Information dissemination using automated phone calls allows reaching low-literate and tech-naive populations. Open challenges include rapid verification of expected knowledge gaps in the community, dissemination of specific information to address these gaps, and follow-up measurement of knowledge retention. We report Sawaal, a voice-based telephone service that uses audio-quizzes to address these challenges. Sawaal allows its open community of users to post and attempt multiple-choice questions and to vote and comment on them. Sawaal spreads virally as users challenge friends to quiz competitions. Administrator-posted questions allow confirming specific knowledge gaps, spreading correct information and measuring knowledge retention via rephrased, repeated questions. In 14 weeks and with no advertisement, Sawaal reached 3,433 users (120,119 calls) in Pakistan, who contributed 13,276 questions that were attempted 455,158 times by 2,027 users. Knowledge retention remained significant for up to two weeks. Surveys revealed that 71% of the mostly low-literate, young, male users were blind.

Religious donations are a very significant financial resource, and mosques as places of worship and as religious institutions, play a strong role in collecting such donations. This is especially true in developing countries, where cash-based donations are commonplace. In this paper, through 8 semi-structured interviews with mosque leaders (Imams) and finance secretaries, and three religious and government leaders, we present qualitative findings about various donation mechanisms and the religious and legal regulations governing such transactions. We then use these findings to present suggestions for a mobile-based application that digitizes the donation mechanism for local mosques.

Speech is more natural than text for a large part of the world including hard-to-reach populations (low-literate, poor, tech-novice, visually-impaired, marginalized) and oral cultures. Voice-based services over simple mobile phones are effective means to provide orality-driven social connectivity to such populations. We present Baang, a versatile and inclusive voice-based social platform that allows audio content creation and sharing among its open community of users. Within 8 months, Baang spread virally to 10,721 users (69% of them blind) who participated in 269,468 calls and shared their thoughts via 44,178 audio-posts, 343,542 votes, 124,389 audio-comments and 94,864 shares. We show that the ability to vote, comment and share leads to viral spread, deeper engagement, longer retention and emergence of true dialog among participants. Beyond connectivity, Baang provides its users with a voice and a social identity as well as means to share information and get community support.

Illiteracy is one of the biggest development challenges, especially in the developing regions. There are 785M adult illiterates in the world; one in every five people has little or no basic reading skills. Illiteracy poses the following challenges: It limits the ability to understand essential information, it increases unemployment, poverty and it has a negative impact on health.

We explore how telephone-based services might be mass adopted by low-literate users in the developing world. We focus on speech and push-button dialog systems requiring neither literacy nor training. Building on the success of Polly, a simple telephone-based voice manipulation and forwarding system that was first tested in 2011, we report on its first large-scale sustained deployment. In 24/7 operation in Pakistan since May 9, 2012, as of mid-September Polly has spread to 85,000 users, engaging them in 495,000 interactions, and is continuing to spread to 1,000 new people daily. It has also attracted 27,000 people to a job search service, who in turn listened 279,000 times to job ads and forwarded them 22,000 times to their friends. We report users' activity over time and across demographics, analyze user behavior within several randomized controlled trials, and describe lessons learned regarding spread, scalability and sustainability of telephone-based speech-based services.

Entertainment has recently been shown to be a powerful motivator for mastering new technologies. We therefore set out to use viral entertainment to introduce telephone-based, speech-based services to low-literate people in developing countries. We describe Polly, a simple voice manipulation and forwarding system that went viral in Pakistan last year. Seeded once by 32 low-skilled office workers in a Pakistani university, in 3 weeks Polly amassed 2,032 users and 10,629 interactions. From analyzing the traffic and its content, it is evident that Polly has been used extensively for entertainment and social contact, but it has also been put to an unintended use as a voicemail and group messaging facility. This demonstrated the potential for speech based services, and the pent-up demand for entertainment, among our target population. Also of note, Polly's viral spread crossed gender and age boundaries and even established itself in a female population. However, it appears to have not crossed socioeconomic boundaries.

BitTorrent is a hugely popular peer-to-peer file sharing system. In countries where broadband Internet is widespread, BitTorrent accounts for as much as 70% of the overall Internet traffic. In contrast, in developing countries, BitTorrent is almost unusable on the typically low bandwidth dialup connections.

