Technology and Social Change 2018

For a couple years, I worked with some great friends of mine to try to build a startup that would encourage, promote, and teach language development strategies to mothers.  A child’s ability before kindergarten is predictive of long term outcomes (high school graduation, earnings, incarceration); there is a oft-cited 30 million word exposure gap between 3 year olds in high- and low- income families that is one of the causal links in this performance disparity.

Our goal was to figure out a sustainable way to build products and scale technology that could make an impact in the space.  To start, we decided to focus on tech-savvy, well-educated (high earning) parents that might pay for this kind of coaching, measurement, and feedback.  We built several prototypes and tested them. (A recording service that analyzed story-time and gave suggestions for dialogic reading techniques.  An app with little games that tracks your child’s development through their success with the activities.  A consultation service with child development experts.)

As individuals, we were not initially very well-equipped to address the problem; hence the many pivots. We had some expertise for automating language tracking and feedback, but at the start we were all young, childless men.  We brought a mother of two young kids onto our team to help rectify the situation, but it was quite late in the game.

For me, ‘predictable consequences’ of the work, at least at the time, are tough to assess.  So much of it seems predictable in hindsight.

Had we successfully cracked the market with any of these ideas, there were possible negative consequences– are we increasing and enabling neurotic parenting?  Are we taking advantage of parents’ anxiety about their child’s development?  Is a quantified approach to parenting healthy?  Since this is likely to be something only people who are aware of the problem seek out, will it simply exacerbate the poverty gap in early school performance?  There would’ve been obvious positive consequences as well, though.  What techniques can we learn from the best parents?  What decisions matter in a child’s development?  How can we cultivate good parenting skills in a scalable way?

We didn’t make it that far, though.  I have vivid memories of going into the homes of many parents, handing them a prototype, and watching them struggle to even glance at it while interacting with their children.  Things we thought were obvious about the UI were totally lost on parents that don’t live in a tech bubble world.  It was painful to see just how out of touch we were with the basic facts about a new parent’s lifestyle.

How predictable was it that we were out-of-touch with our vision?  My biggest regret is the amount of time it took me to step into the home of our first parents; it became clear quite quickly after that.  Parents of young kids are putting out fires on a minute-by-minute basis; aspirational thoughts of language learning and social development are a luxury.  While I still believe it’s an important goal, I don’t think it we were solving the right problem in the right way.

There were potential consequences of the technology we set out to develop that we never had to grapple with.  There were *also* plenty of real-world negative consequences in our design approach that impacted our lives directly.  Early on we were marked by indecision.  When we found focus, our prototypes revealed that we didn’t understand who we were designing for, how they lived, or what they needed.  This was *not* a pleasant lesson to learn.  Fortunately, a healthy dose of humility has a way of preventing us from repeating our past mistakes.

While I do not have a personal connection to Rainforest Connection, the highly-publicized project provides fertile ground for analysis.

Rainforest Connection (RFCx) has an ambitious mission: stop illegal deforestation, and in doing so, combat climate change. “If we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are there, we can have an impact,” CEO Topher White explains, “It might be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change.”

To achieve their mission, White designed a system of solar-powered cellphones installed deep within the tropical forests of Peru, Ecuador, Brazil and Cameroon. Automated algorithms process audio from these cellphones to detect sounds of chainsaws in real-time and send text messages to local communities to alert them about nearby activity.

Rainforest Foundation frames deforestation as a metaphysical problem: local people just don’t know when and where it’s happening. “It [is not] that the rangers [don’t] care; they just [can’t] hear the chainsaw whirring less than a half-mile away,” White claims. After all, we all know the thought experiment: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If stopping deforestation were a matter of information asymmetry, we would have solved it long ago.* However, the root problem is much larger in scope: consumer demand for agricultural products like beef, palm oil and soy drive over 70% of deforestation in the tropics. Kit-kat bars destroy orangutan habitat in Borneo; increase demand for precious metals in consumer electronics drive mines into the forests of Congo.Global market forces make the opportunity costs of conservation too high. Simply knowing that it’s happening won’t shift this calculus.

Poverty and urban expansion also threaten forests. Deforestation is upheld as a development strategy in many countries, such as Liberia, PNG, and Myanmar, which experienced wholescale leasing of remaining forests by government to private agribusiness and logging companies. Leading researchers on the topic have found that “powerful actors with a stake in deforestation often figure out how to get their way – whether using the rules to their advantage, or going around them.”

Deforestation is a complex eco-social-economic issue without a quick techno-fix. In this context, acoustic sensors are like smoke alarms without a fire brigade: they can help you know when and where a problem exists, but they can’t help put the fire out, or prevent arsonists from burning down your house in the first place.

Of course we all need fire alarms. But we also need phones to call the fire department – and we need them respond to our pleas, quickly. Based on my experiences working in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia and Uganda, even when locals know where illegal deforestation might be occurring – and they often do – myriad factors prevent “immediate intervention”: they lack the vehicles and fuel to travel long distances for investigations. They face threats to their livelihoods; in 2017, more than 197 environmental activists and defenders were murdered – a number that has been increasing in recent years. Their reports are ignored by courts and relevant legal authorities. Loggers are never fined; ranchers are never jailed.

No doubt White has good intentions and a laudable goal. However, one smells traces of Courtney Martin’s “Seductive Reductionism of Solving Other People’s problems” in his life trajectory:

It would have seemed absurd for anyone to suggest, back when he was a nerdy kid attending a San Francisco prep school … that Topher White was destined to spend his days traipsing through the trees… He spent his 20s as a peripatetic vagabond, dabbling as a hired hand at various Silicon Valley start-ups, dancing in a touring Neil Young rock opera, and building elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions at Dennis Hopper’s New Mexico estate.

Then, in 2011 … he took a side trip to Borneo to volunteer at a gibbon reserve…. and then baffled when, on a leisure hike, he came across a group of men illegally cutting down a tree.

