Emails continue to remain the most important and widely used mode of online communication despite having its origins in the middle of last century and being threatened by a variety of online communication innovations. While several studies have predicted the continuous growth of volume of email communication, there is little innovation on improving the search in emails, an imperative part of the user experience. In this work, we present a lightweight email application codenamed InLook, that intends to provide a productive search experience.

India's extensive Self-Help Group (SHG) microfinance network brings formal savings and credit services to 86 million poor households. Yet, the inability to maintain high-quality records remains a persistent weakness in SHG functioning. We study this problem and present a financial record management application built on a low-cost digital slate prototype. The solution directly accepts handwritten input on ordinary paper forms and provides immediate electronic feedback. A field trial with 200 SHG members in rural India shows that the use of the digital slate solution results in shorter data recording time, fewer incorrect entries, and more complete records. The paper-pen-slate solution performs as well as, and is strongly preferred over, a purely electronic alternative. The digital slate solution is able to comfortably move between paper and digital worlds, achieving efficiency and quality gains while catering to the preferences and budgets of low-income low-literate clients.

Cellular radio communication is a significant contributor to battery energy drain on smartphones, in some cases inflating the energy cost by a factor of 5 or more compared to the energy cost of the base device. Stratus is a system to reduce this energy consumption by leveraging cloud resources to make data communication on smartphones more efficient. Using a cloud-based proxy, Stratus employs optimizations that adapt an application's incoming and outgoing traffic to better match the energy characteristics of the radio interface. The optimizations include (a) aggregation to bunch up sporadic transmissions, (b) asymmetric dictionary-based compression to reduce the number of bits transmitted over the air, and (c) opportunistic scheduling to avoid communication during periods of poor signal reception. These optimizations can be used individually, or in combination, subject to an application's delay tolerance. For example, using our Stratus prototype, the aggregation and compression optimizations together achieve up to 50% energy savings for web browsing, while the aggregation and scheduling optimizations together achieve up to 35% energy savings for a media streaming application.