The Distributed Sensing and Computing Over Sparse Environments (DISCOVER) testbed is a pioneering cyberinfrastructure initiative designed to advance research in distributed computing and networking tailored to rural, remote, and sparsely populated regions. Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), DISCOVER integrates a network of configurable Internet-of-Things (IoT) nodes—including stationary sensors, drones, and terrestrial rovers—across three key sites: Northern Arizona University (NAU), Clemson University, and Navajo Technical University (NTU). This collaboration offers a unique platform to explore innovative algorithms and methodologies addressing the technical challenges of under-served areas, with an emphasis on environmental and civil disaster response. The testbed enables a wide range of experiments, such as regional-scale data collection, heterogeneous networked services, distributed artificial intelligence (AI), distributed multi-robot control, and communication-aware software for resource-constrained networks. An online portal enhances accessibility, allowing researchers to request resources, upload experimental code, and retrieve data, with pre-integrated deep learning models for applications like human posture detection, object detection, and wildfire detection. This paper outlines the testbed’s architecture, operational sites, supported experiment types, ongoing research efforts, and its educational and outreach impacts, highlighting its role in fostering scientific innovation.

Crowdsourced data collection is a scalable approach to collecting mobile broadband performance data across space. However, existing platforms for crowdsourced mobile broadband measurements are not designed to engage workers over time or space, which can lead to spatial misrepresentation and stale data. With the insight that games and play offer naturally engaging frameworks for users, we held five iterative, participatory design sessions with 11 participants to co-design a catalog of 11 game concepts that could be used to create more spatially representative mobile broadband data sets. Importantly, we found that while games varied substantially with respect to theme, all used a few common game mechanics to incorporate mobile broadband data collection into play. This indicates that a designed prototype might focus on offering a customizable gaming structure that would allow communities and individuals to create thematic content that could overlay onto a set of common mechanics that could support more representative geospatial data collection.

In 2011, the United Nations declared Internet access to be a basic human right. Achieving universal Internet access has been a longstanding goal of governments around the world. In the United States (US), provision depends primarily on decisions made by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) driven essentially by commercial market concerns. To encourage deployment in underserved regions, the US federal government has recently allocated unprecedented funding, with distributions guided by the information in broadband maps, spatial representations of current Internet access and quality published by the Federal Communication Commission. Yet, these maps are known to be inaccurate, especially for populations that are marginalized, such as tribal and rural residents. We are interested in the collaborative and contentious efforts to repair the data contained in broadband maps, and particularly by the efforts of citizen groups and local government to counter claims made by ISPs. In this paper, we study these efforts via interviews of 14 individuals involved in various local and regional roles, in policy, IT, advocacy, and research. We draw upon frameworks of repair and of data activism to ask who does this work and why; what tangible and intangible tools are brought to bear; and how the structural context simultaneously empowers and burdens repair workers. In doing so, we make three contributions: (i) we critique the process and system for broadband map repair for the burdens it places on historically marginalized groups to demonstrate how they have been left out of expansion and how their experiences are otherwise silent in official records; (ii) we bring together analytical concepts from repair and data arenas to examine repair work that is substantially shaped by socio, political, and economic context; and (iii) we illustrate how viewing broadband data workers as activists reveals the inadequacy of current tools and the opportunity for better support for their long-term, contextualized, and mediated efforts.

Disruption to routines is an increasingly common part of everyday life. With the roots of some disruptions in the interconnectedness of the world and environmental and socio-political instability, there is good reason to believe that conditions that cause widespread disruption will persist. Individuals, communities, and systems are thus challenged to engage in resilience practices to deal with both acute and chronic disruption. Our interest is in chronic, everyday resilience, and the role of both technology and non-technical adaptation practices engaged by individuals and communities, with a specific focus on practices centered in nature. Foregrounding nature's role allows close examination of environmental adversity and nature as part of adaptivity. We add to the CSCW and HCI literature on resilience by examining long-distance hikers, for whom both the sources of adversity and the mitigating resilience processes cut across the social, the technical, and the environmental. In interviews with 12 long-distance hikers we find resilience practices that draw upon technology, writ large, and nature in novel assemblages, and leverage fluid configurations of the individual and the community. We place our findings in the context of a definition for resilience that emphasizes a systems view at multiple scales of social organization. We make three primary contributions: (1) we contribute an empirical account of resilience in a contextual setting that complements prior CSCW resilience studies, (2) we add nuance to existing models for resilience to reflect the role of technology as both a resilience tool and a source of adversity, and (3) we identify the need for new designs that integrate nature into systems as a way to foster collaborative resilience. This nuanced understanding of the role of technology in individual and community resilience in and with nature provides direction for technology design that may be useful for everyday disrupted life.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has recently released official technical requirements for its Broadband Data Collection (BDC) processes, with the purpose of improving the accuracy of broadband coverage data in the United States. A key process in the BDC establishes the opportunity for communities to crowdsource Internet measurements that may dispute coverage data maintained by Internet service providers. This process outlines complex requirements that may provide a substantial barrier to community participation. In this poster we share the design of a network measurement tool suite and the requirements for a community coordination tool to support community-led efforts to challenge official reports. Our design is based on “counter-data action” principles, which call unethical and authoritative uses of data into question.