White is a brilliant technologist doing what technologists do best: deploying gadgets at scale. Western readers love the story of a Silicon-Valley do-gooder, so perhaps it is no surprise that press about RFCx obscures the real agents of change – local people – by focusing on the genius of the creator or the ingenuity of the device. But while the technology itself scales, the complex governance, economic, normative and legal issues driving deforestation manifest locally – and are perhaps best navigated by an Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Brazilian or Cameroonian affected by these dynamics.

Given its simplistic diagnosis of the problem, RFCx makes for easy critique. But, being a relatively new project, RFCx might yet yield results; more data are required to understand its effects and potential unintended consequences over time. But in the absence of more meaningful interventions that address immediate barriers to acting on deforestation, as well as the root economic drivers, I remain skeptical. RFCx is like a very TED-friendly fire alarm, ringing while the house burns down around us.

*NB: my previous project, Global Forest Watch, also frames deforestation as a metaphysical problem: if we just give people real-time deforestation data from satellites, they will act. 

“would

you still want to travel to

that

country

if

you could not take a camera with you

– a question of appropriation” – Nayyirah Waheed

In Elizabeth Barret’s 2000 documentary film, Stranger with a Camera, she explores the murder of a filmmaker who sought to capture the War on Poverty in rural Appalachia in the 60s. She questions the role of the storyteller in shaping the narrative of a place. I find myself circling back to this film whenever I reflect on my past stints in the social impact world.

Who gets to tell someone else’s story? What is my responsibility in telling a story as an outsider?

Barret posits the extent to which the camera is a weapon, capable of representation and misrepresentation, and in doing so, has the power of creating or destroying worlds. She asks: What is the difference between how people see their own place and how others represent it? Similarly, as we saw in class last week, the journalist Amy Costello had a key role in crafting the narrative(s) of PlayPump which led to its initial success.

In 2011, I took the year off to volunteer with an NGO in the Western province of Cambodia. The NGO sought to “achieve sustainability and self-sufficiency through wells, irrigation systems, schools, training and empowerment.” In a country still recovering from the reeling 1979 genocide, access to clean water, sanitation, food, and education remains low. Further, widespread corruption stifles the distribution of international aid.

I worked on 2 key projects: i) grant writing, ii) healthcare and sanitation. In the former, I found myself looking for and hoping to tell a certain narrative; that of poverty-stricken Cambodia. I sought pictures to affirm donors’ perceptions (and perhaps, my own perceptions) of a “third-world” nation. Consciously and unconsciously, I was complicit in re-perpetuating the political and cultural domination of Cambodia through the images I had captured. To what extent did my camera serve as a tool to re-colonize the Khmers?

In the latter project, I worked with the health and sanitation department to design and assess the quality of water programs. My biggest takeaway from this project was the importance of co-design in impact work. Whilst the NGO had implemented wells in villages, my conversations with the villagers revealed that the shared wells had become a source of tension in the community. While the NGOs had assumed that the villagers would have no issues with the communal wells, in reality, the families wanted their own individual biosand water filters.

In retrospect, the extent to which I was least-positioned to tackle the issues I had sought to address couldn’t be more jarring. Fresh out of high-school then, I had nothing else to offer besides good intentions; intentions that fell short of redesigning water systems or implementing public health curriculums. Those were some sobering months indeed!

While instances of overt, aggressive sexism have decreased during the past half-century, sexism persists, more embedded. Internalized sexism is one of the more subtle forms of contemporary sexism, not extensively examined but surprisingly influential as some studies illustrate.

Internalized sexism is also prevalent in the perception of voice. A persuasive voice for public speaking and is often described as booming—loud, deep, and resonant—a quality more often physically tied to male voices than female ones. Female voices—quiet, less resonant, “weak”—are thus often given less authority. Female voices also lack representation, with females accounting for only 30% of speaking characters in top grossing films, for example. Many women subconsciously associate female voices, including their own voices, with weakness or lack of authority and ultimately connect themselves with such.

Man of My Words is a wearable self-feedback voice changer for women aiming to disrupt this self-association between voice and hierarchy. When they speak into the device, they will hear their voice real-time in a male voice, thereby having the perception of speaking in a male voice. Man of My Words aims to disrupt the association women make between their voice and social hierarchy. By this experience, women can hopefully attribute to themselves to the authority and power they usually only associate with men.

Full disclosure – this is not a project I have worked on, but one that I want to develop something similar towards as I work on my master’s thesis.

Loneliness is an epidemic around the world. As much as 40% of the population is estimated to experience loneliness as some point in their lives. It can impact all ages, ranging from small children, who, for medical reasons, cannot attend school, to the elderly who no longer live with anyone. Of those over 75 who live alone, an estimated 25% have no human contact for days at a time. Even though it is mental, it can manifest physically, even causing heart problems. [1] To start to understand and address some of these issues the UK has even hired a Minister of Loneliness.

The solution developed by the Norwegian company No Isolation to work towards loneliness in the elderly is called KOMP. It’s a simplified skype-like system for them to connect with their younger family members. No Isolation’s heartwarming promotional video shows a lonely older man eating breakfast in his kitchen while his granddaughter is far away struggling to build a birdhouse. She calls her grandfather over KOMP and they are able to connect while he gives her tips to assemble the birdhouse. In addition to video calling, KOMP allows family members to send photos and videos to their elders, for them to view at their convenience, making the isolated people feel more present in their family members lives.

The design of the system is an important aspect to its success. The simplified interface, with just one button, makes it easy for those not well adapted to modern technology to operate. Many elderly even have trouble physically operating something like an iPad because the dryness of their fingertips makes it impossible for the touchscreen to recognize their finger’s presence.

Benefits of the KOMP system include making elderly or isolated family members feel more connected with those in their family. This is particularly important when either families live so far apart, as is often the case in the United States, or when a family member has been isolated, when, for example, they had to be hospitalized for medical reasons. As many elderly go days without human contact, KOMP starts to address that issue by making it easier for the tech-savvy family members to connect with the less-than-tech-savvy ones.