We present a case study of an international distance education course involving two sites in the US and one site in Pakistan. We use the case study to examine the elements of the distance learning environment, and specifically how those elements can be best used to promote classroom interaction. In particular we discuss the effectiveness of two software tools for distance learning that we have developed: ConferenceXP for video conferencing and Classroom Presenter to facilitate interaction across sites. We bring special attention to the use of student artifacts including digital ink and text, and their use in the presentation of design proposals, the facilitation of critiques, and in the promotion of general interaction.

We present a middleware platform for assembling pervasive applications that demand fault-tolerance and adaptivity in distributed, dynamic environments. Unlike typical adaptive middleware approaches, in which sophisticated component model semantics are embedded into an existing, underlying platform (e.g., CORBA, COM, EJB), we propose a platform that imposes minimal constraints for greater flexibility. Such a tradeoff is advantageous when the platform is targeted by automatic code generators that inherently enforce correctness by construction. Applications are written as simple, single-threaded programs that assemble and monitor a set of distributed components. The approach decomposes applications into two distinct layers: (1) a distributed network of interconnected modules performing computations, and (2) constructor logic that assembles that network via a simple block-diagram construction API. The constructor logic subsequently monitors the configured system via a stream of high-level events, such as notifications of resource availability or failures, and consequently provides a convenient, centralized location for reconfiguration and debugging. The component network is optimized for performance, while the construction API is optimized for ease of assembly.

We describe an approach to automate certain high- level implementation decisions in a pervasive application, allowing them to be postponed until run time. Our system enables a model in which an application programmer can specify the behavior of an adaptive application as a set of open-ended decision points. We formalize decision points as goals, each of which may be satisfied by a set of scripts called Techniques. The set of Techniques vying to satisfy any goal is additive and may be extended at runtime without needing to modify or remove any existing techniques. Our system provides a framework in which Techniques may compete and interoperate at runtime in order to maintain an adaptive application. Technique development may be distributed and incremental, providing a path for the decentralized evolution of applications. Benchmarks show that our system imposes reasonable overhead during application startup and adaptation.

Users in the developing-world are typically forced to access the Internet at a fraction of the speed achievable by a standard v.90 modem. In this paper we present an architecture to enable offline access to the Internet at the maximum possible speed achievable by a standard modem. Our proposed architecture provides a mechanism for multiplexing the scarce and expensive international Internet bandwidth over higher bandwidth p2p dialup connections within a developing country. Our system combines a number of architectural components, such as incentive-driven p2p data transfer, intelligent connection interleaving and content-prefetching. This paper presents a detailed design, implementation and evaluation of our dialup p2p data transfer architecture inspired by Bittorrent.

This paper investigates the suitability of emerging tiled-architectures, equipped with low-latency on-chip networks, for high-performance network routing. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a continuum of software-based routers on the MIT RAW microprocessor. The routers presented in this paper explore 1) several design choices for mapping the routing functions to the RAW tiles, 2) the role and behavior of RAW on-chip interconnects for transporting and switching packets, and 3) the placement of packet buffers and their interaction with the RAW on-chip networks. Our experiments evaluate the performance benefit of streaming on-chip networks for transporting packet payloads, effect of buffering on the linecards, and the cost of scaling our design. Our software-based routers on RAW can achieve a throughput of 15Gb/sec -- an order of magnitude improvement over previous software routers on traditional general-purpose architectures and at least four times faster than Intel's IXP1200 Network Processor.

This paper presents the design and implementation of service-oriented network sockets (SoNS) for accessing services in a dynamically changing networked environment. A service-oriented network socket takes a high-level description of a service and opportunistically connects to the best provider of that service in the changing characteristics of a mobile system. An application states its high-level service requirements as a set of constraints on the properties required in a suitable resource and SoNS continuously monitors, evaluates and compares the available resources and (re-)connects to the resource that best satisfies the specified constraints. Unlike content-based routing systems, SoNS is an endhost system, interposed at the session-binding layer, and offers connection-oriented semantics. SoNS ’ interface allows an application to tailor the planning policy used to establish and rebind a network session. SoNS is based on an extensible architecture to leverage the wide-range of emerging technologies for discovering and locating resources in a mobile system. SoNS integrates a service-oriented abstraction with the traditional operating system interface for accessing network services, making it simpler to develop pervasive, mobile applications. We present an implementation for a mobile handheld device, analyze the performance of our system and describe an application to demonstrate the utility of our system. 1