Globally, 43% of households lack Internet access, primarily in regions where deployment and/or service costs are prohibitive, including in the least developed countries, rural locations, and regions with high concentrations of ethnic minorities and low-income populations. Unfortunately, this lack of Internet access increasingly equates to a lack of access to essential services, such as healthcare, education, and economic opportunities. In an environment of marginal economics, creative and varied approaches to obtaining access have flourished, including Internet kiosks long popular in the Global South, libraries as public access in the Global North, parking lot use of open WiFi access points, and spectrum-based solutions such as TV whitespace links and citizen band radio. In the near future, local 5G and the deployment of satellite constellations promise yet additional options in the price/performance space for access. In this context we are interested in the following research question: How can the presence of multiple networks, with different price, performance, and geographic reach profiles, be best used in concert to improve access to critical services? We propose that a robust answer to this question bears a holistic, cross-layer examination of new communication paradigms, network architecture innovation, and application design. We make this concrete by running to ground a specific case study of two networks, one high performance yet limited in geographic scope and the other low performance yet pervasive. Specifically our LoRaX (LoRa eXtends the Internet) system combines high bandwidth but non-pervasive Internet access with a low data rate, low power, yet ubiquitious network made possible by IoT developments. By focusing on two networks with extreme differences, we explore a design space that offers users new opportunities for participating in Internet-based services–even when high speed Internet connectivity is intermittent. We also reflect on the generality of the environment and our solution approach for future multi-network settings.

Cellular network performance does not cleanly generalize. A variety of factors, such as location, terrain, signal quality and network load, affect the performance of services delivered over LTE networks. As a result, the presence of LTE coverage does not always equate to usable service; coverage can be of poor quality, or it can be congested and difficult to access. Given that reliance on LTE networks for Internet connectivity has exploded, it is critical to understand the quality of experience for applications delivered over these networks in a variety of scenarios. To this end, we develop a robust measurement suite that we use to conduct a unique measurement campaign in tribal, rural, congested urban and uncongested urban regions, representing a variety of under-provisioned, congested, and well-provisioned operational LTE networks run by four major providers. Our analysis confirms that the performance of LTE networks in tribal and rural areas is typically worse than even heavily congested urban networks. More specifically, in the regions that we study, LTE networks in under-provisioned (tribal/rural) areas have $ 9\times$ poorer video streaming quality, $ 10\times$ higher video start-up delay, undergo more than $ 10\times$ the number of resolution switches, and lead to more than $ 2\times$ slower Web browsing experience as compared to urban deployments. We show that throughput and latency are $ 11\times$ and $ 3\times$ worse in tribal and rural locations, despite identical LTE carrier subscription plans.

Native American communities are disproportionately affected by a number of behavioral health disparities, including higher rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. As mobile health (mHealth) interventions gain traction as methods for addressing these disparities, they continue to lack relevance to Native American youth. In an effort to explore the design of relevant behavioral mHealth intervention for Native American communities, we have developed ARORA (Amplifying Resilience Over Restricted Internet Access), a prototype behavioral mHealth intervention that has been co-designed with Native American youth, a community advisory board, and a clinical psychologist. In this paper, we qualitatively analyze our co-design and focus group sessions using a grounded theory approach and identify the key themes that Native American community members have identified as being critical components of relevant mHealth designs. Notably, we find that the Native American youth who participated in our focus groups desired a greater level of didactic interaction with cultural and behavioral health elements. We conclude with a discussion of the significant challenges we faced in our efforts to co-design software with Native American stakeholders and provide recommendations that might guide other HCI researchers and designers through challenges that arise during the process of cross-cultural design.