Potential downsides include that this is a virtual solution. It’s possible actual physical face-to-face interaction is more beneficial than virtual ones. Additionally, as the system needs to be operated with the push of a button, it’s possible that even if isolated family members love the device, their health could decline so much that they can no longer operate the device. As a result, the elderly is a challenging demographic to design for. Both due to physical limitations in operating a device and mental limitations understanding how the device works. However, it seems that KOMP is a promising step towards making loved ones feel more connected.

Overview

I spent the past four years as one of the curriculum leads for a pan-African university that aimed to create a network of tertiary institutions across Africa. The principle goal of our work was to support young, talented Africans through intentional leadership development, an emphasis on project based, constructivist learning, and exposure to peers and mentors from across the continent and the world. Because of a lack of public investment in higher ed, we elected to go a for-profit route, raising money from mainly US and European investors. While this fueled our growth across Mauritius, Rwanda, Kenya, and South Africa, it also created a tension – pressure to scale and expand, even with patient capital, in the face of fine tuning and refining our learning environment.

Because of the scope of the project, I’d like to focus on a few areas of critique introduced in class.

Problem Definition: Were we solving the “right” problem?

We were addressing challenges related to lack of access to high quality tertiary education: In Sub-Saharan Africa only 9% of people enroll in higher education. Compare that to 27% in India, 36% globally, 48% in China, and 79% in the US (World Bank 2016). And data that we drew on suggested that there was growing demand for tertiary education.

Of the students who do make it to university, many struggle to find jobs. Even the ones who find jobs are often either underemployed or reported as lacking relevant skills, suggesting that tertiary institutions don’t necessarily support students to succeed after graduation – a challenge that we fleshed out more through research into other institutions. We attributed this to four intersecting challenges: (a) Wrong outcomes: Most universities do not prepare students with general problem solving, cognitive, or contextual skills to excel in complex, changing environments and at best do this accidentally (b) instructionist, ineffective pedagogy (c) poor linkages to employers or to career opportunities and (d) high cost of relevant training or opportunities.

However, I think we struggled with scoping the problem. For example, in our early days, we attempted to not only design a curriculum from scratch, but also tried to build important tech systems internally (e.g. a learning management system, admissions platform, etc.), which diluted our resources across a range of complex challenges. Similarly, we increasingly began to delve into diverse offerings beyond our “core” undergraduate offering – corporate short courses, an MBA program, executive courses, a second campus, and finally an unaccredited offering which we hoped to become our engine for growth.

On the one hand, we often created new offerings based on market “pull” (e.g. companies would be thrilled by our interns and then ask us to “do the same thing” for their staff). We also needed to keep generating revenue while our students remained in school (many were able to afford our university due to Income Sharing Agreements) and while we scaled up our numbers. We also pivoted our focus to a lower cost unaccredited offering because of a hypothesis that our main undergraduate offering was too expensive – and therefore our engine for growth would need to come from somewhere else.

While I think we handled the challenges related to outsider perspective (our team hailed from 20+ countries across Africa, 30+ countries across the world, with diverse disciplinary, and socioeconomic backgrounds; we were disciplined in participatory design with students, employers, families, and governments; and regularly adapted our design based on feedback from various stakeholders), I think we struggled most with incentives. Because we were for-profit and venture backed, and despite having patient capital that explicitly supported our efforts to iterate and refine our offerings, there remained pressure to scale before a number of us felt we were ready. Instead of running smaller, lower stakes, in market-experiments, we found ourselves launching larger launches with real students – and while we were open to pivoting and adapting, this urgency to scale often came into tension with efforts to refine.

Lastly, I think we underestimated the value of particular kinds of expertise. While we had a diverse and talented team, few of us had depth in learning design – and were developing these fundamental skills while building our offerings – one of the principal reasons I returned to grad school was to deepen my own expertise in constructionist learning design.

Despite these challenges, the organization is still doing quite well. We’re still being featured quite prominently (most recently on Bill Gate’s blog) – and I’ve seen the impact our work has had on our students and their respective communities (from a student who employees 40 people outside Kampala to students who’ve tinkered with ML and AI to develop all kinds of art and smart agro tech to activists engaged in political reform in South Africa and Zimbabwe). Like all organizations (e.g. similar to Mkopa from last week), we navigated and continue to navigate a range of design tensions. And hopefully will continue to balance these tensions productively.

For a brief period, I worked as a Smart Cities Fellow in Providence, RI. I was recruited from the neuroscience department here at MIT, by a newly appointed Chief Economic Officer hoping to incorporate behavioral science into his policy decisions. One of the first programs I was introduced to was Providence Talks, an early life literacy intervention program. Basically, UK put out a widely cited study showing children from lower-income families across the US hear ~30,000,000 fewer words than their peers by the time they reach kindergarten. This word exposure gap leads to an early education performance gap, as measured by literacy. 2/3 of children in Providence start kindergarten already falling short of national literary test benchmarks, and the city struggles with how best to include a largely bilingual child population in public school curriculums which are largely English-only.

The intervention relies on a new tech called a LENA device, essentially a conversation tracker–how many words are heard and said by a child, with a person, with a television, with a radio, alone…these numbers are then given to social workers and educational coaches, who use the data to speak to caretakers, who then use this advice to change the way they speak to children in subtle ways and increase words exchanged. The data, gathered from hundreds of low income homes across the city, shows the program is remarkably effective: 2/3 of participating children have had word exposure increase by >50%.

I worked next door to Providence Talks, from the Economic Development Department. There were early questions that came up in our discussions, different from the purely ed intervention side. Firstly, the system was setting up an efficient sort of audio surveillance, of the most sensitive members (children) of a vulnerable group (largely poor latino families), directly to a government body. The data was parsed purely algorithmically (this was meant to mean with no human influence), we were assured, with no audio recordings saved. Secondly, the system was built on a few assumptions that deserve questioning: that the results from the UK study generalize, that increasing word exposure at home via intervention is the same as living in a home which organically involved more word exposure, that this relationship is causal and not correlative, and that English language learning is necessarily what young Spanish-speaking children need.

