While researchers have studied the benefits and hazards of crowdsourcing for diverse classes of workers, most work has focused on those having high familiarity with both computers and English. We explore whether paid crowdsourcing can be inclusive of individuals in rural India, who are relatively new to digital devices and literate mainly in local languages. We built an Android application to measure the accuracy with which participants can digitize handwritten Marathi/Hindi words. The tasks were based on the real-world need for digitizing handwritten Devanagari script documents. Results from a two-week, mixed-methods study show that participants achieved 96.7% accuracy in digitizing handwritten words on low-end smartphones. A crowdsourcing platform that employs these users performs comparably to a professional transcription firm. Participants showed overwhelming enthusiasm for completing tasks, so much so that we recommend imposing limits to prevent overuse of the application. We discuss the implications of these results for crowdsourcing in low-resource areas.

Visually impaired people (VIPs) face significant usability and privacy challenges using digital finance technologies. In this paper, we focus on investigating these challenges in the context of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) in India. To find out the accessibility status of ATMs across India, we first reach out to public banks, and then conduct in-person field surveys and an online crowd sourcing survey of 107 ATM machines across 4 cities in India. We find that less than 18% of surveyed machines are accessible, and follow up with 22 interviews with VIPs regarding challenges using ATMs. Based on insights, we design PocketATM: a system that enables VIPs to use ATMs using their own smartphones - a user can pre-authorize a cash withdrawal using a phone application, then go to any nearby ATM to receive the pre-authorized amount. Our usability evaluation with 19 VIPs demonstrates that PocketATM is usable, practical, and could be embraced by VIPs in India.

Software bugs are inevitable in software-defined networking control software, and troubleshooting is a tedious, time-consuming task. In this paper we discuss how to improve control software troubleshooting by presenting a technique for automatically identifying a minimal sequence of inputs responsible for triggering a given bug, without making assumptions about the language or instrumentation of the software under test. We apply our technique to five open source SDN control platforms---Floodlight, NOX, POX, Pyretic, ONOS---and illustrate how the minimal causal sequences our system found aided the troubleshooting process.

The distributed systems research community has developed many provably correct algorithms and abstractions that are in wide use. However, practical implementations of distributed systems often contain many bugs, and practitioners spend much of their time troubleshooting these bugs. In this paper we present an algorithm, retrospective causal inference, to ease the burden of troubleshooting. We end by enumerating several open research problems related to the troubleshooting process.

The Internet was designed to always find a route if there is a policy-compliant path. However, in many cases, connectivity is disrupted despite the existence of an underlying valid path. The research community has focused on short-term outages that occur during route convergence. There has been less progress on addressing avoidable long-lasting outages. Our measurements show that long-lasting events contribute significantly to overall unavailability.

Modern enterprises almost ubiquitously deploy middlebox processing services to improve security and performance in their networks. Despite this, we find that today's middlebox infrastructure is expensive, complex to manage, and creates new failure modes for the networks that use them. Given the promise of cloud computing to decrease costs, ease management, and provide elasticity and fault-tolerance, we argue that middlebox processing can benefit from outsourcing the cloud. Arriving at a feasible implementation, however, is challenging due to the need to achieve functional equivalence with traditional middlebox deployments without sacrificing performance or increasing network complexity.

We propose a new approach to mitigate disruptions of Internet connectivity. The Internet was designed to always find a route if there is a policy-compliant path; however, in many cases, connectivity is disrupted despite the existence of an underlying valid path. The research community has done considerable work on this problem, much of it focused on short-term outages that occur during route convergence. There has been less progress on addressing avoidable long-lasting outages. Our measurements show that long-lasting events contribute significantly to overall unavailability.

Over the past years, the Object Technology community has seen the birth of a number of new technology ideas that have changed the way we do computing. These ideas have affected compiler design, analysis approaches, project management techniques, user interface design, deployment strategies and implementation tactics. But where do these ideas come from? And how do they evolve? Do they address the needs as specified by members of the Object Community? Is there a way we can nurture the introduction and assimilation of these ideas to and by the community at large? And what are the market forces that bend ideas to their will. This panel will look at new ideas in Object Technology from a variety of perspectives and will attempt to get to the heart of the way that we, as technologists, create, buy, sell and grow ideas.