Researching and designing Internet infrastructure solutions in rural and tribal contexts requires reciprocal relationships between researchers and community partners. Methodologies must be meaningful amid local social textures of life. Achieving transdisciplinarity while relating research impacts to partner communities takes care work, particularly where technical capacity is scarce. The Full Circle Framework is an action research full stack development methodology that foregrounds reciprocity among researchers, communities, and sovereign Native nations as the axis for research purpose and progress. Applying the framework to deploy television white space infrastructure in sovereign Native nations in northern New Mexico reveals challenges for rural computing, including the need to design projects according to the pace of rural and tribal government workflows, cultivate care as a resource for overworked researchers and community partners, and co-create a demand for accurate government data around Internet infrastructures in Indian Country and through rural counties.

introduction Introduction: Performing Rurality with Computing Share on Authors: Norman Makoto Su Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University BloomingtonView Profile , Jean Hardy Michigan State University Michigan State UniversityView Profile , Morgan Vigil-Hayes Northern Arizona University Northern Arizona UniversityView Profile , Tiffany Veinot University of Michigan University of MichiganView Profile , Rob Comber KTH Royal Institute of Technology KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 28Issue 3July 2021 Article No.: 16epp 1–13https://doi.org/10.1145/3461832Online:03 July 2021Publication History 0citation126DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads126Last 12 Months126Last 6 weeks17 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

We investigate Internet traffic logs on rural Native American reservations in California served by a tribally-owned Internet provider. The anonymous user browsing traffic and device preferences create unique failure patterns that reveal where connectivity is not well-served by standard networking technology. Geographical and cultural marginalization has lead to distinctive Internet usage when connectivity is available. For instance, residents commonly visit websites that are not as popular in the wider United States; and mobile devices dominate web request traffic, often with content-heavy video and media downloads, despite sustaining a higher rate of failure than desktop devices. This statistical analysis of passive measurements avoids institutional and cultural biases and ensures continuing research will contribute to a decolonizing narrative of Native American informational practices and values. Based on our analysis, we propose follow-up research angles to better understand the technological and social drivers behind these findings in order to improve user experience in this, and similar, networks.

Despite widespread LTE adoption and dependence, rural areas lag behind in coverage availability and quality. In the United States, while the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates mobile broadband, reports increases in LTE availability, the most recent FCC Broadband Report was criticized for overstating coverage. Physical assessments of cellular coverage and quality are essential for evaluating actual user experience. However, measurement campaigns can be resource, time, and labor intensive; more scalable measurement strategies are urgently needed. In this work, we first present several measurement solutions to capture LTE signal strength measurements, and we compare their accuracy. Our findings reveal that simple, lightweight spectrum sensing devices have comparable accuracy to expensive solutions and can estimate quality within one gradation of accuracy when compared to user equipment. We then show that these devices can be mounted on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) to more rapidly and easily measure coverage across wider geographic regions. Our results show that the low-cost aerial measurement techniques have 72% accuracy relative to the ground readings of user equipment, and fall within one quality gradation 98% of the time.

In the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, a record number of Native American candidates ran for office at all levels of government. To better understand how these 104 candidates intersected with Indigenous political issues and movements to increase Native American voter turnout, we study 723,269 tweets about or by these candidates and 15,476 tweets associated with the #NativeVote movement between October 6, 2018 and February 5, 2019. We use a mixed methods approach to identify issues that emerge in the Native Candidates data set, including issues of representation and protean usage of the "Make America Great Again" hashtag #maga. When examining the feeds of selected candidates, we find that there can be a disconnect between the issues that candidates align themselves with on social media and the issues that they are associated with by others. We also find evidence of Indigenous issues spanning a vast political spectrum and being coupled with other issues in different ways by different candidates and audiences. Finally, we examine the intersection between Native American candidates and the\#NativeVote movement to discover emergent issue networks, including networks around voter suppression and Indigenous political action. Critically, we discuss how our interdisciplinary Indigenous feminist approach to social media analysis illuminates issues of marginalized communities in both a systematic and inductive manner that allows us to discover new patterns and issues with limited a priori knowledge about a complex system.

When a disaster strikes a city, conventional information networking infrastructure can be damaged or completely lost, leading to suffering or loss of life. These consequences are avoidable with the introduction of an urban networking fabric for emergency services. We describe here an overall design for a Network for Urban Emergency Services (NUES) that provides essential communication services during disasters and post-disaster recovery. The core of NUES is a dense wireless networking fabric composed of low-cost wireless nodes. Because each node is autonomously powered, and NUES takes advantage of satellite networking services, the overall NUES architecture can be independent of all other (conventional) infrastructure, depending only on users' battery-powered devices (such as cell phones or tablets) and satellite data services. But it also has the ability to exploit conventional infrastructure (in particular cellular wireless) to reduce cost and provide greater bandwidth to users. Since some NUES nodes themselves may be damaged or lost, NUES is also designed for resilience, with redundant nodes connected by a self-healing network. Due to its dense coverage and modular node architecture, NUES also provides smart city sensing services the year around, greatly increasing its cost efficiency.