The educators running this program were well aware–they gathered data not only on word exposure, but have begun gathering on relationship to longitudinal ed performance; they have begun a LENA based program for ESL, which aims to strengthen Spanish skills as well as English skills. They were largely bilingual themselves, and training coaches who came from the communities they were serving. The PVD Talks group have trouble addressing the LENA device privacy concerns, because none have a background in computation or speech processing, such that the input-output of the device from audio to word count is largely mysterious. But they have executed the largest educational behavioral intervention in the US, in hundreds of homes with thousands of children, on minimal funding from city gov (~500k), utilizing a new technology that is hard to understand, working alongside communities. And as a model, translating research to action at scale–which happened remarkably rarely with educational neuroscience–I think there’s a lot to learn from PVD Talks.

Adam

When we first landed in Baja, California, the question the M.Arch Core 3 studio had set out to answer–how can you design a winery for one of the driest regions in the world–already seemed wrong. We spent one week traveling from one winery to another, treated to drinks and food and admiration that was so clearly juxtaposed by the communities existing just outside of each winery’s wealthy purview. I will admit a certain excitement with all the spoils of our travel, from both the wineries and from MIT, but all of this came with a creeping sense of guilt. Who were we hurting with our presence?

The studio instructors, to their credit, encouraged us to address the political nature of the project. They would bring up questions of community, of public space, of water-saving techniques for producing wine that might help the winery minimize its impact on the existing infrastructures. But, of course, we were never allowed to ask the looming question: does Baja California really need another winery? Can architecture help with the issues that exist in the region, or will it, through both the economic and social costs of building, actually exacerbate the problem?

These are questions, I have noticed, that architects don’t like to ask. Nader Tehrani’s famous-within-the-department advice on how to begin your own architecture firm is to “never say no to a project.” Rem Koolhaas’s Junkspace makes a claim for the influence architects can have over the small moments of beauty and community within a building, even if the purpose and outlook of the architecture is the junk of its developers. All of these arguments begin from a dangerous claim: the proposed architecture will be built anyway; if you can do it better than it might otherwise be, then why not take the project?

One of the greatest oversights of this question relates to the community for which a project is proposed. Most US states–most countries–include a community review of building plans before construction permits are approved. This gives neighbors a chance to claim their right to views, to fresh air, to not facing another building’s back-end. It also often stops projects that seem detrimental to the surrounding community (too big, too corporate, too impersonal). This process (along with other permitting and financing challenges) stops a huge percentage of building proposals before construction ever begins. Hiring a well-known, well-respected architect often makes this process easier. An architect can make a not-so-great program more palatable to the public with promises of public space, minimal environmental footprint, and beautiful renderings. At what point does this become disingenuous work?

This question brings me back to the Baja California winery prompt we began our second year with. It is true, of course, that architecture above a certain size requires someone certified (architect, engineer, or otherwise experienced) to verify the health and safety requirements of a building. In that sense, architects are always needed. This does not mean, though, that architects are always best suited to address the problems of a particular region. Architecture is often a media that promotes itself–promotes development–in places that will not always benefit from it.

The answers to the specific questions given in class have been vague so far, so I’ll clarify a bit. A prompt like the Baja winery does not address the full scope of the problems in Baja, Mexico because it assumes as a premise that architecture must be a solution, and works backwards to discover problems architecture might address. The community surrounding is often only understood as a community to make some concessions for, although they are the people most affected and most aware of how architecture could help or harm. Architects, however, are working to convince communities of new projects, and these persuasions do not trust the community to know what will be good for them. The predictable consequences of something like a winery studio for Baja have to do with the related media. We know in school that our designs will never be built, but by supporting an exercise of creating a winery in Baja, and sharing these ideas and renderings and writings with the existing wineries and the MIT community, we are through just an academic project promoting the development of the region. Even if the projects are conscious of the environment and the neighbors, by the very fact that we must use architectural projects to address issues of the region, we are supporting development. I wish, at some point in school, we would be taught to just say “no.”

To me, it was the most absurd statement a digital leader for a top newspaper company could make — worse, I wouldn’t know until much later that the trajectory I helped set my smaller news organization on wasn’t much better.

“You simply can’t put the cat back in the bag,” he said, referring to his contention that there was no hope of reversing the newspaper industry’s practice of providing free articles online. He contended the future of newspapers — especially the local ones that do most of the heavy lifting in the U.S. when it comes to holding state and local governments accountable — was in rounding up as many clicks each month as possible.

My response: “We don’t have much of an option, we must put the cat back in the bag or we won’t have local journalism.”

I, having a few months earlier helped launch a new paywalled website at the small daily newspaper where I worked, bristled at his plan to focus his staff on what essentially was click bait. I contended readers would see the value in supporting their local newspaper by subscribing online, giving them access to both the racy crime articles AND the less entertaining, but more important coverage of how their elected representatives were steering their government.

They didn’t.

The problem is, neither of us was entirely correct. It was 2008 or 2009 and online news consumers were shocked by the notion of paying for their news online. They were conditioned, mostly by flippant practices of newspapers at the outset of online news, to consider digital journalism as nearly value less. Worse, we at the newspaper did little to explain the economics of local news to our readers and we proceeded to set a price for the online subscription that aimed to protect our print subscriptions, not to grow our digital audience. The backlash was awful and drove many to stop consuming local news as part of their daily routine — the exact opposite direction from where civic-minded local newspapers want to go. The fact is, we were nearly a decade early (payment systems were clumsy, prices were too high, only one national outlet charged for content at the time, and we failed to communicate the value of what we were doing).

