Development
The MD4SG Development working group fosters collaboration and discussion amongst practitioners and academics to understand and tackle issues pertaining to the role and application of technology in addressing challenges in emerging nations and under-resourced settings. We study how techniques from algorithm and mechanism design, computational social science, and optimization can inform and help advance existing development policies and practices.
Ongoing Projects
Test & Attend: reopening schools
- Project Lead(s): Edwin Lock and Jakob Jonnerby
- Project Summary: This project aims to develop a
strategy for reopening and running schools amid a
pandemic (such as COVID-19) using minimal testing resources.
- Project Members (active): Michelle González Amador, Simon Finster, Francisco Marmolejo, Meareg Hailemariam.
Multi-Modal Data for Improved Prediction in Low-Data Settings
- Project Lead(s): Ezinne Nwankwo and Elizabeth Bondi
- Project Summary: In a lot of resource-constrained settings,
data is often scarce or hard to collect. We want to investigate
alternative data sources which may be more easily accessible.
For example, what if we could augment ground-level, crowdsourced data with
remote sensing data to potentially build a better predictive model and reach a better outcome.
- Project Members (active): Ezinne Nwankwo (Duke University),
Elizabeth Bondi (Harvard University),
Dina Machuve (Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology),
Chinasa T. Okolo (Cornell University),
Fanqi Zeng (University of Bristol),
Jimi Kim (University of Texas at Dallas), Shivam Gupta
Past Projects
- Rediet Abebe, Irene lo, Dina Machuve, Francisco Marmolejo-Cossío, Moses Namara, Ezinne Nwankwo, and Mwiza Simbeya. “Market and Mechanism Design Challenges in African Agriculture”. In preparation.
- Ezinne Nwankwo, Chinasa T. Okolo, Cynthia Habonimana. “Topic Modeling Approaches for Understanding COVID-19 Misinformation Spread in Sub-Saharan Africa.” In the AI for Social Good Workshop (Harvard University CRCS), 2020.
- Chinasa T. Okolo*, Michelle Gonzalez Amador*. “ACIPS: A Framework for Evaluating Patient Perception in the Introduction of AI-enabled Healthcare.” Accepted to the Data4Good: Designing for Diversity and Development workshop at the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI).
Selected Readings
- Okolo, Chinasa and MD4SG Working Group on Development. COVID-19 in the Global South Part 1. https://medium.com/@md4sg/covid-19-in-the-global-south-4ceefeb09165
- Newman, Neil, et al. "Designing and evolving an electronic agricultural marketplace in Uganda." Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies. 2018.
Working Group Organizers
Working Group Members
| Rediet Abebe |
Junior Fellow |
Harvard University |
| Michelle González Amador |
Ph.D. Fellow in Economics and Governance |
UNU-MERIT / Maastricht University |
| Pradeep Balachandran |
Technical Consultant |
Independent |
| Elizabeth Bondi |
PhD Candidate |
Harvard University |
| Siphelele Danisa |
Graduate Student |
Univ. of Toronto and University of Cape Town |
| Yves Dusenge |
Software Engineer and ML Engineer |
Eltoro |
| Olumurejiwa Fatunde |
PhD Candidate |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology/td>
|
| Simon Finster |
PhD Candidate in Economics |
University of Oxford |
| Cynthia Habonimana |
Undergraduate Student |
California State University-Long Beach |
| Meareg Hailemariam |
Adjunct Lecturer |
DAUST/td>
|
| Alex ben Hassine |
Predoctoral Fellow |
University of Chicago |
| Jacob Jonnerby |
DPhil Candidate in Physics |
University of Oxford |
| Lynn Kirabo |
Ph.D. Student in Computer Science |
Carnegie Mellon University |
| Irene Lo |
Assistant Professor in Management Science & Engineering |
Stanford University |
| Edwin Lock |
Research Fellow |
Nuffield College, University of Oxford |
| Dina Machuve |
Lecturer in Information and Communication Science |
Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology |
| Lindiwe Malobola |
Masters Student in Computer Science |
University of the Witwatersrand |
| Francisco Marmolejo |
Fellow |
University of Oxford |
| George Musumba |
Lecturer in Computer Science |
Dedan Kimathi University of Technology |
| Moses Namara |
Ph.D Student |
Clemson University |
| Ezinne Nwankwo |
Ph.D. Student in Statistics |
Duke University |
| Believe Ohiozua |
Undergraduate Student |
University of Benin |
| Chinasa Okolo |
Ph.D. Student in Computer Science |
Cornell University |
| Ahmed Olanrewaju |
Lecturer |
University of Ibadan |
| Ninad Rajgopal |
DPhil Candidate in Theoretical Computer Science |
University of Oxford |
| Regina Rex |
Undergraduate Student |
University of Wisconsin-Superior |
| Raesetje Sifala |
Masters Student |
University of the Witwatersrand |
| Jean-Michel Sarr |
Ph.D. Student in Computer Science |
University of Dakar |
| Mwiza Simbeye |
Machine Learning Researcher and Engineering Fellow |
AgriPredict and Major League Hacking |
| Michael Yimer |
Undergraduate Student |
HiLCoE School of Computer Science and Technology and Addis Ababa Univeristy |