With fewer than 66% of eligible voters registered and voter turnout rates 5-14 percentage points lower than any other ethnic group, Native Americans comprise the least participatory ethnic group in U.S. political elections [42, 57, 49, 25]. While discourse surrounding Native American issues and interests has increasingly moved to social media [55, 56], there is a lack of data about Native American political discourse on these platforms. Given the heterogeneity of Native American peoples in the U.S., one way to begin approaching a holistic understanding of Native American political discourse on social media is to characterize how Native American advocates utilize social media platforms for connective action. Using a post-structural, interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, we use theories of connective action [5] and media richness [14] to analyze a Twitter data set culled from influential Native American advocates and their followers during the 2016 primary presidential election season. Our study sheds light on how Native American advocates use social media to propagate political information and identifies which issues are central to the political discourse of Native American advocates. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the bandwidth characteristics of content impact its propagation and we discuss this in the context of pernicious digital divide effects present in Indian Country.

While online social networks (OSNs) play a critical role in developing social capital [18], many communities are unable to utilize the benefits of OSNs due to lack of Internet accessibility. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of the Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS) associated with FM radio stations as a means to deliver social network content to OSN users who do not have access to Internet services. Using Instagram as a case study, we analyze data from 254 public Instagram users associated with the Tribal Digital Village (TDV) network in Southern California. Our analysis of over 1.2 million unique Instagram posts reveals that Instagram users in the TDV network interact with locally generated content 46.6× more often than content generated by users from outside the network. We use our observations of OSN usage to compare five OSN content scheduling approaches. Our evaluation reveals that up to 81% of users received at least half of their content requests and 35.5% of the 1.1 million requested Instagram photos were transmitted to users.

No abstract available.

With broadband penetration rates of less than 10% per capita, Tribal areas in the U.S. represent some of the most underserved communities in terms of Internet access. Although numerous sources have identified this digital divide, there have been no empirical measurements of the performance and usage of services that do exist in these areas. In this paper, we present the characterization of the Tribal Digital Village (TDV) network, a multi-hop wireless network currently connecting 13 reservations in San Diego county. This work represents the first traffic analysis of broadband usage in Tribal lands. After identifying some of the unique purposes of broadband connectivity in indigenous communities, such as language revitalization and cultural development, we focus on the performance of popular applications that enable such activities, including Youtube and Instagram. Though only a fraction of the bandwidth capacity is actually used, 30% of Youtube uploads and 24% of Instagram uploads fail due to packet loss on the relay and access links that connect the reservations to the TDV backbone. Although failure rates are prohibitive to the contribution of locally generated media (particularly videos), our analysis of Instagram media interactions and engagement in the TDV network reveals a high locality of interest. Residents engage with locally created media 8.2 times more than media created by outside sources. Furthermore, locally created media circulates through the network two days longer than non-local media. The results of our analysis point to new directions for increasing content availability on reservations.

Cellular networks are often the first telecommunications infrastructure in developing regions. By studying cellular net- work traffic, researchers gain insight into how technologies can be used to access services critical to further development. In this work, we approach a cellular traffic dataset provided by Orange in Cote d'Ivoire with the goal of identifying distinctions between urban and rural use of cellular infrastructure. We report on a number of interesting differences between urban and rural usage of cellular infrastructure. For instance, 70% of calls that originate in rural areas occur within the vicinity of the same antenna, whereas the same is true for only 23% of calls with urban origin. We are compelled to conclude that development efforts for rural areas might be implemented differently from development efforts in urban areas based on divergent use of current cellular infrastructure.

Studies of user behavior in cellular networks have served as a knowledge base for development of critical applications and services catered to specific user needs. In this paper we examine community persistence in egocentric social graphs extracted from cellular network traces in the Cote d'Ivoire provided by Orange. The goal of our study is to inform mechanisms for improved dissemination of information by identifying subscribers or groups that can serve as information relays. We find that communities that persist in an egocentric network are independent of one another. Thus, multiple information relays can be selected from each independent community, to increase the probability that information will flow to the ego.