Unfortunately, the digital business model that larger chain and many others adopted was fatally flawed. It relied upon digital advertising, mostly from national services, that today barely pay enough to cover the electricity bill at most local newspapers. The second hit for those organizations struck when the practice of aggregation proliferated. Those factors combined to drive many local newspapers out of business or at least to such low staffing levels as to render them ineffective. In some places, the shift created opportunity for new digital outlets to thrive. But the result for most has been the creation of vast local news deserts. 

In hind sight the outcomes all were predictable.

So what’s the real problem here? Certainly not that one business model may be driven into extinction by a newer, more technologically advanced one. 

No, the real problem is the lack of local journalism occurring in communities across the United States. Nobody is asking what the city plans to do about lead contamination in its water supply. Or what the state will do about PFAS groundwater contamination left behind at airports and military installations. In the worst cases nobody even knows those issues exist until its too late. 

Our solution didn’t work, neither did that of others who took a different path. And we likely weren’t the best positioned to provide solutions, nor were we asking and answering the right questions. We were far more concerned with how to ensure the survival of our news business model.

So the question is how do we make local journalism affordable, accessible and sustainable?

Hi everyone! I happily joined the class last week, so I will combine post 1 & 2 here.

I’m Julie and I’m currently based at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, as part of the think tank Data-Pop Alliance co-created by Sandy Pentland and Patrick Vinck (HHI, HSPH), where I lead applied research projects around the use of big data/AI for public policy and development – with a strong focus on the LATAM region.

I studied in France, where I graduated from two masters in (1) Gender Studies (Université Paris Diderot – VII) and (2) International Development (Sciences Po Paris). My program in Gender Studies (officially in “Gender and development” at the time), gave me (much needed) materialist-intersectional-feminist views about the “development field” that had a strong impact on both my studies and my personal socio-political perspectives.

So it is through a “development” approach that I got into the “tech for social change” field. The projects I am currently involved in look into leveraging CDRs and bank data to study crime dynamics in Colombia (focus on drivers of criminality) and Mexico (focused on the impact of crime waves on citizens’ routines).

Project reflection:

The following is not (yet) an implemented project – but one at the stage of conception being actively discussed with a Media Lab PhD student.

When I moved back to São Paulo in 2016, I volunteered at the National Committee for Refugees (the governmental body in charge of deciding on all asylum claims in Brazil). At the time, Brazil was receiving an increasing number of asylum applications, notably from Syria, as the country had adopted a “laissez passer” policy for Syrian nationals. There I worked as an interpreter for interviews but also answered (or tried to answer) the questions from asylum seekers and refugees that would come asking about procedures or oftenly to check on the status of their applications – which were taking months (sometimes up to 1-2 years). In 2017, I was part of a small team that conducted surveys in a Syrian refugee camp in Greece. Most of the people in the camp, had done their asylum request and had been waiting for several months already to hear back about their status – and their new papers that should allow for the start of a new phase in their lives. I vividly remember a young refugee telling us “Why are you studying our use of mobile phones? What we really need is to get out of here, study, work, continue with our lives”.

To summarize the scope of the problem: in both countries, and anecdotally in others, asylum services are extremely lengthy, frustrating and adding to the hardship of people that are eager and impatient to start building a better life. Part of the problem is surely that asylum services are overwhelmed with more demands than they were/are equipped to handle (in Brazil, we were a team of 20 volunteers, also doing contextual background checks to contribute to the asylum request processes). Bearing that in mind, we are exploring the idea of using an algorithm, built to improve the targeting of social programs, in a stage of the asylum procedure, with the goal to expedite the process.

The ideal person to address this issue would likely be a specialist of the legal and procedural asylum process (in each country of implementation) along with a data scientist well versed on algorithmic fairness and bias.

The first potential consequence harmful consequence I imagine could come from systematically unfair predictions – as certain cases will be easier to ascertain (for e.g. citizens from a war zone, such as Syria) than others (for e.g. an individual being politically persecuted in a “peaceful” country).  

The problem

Nobody loves when perfectly eatable food gets thrown out – yet almost every business which deals with food does that every day. Obviously, this nagging feeling may cover an array of different stances towards what the core problem is: The pure waste of food, the lack of distribution to people who cannot afford food, over-production, negative effects on the climate, inequality, luxury, carelessness of others, superabundance, … or capitalism? For certain, the full scope of throwing out food is a structural problem that needs to be fixed. Thinking about problem selection, the mere process of selecting what the actual problem is seem extremely hard, if not insurmountable, and requires years of research. Besides, one technical solution may not fix all the causes. So which cause is most important, which is easiest, which is the most effective to solve – they may not be the same. Is it possible – or good? – to fix a symptom of a larger structure and thereby try to at least diminish the effects of it? Could symptom fixing be a way to core structural change?

One solution among many causes

In 2015, some Danes from Copenhagen thought food waste was problematic, and decided to fix it in a way that works with the market forces as a lever of change. They diagnose the problem as having two centers: i) food waste leads to negative effects on the climate due to overproduction and ii) wasted food benefits the bins instead of those in need due to a lack of distribution. The project sought to fix distribution as well as overproduction at the same time. The project is informed by the literature on food waste, thus citing ’food waste’-expert Tristram Stuart, who states that one third of the world’s food is wasted (i.e. 1,3 billion tons every year – enough to feed 3 billion people/10 times the population of the US). So, what did they do?

They made an app called ’Too Good to Go’. The idea is to, in their own words, give ”stores a platform to sell their surplus food” for significantly lower prices. So far, this works surprisingly well. In less than two years, they have 5,000 stores and 3 million people signed up that in sum have ”rescued”, as they call it, 2,5 million meals. What the app did was to offer free visibility to (new) customers and thus increasing revenue of stores. Using a profit-based approach, the app incentivizes stores to sell instead wasting their food just before closing time, and thus utilize the market force as a lever for social change. The app charges a certain percentage of the transactions thus making a profit themselves allowing them to expand their capacities.

