perspective
by using the narrative, first-person construction of storytelling. This is
supported by simple digital media captured with camera phones or other
relatively low-cost devices.

These digital stories are shared via an online service which supports
existing efforts to bridge cultural and geographic boundaries.

John's experimental video blog is at http://projectview.blogspot.com

Small Is Beautiful: How Can 1 Million Feel Friendly?

How does the world's largest education network maintain intimacy even as it grows?

Nearly 20 years ago, when the International Education and Resource Network (iearn.org) started, the network attracted early adopters who met one another at the annual conference and maintained personal friendships. Today the network includes more than 20,000 teachers in 115 countries, and ministries of education are including the projects in their national curriculums.

A small core of these teachers live in Brasilia, where they use iEARN projects to give English and Spanish-language students in public schools a chance to use the language P2P. (Note: In order to attend any university in Brazil, students must pass a national exam in either English, Spanish or French.) Cathy Healy is working with her iEARN-Brasil partners to bring more teachers into the network . She would like help from HCI to prototype a Brazilian portal that draws new teachers into the network. 

ICE: Information, Communication, Entertainment

ICE is a broadband wireless network initiative that will transform 100 Nigerian universities into digital campuses by connecting them to each other and to the world.  The digital campuses will serve as hubs for digital cities whose success will fuel a regional rollout.  This affordable community-driven infrastructure/content play is sustained by a scalable subscription business model.  The venture is incubated at Stanford University's Reuters Digital Vision Program and is being developed in partnership with Cisco Systems, NeGSt Global (Nigeria’s eGovernment implementation managers), and other leading technology companies. 

The ICE wireless research and social network will allow Nigeria's 1 million higher-ed students and professors to create and share applications and local content using a mobile-capable software platform.  Each university will have a wireless mesh campus network and 300 thin clients (per 10,000 students) pulling content from terabyte servers on a gigabyte network.