The vision of the project is to equal production with consumption, thus stopping a culture of overproduction. However, the project does not avoid overconsumption, and overconsumption may lead to producing more food (a sort of de facto form of overproduction). The app may simply just expand stores’ customer base thus lead to ’fake waste’ being produced that again may lead to producing more goods and thus produce more waste. But this problem is unverified. Another speculative but potentially positive side effect of this project is that it may lead to an increased awareness of food waste thus changing norms on a large scale. As such, food waste awareness may spill-over to other domains rather than being siloed in a business model for stores. Another negative approach to this project is a question: How many poor people do actually benefit from this? The project simply provides a platform for distribution, but does not offer social redistribution from the well-off to other sectors of society. So it seems that the project only focuses on solving one of their two diagnosed problems.

I’m writing about a project i did in high school, as gaining some time and distance from it has produced some reflections I think can be framed in terms of the questions asked in class. I spent the last two years of my high school career working on a program at my public school to help students find networks of other students and improve their studying skills and ultimately their school performance. This was meant to break down barriers to entry, whether financial or emotional, to more institutionalized programs like tutoring or even informally asking for help from teachers or other students. I researched and produced a proposal for an open peer learning space held in a couple of classrooms after school each week where high-performing and experienced students would volunteer to staff group study sessions and be there to answer any questions that people might have. We even produced study guides on popular subjects with notes and practice questions that we placed around the rooms for students to take home. My idea was guided by proponents of social learning and a desire to produce materials to help our huge and understaffed school population gain the resources to succeed as much as possible given our circumstances. This was the scope of my problem: within the bounds of my school, connect students with each other and enable them to get the help they need.

Who is best positioned to address the problem? Upon first reflection, the answer to this question is students at my high school, which included me! However, part of the problem was that there was a pretty clear divide on the amount of resources my school invested in the honours versus the regular program, and I wanted to break down barriers between students in those programs so they could help each other. So, to be more specific, a non-honours student who is struggling in school would be best positioned to address the problem. This is the demographic who would be affected by the program in the first place.

What are predictable consequences of the proposed solution? The most predictable consequence was simply that this project would fail to be adopted on a large scale by students and/or cease to exist after I graduated. I had read extensively about this kind of study program being used at other schools and universities, which improved my hopes about participation. But as with most clubs and events hosted on high school or even college campuses, participation rates are often a basic thing and a real worry.

While the study program really did help some people I was trying to help and was adopted by a number of students (and a lot of volunteers from the honours program), the rooms weren’t always full and I’m not sure if it continues to exist today. While the program was on the whole successful and its disappearance wouldn’t cause much direct harm, I continue to think about my own motivations in creating it, since in truth the development of the program was geared towards college admissions. I wonder about the ways I could have approached the program’s development if I had not been so bent on making this program succeed since I had dedicated so much time to it — perhaps I would have been willing to make major shifts in the structure based on student feedback, or share the direction and leadership of the project with the people I was actually trying to help. And I think this kind of problem continues to happen with justice-oriented work past high school, no matter how wholesome the original intent. What kinds of reflection are we missing when we’re trying really hard to get some grant, or some type of recognition for our work, or even just personal fulfillment?

Do we want hunger to exist at all or in more than 2% of the population? The world faces tremendous challenges to feeding a growing, richer world population — particularly, doing so sustainably, without degrading our planet’s resources and the environment. On a national level, Feeding America reports that one in eight people struggle with hunger and need $22B more per year to meet their food needs. These people are seniors, children, minorities, and rural dwellers. According to the Organic Trade Association, $65B is spent on organic produce yearly across the US, yet 74% of customers are concerned about the price of organic produce. These concerns have caused a greater need for locally produced fresh food and purportedly, 40M US households grew something edible at home in 2016 (National Garden Industry Survey). On a local level, one in four botany and horticultural graduates are unemployed while 34% of busy homeowners, need edible gardening help (Garden Research). It is important to note that 125M US households spend $75B on lawn care maintenance.

To address these challenges, we must deliver more food to the world through a balanced mix of growing more food (while reducing the environmental impact of agricultural practices) and using the food we already have more effectively. While individuals and organizations with the skills and motivation to lead systemic change are best prepared for such an increasingly complex and uncertain future, no company can solve it alone. Lisa Drier posits that we need to create networks of organizations to act together to reach common goals. To make any real headway on solving problems of this size, coalitions (online and offline) have to be both big and effective. And motivating dozens or even hundreds of organizations to work together — and making sure their work makes a difference — is extremely difficult when no one is clearly in charge (Drier). Terraformers is a startup that helps people eat more nutritious food at low cost through productive and networked backyard gardening, one community at a time. Perhaps with time and wild success, it may become our intention to take charge.

Only through a balanced approach of supply-side and demand-side solutions can we address this difficult food insecurity challenge. When we reduce food waste, rethink our diets and biofuel choices, help people to shift their diets towards more sustainable directions, and grow more food at the base of the agricultural pyramid with low-tech agronomic innovations, we will have a well-fed human race and a healthier planet. Global environmental scientist Jonathan Foley, rightly states that “an interconnected network of good farms —real farms that provide nutritious food, with social and environmental benefits to their communities” — will feed everyone including the World Food Programme’s estimated 66 million hungry children. Ultimately, a world where no one is hungry and self-sufficiency is reintroduced into communities will move humanity forward and is a future worth creating.

My freshman year, I participated in a winter session study abroad program in Sao Paulo, Brazil where I worked with fellow Harvard students and Brazilian students to help find a solution to Sao Paulo’s transportation problem. Hosted by Sao Paulo Transit and MobiLab — a think-tank/incubator for “innovative” ideas as it relates to transportation to Sao Paulo, this was my first encounter with human-centered design and the design process — so I didn’t have the critical skills to critique the process, the work I was outputting nor the focus.

This is to say the winter session program wasn’t perfect — not based on what I know now of the design process and what my values are when it comes to entering and working with a community. However, this project still remains one of my proudest ones thus far and I think it is important for these two ideas to co-exist and continue to inform my future experiences.

The full scope of the problem as presented to us by Sao Paulo Transit and Mobilab was how might we utilize aerial images to  eliminate traffic jams and relieve congestion of the overall transportation system within Sao Paulo? Looking back on this experience, I still have mixed-opinions on the structure of the program. To begin, I do appreciate the fact that we were given a problem to solve as opposed to a group of Harvard students entering a community we have limited to no knowledge about and deciding how we frame the solution. Had we been given the reins to frame and choose the scope of the problem, I imagine we would have been very off-base as to what problems we truly needed to solve. Similarly, I appreciated that this program was a joint effort between Harvard and Brazilian students and the institution that works on transportation to create co-design environment. However, I think the problem presented to my six-person college team was far too large for our given time period of 15 days.

During this short period of time, my team and I worked to create an image processing website that identifies aerial road images by width to support up-to-date spatial planning for the provision of urban services in Sao Paulo specifically designed for the local metropolitan level. This project hasn’t created any terrible impacts in the area to my current understanding. The real issue with this solution was the impact in which it actually had and our ability to execute said solution. Our goal was to help identify road-widths such that traffic could possibly be re-routed to allow the number of cars a particular road can handle thus relieving congestion; to standardize street widths for accessibility of pedestrians and bikers; lastly, to alert the municipal government to what roads might be most critical for them to update from a spatial standpoint. However, we were not the ideal group to craft this solution. Of the 6 college students, only 2 had any sort of background in image processing and not enough to build a robust image processing website. 2 of the 6 had no experience coding until this winter session — I was one of them, so I could really only learn and help with front-end development. After we brought this idea to a proof of concept stage, this program ended, meaning there was no one to continue the development of the solution, so it can actually be used. We left the code open-sourced so others at MobiLab or future program participants can continue with it; however, 2016 was the one and only year in which this program ran. Lastly, we created a solution to the problem, but I don’t think it was the best solution. Even if we built out this site, the actual effectiveness of the site would have been questionable; similarly, would this solution have actually been used by Sao Paulo Transit? We framed our goal to be narrow in who we impact. While up-to-date spatial planning could be beneficial to the local metropolitan area, traffic congestion and those most impacted by it extend way past the local metropolitan boundary.

This project had the potential to become something impactful. What the project needed were people who specialized in image processing, people who understood how Sao Paulo Transit operated and what tool could actually be used in their work, people who could correctly identify the target audience and someone who could dedicate the time to bring this project to life. This project has given me a lot to think about and questions I am still pushing myself to answer such as: What does is look like to enter a community that is not your own and partner with them? How do I engage in critical issues and output solutions in a collaborative manner that will actually create positive impact? How do I extend the confines given to me in future projects to give a project more meaning than what can go on a resume? How do I ensure my work can continue on without me? These are questions I haven’t yet found the answer to, but I will continue to pursue.

While an undergrad, I studied the role of arsenic in water systems with a particular emphasis on Maine. Arsenic has long been acknowledged to have an adverse effect on human health. Found naturally in the Earth’s crust, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over 200 million people worldwide are exposed to elevated levels of arsenic in drinking water. The WHO and US Environmental Protection Agency set a safety standard of 10 ug/L of arsenic, yet in large portions of developing countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Chile, As concentrations regularly exceed the safety standard. In the United States, the US Geological Survey (USGS) considers Maine, along with much of New England to be part of “the Arsenic Belt.” In a 2010 study conducted by the USGS of 174 towns with 20 or more sampled wells in Maine, more than 25 percent of the sampled wells in 44 towns exceeded 10 μg/L. In 19 towns, more than 10 percent of the sampled wells had arsenic concentration over 50 μg/L. While prior studies estimated that nearly 10 percent of domestic wells in Maine contained arsenic, the presence of “hot spot” regions of wells with more than five times the MCL for arsenic in the US had not been well characterized. This is particularly worrisome because nearly 40% of people in Maine rely on wells for their water supply.

The Top-Down Approach

In order to address the arsenic problem in Maine State legislators produced two pieces of legislation to promote well water testing; L.D. 1775 (2007) and L.D. 1162 (2015). Both pieces of legislation gained bipartisan support, yet both were ultimately vetoed by separate governors. L.D. 1775 required well-testing as a component of a contract of sale of real estate property and suffered stiff opposition from the Maine Association of Realtors who had issues with being placed in a quasi-enforcement position to ensure that water testing occurs. L.D. 1162 was a more modest bill to provide state funding for educational outreach to motivate people to get their wells tested and was vetoed by the Governor for ideological reasons.

The Island Approach

The duty of private water sanitation ultimately rests on well owners. Water use from a well can either be treated at the point-of-entry into the household or at the point-of-use. Point-of-entry treatment is typically done with anionic exchange systems. This method works by chelating contaminates to a resin bed and requires very little maintenance.  Unfortunately, these systems also run the very small risk of total failure where all of the captured contamination can be released at once. The most cost-effective method of point-of-use treatment is reverse osmosis, which uses a microscopic membrane to trap contaminants. This method is very effective at removing arsenic, more so than anionic exchange systems. Nevertheless, due to their small size, they can only produce a few gallons of treated water per day. Prices typically range in the $800-$3000 for arsenic specific treatment filters in either range, with point-of-entry systems running in the higher bound and reverse osmosis in the lower bound. Residents of rural areas, where well use is prevalent, typically have lower socioeconomic means than those living in more populous regions. As one might expect, this, in turn, affects the decision to invest in well remediation even in light of the known health risk.

Reflection

Neither option really provided me with a sense that the arsenic dilemma in Maine was adequately managed or handled. The legislative ‘solution’ seemed broken and the technological ‘fix’ was too cost-prohibitive. For me, then a student in Chicago with a clear line of sight to the greatest surface freshwater system in World, I didn’t feel it was my place to tell Mainers water to do. But perhaps at my vantage point, I could work to bring awareness to the issue.

Like the movies, popular music is both an influencer and an indicator of public opinion. Artists can use music to apply pressure to a political regime, and to explicitly communicate a feeling to a large group of people. A good example is Jimi Hendrix’ performance of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969, which expressed a complex combination patriotism and protest simultaneously. No words alone could communicate the same message.

It sounds like popular music is an opportunity to influence public opinion, but there is a problem. Playback on contemporary hit radio stations is the largest factor in determining which songs become hits. Record labels have a huge amount of power determining which songs get played on the radio. Songs that pop labels produce are not written by artists. They are written by songwriting teams, and engineered for mass appeal. It is difficult for an independent artists to create music that competes with the record label song writing machines. Childish Gambino is the exception, not the rule. This is where the geniuses in Silicon Valley will propose:

We’ll use machine learning identify the the musical qualities of the hits that Max Martin wrote for the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Pink, Avril Lavigne, Usher, Jessie J, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and many others. Then we can “disrupt” the business of writing songs, and “democratize” the process of making hits!

This is not a technology that I’ve worked on directly, but it is almost certainly a project that making its way into production at this moment. The problem: How can we insert greater diversity sounds and perspectives into popular music? While pop artist Ke$ha was signed to a label, her producers had commercial success selling her as a sexualized party girl with songs like Tik Tok and Right Round. But Ke$ha didn’t want to that to be her image. She wanted to remake pop music with a message and with her own voice, and this presents challenge. In the words of songwriter and lyricist Bonnie McKee:

“People like hearing songs that sound like something they’ve heard before, that’s reminiscent of their childhood, and of what their parents listened to. I mean, every once in a while something new will happen, like dubstep, where it’s like, ‘This is robot future music!,’ but most people still just want to hear about love and partying.” (Seabrook, J.. The Song Machine, 2017, Chapter 21)

Is it possible to write a song that is entertaining as it is informative — or as popular as it is progressive? In Ke$ha’s newer songs you can hear a tones of the 60’s rock and roll, and they espouse positive and progressive messaging, writing about abuse, depression, and heartbreak, and marriage equality. Despite the backing of Sony owned RCA Records, singles on her new album did not get achieve the commercial success that her earlier songs did.

Her story illustrates a larger picture. Female artists are sexualized and exploited, and the labels and executives profit handsomely. No one said it more simply than artist Sinéad O’Connor in a 2013 open letter to Miley Cyrus after Cyrus’ performance at the American Musical Awards ceremony. Popular music is already produced be a mechanical and formulaic process. As machine learning optimizes pop to capture our collective attention, how artists stay competitive?

Who is positioned to address the the problem? Is it the artists? The songwriters? The producers? Record Labels? A consortium of all of them? No one can do it alone. Stories of sexism in the entertainment industry, and the lack of women is leadership roles,  suggest that women may be best equipped to lead the industry toward solutions. However, we cannot but the burden of making progress on women alone. The fight against the industrial song machine will not be one easily… especially if they are the ones with the resources to tap machine learning for the purposes of crafting the perfect musical hook. The obvious problem with using machine learning to write songs, is the same as the using machine learning to identify people: Inheriting bias, and perpetuating inequality. These are our problems, and machine cannot learn the solutions for us. Norbert Wiener probably said it best in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings:

“Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal-minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us!”

In 2016, I founded the Mekatilili Program, which is an educational initiative that conducts interactive workshops on Human-Centered Design and basic engineering concepts to improve technical expertise, nurture innovation and to promote social cohesion among the youth in Africa. The focus of the program is to improve representation of women in STEM by facilitating these workshops in girls’ high schools. I hope to expose as many young, African women to design and innovation, to inspire girls to pursue careers in STEM and to be changemakers in their communities.

The group of people who would be best positioned to address this problem are:

1. Women in STEM – Through their experiences, they can positively inform what would be the most appropriate solution. They also know what may work, what needs to be improved and can identify key issues in girls’ education.
2. Educators – Their role in education can greatly inspire or deter young women to join STEM. Fostering creative learning in schools can promote an enabling environment that encourages girls to get involved in STEM.
3. Policymakers – They are able to lower and remove barriers which hinder creative learning through systematic changes in education. Also, they can create awareness on gender bias and disparity in schools and in the workplace to shed light on various challenges that women face.

Reflecting on the consequences of the proposed solutions, I wonder if solely focusing on girls’ in STEM may inadvertently create a reverse effect whereby young boys and men feel neglected.

In the 2017 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) test scores, which is national examination completed by students in their final year of primary school, an unprecedented number of girls topped the country. Cyprian Nyakundi, a popular Twitter personality (who had over 700,000 followers before his account was suspended) wrote a lengthy post responding to the news and criticizing the feminist movement. Some quotes from the post include:

Men can no longer remain silent as the continued “genocide” on our gender persists. We are seeing more resources and emphasis being laid on the Girl-Child, contrary to the spirit of equality as conceptualized by the original feminist movement.

While rabid-feminists are chest-thumping and calling it a “victory”, right-thinking women who are mothers to sons, sisters, aunties, grandmothers can see the crisis that we are staring at. They know that their Boy-Child’s will not realize their full potential in this toxic environment, skewed to favor women.

The post went viral and to my surprise, many men supported his views as seen through the comments.

We’re busy empowering the girl child and ignorantly marginalizing the boychild.. The boy child will soon be extinct if we’re not careful. Let voices and activism arise in the same measure. Feminism is deafening us. Why should we be silent!!?

…continue laughing as men and boy child are being pushed to the corner by chauvinists, gays and lesbians. Violence and terror should be meted on those against boy child with immediate effect.

While others demanded for a call to action.

This result is just worrying, boys used to top, what happened, we need a discussion on this and a serious one to see how the boy child can gain his glory. We are throwing our boys to the bottom line and we expect them to be bread winners, let’s do something.

By focusing on women, am I inadvertently creating a rift between boys and girls in Kenya? Don’t young, African boys deserve to be involved in STEM programs too?

My personal experiences have shown me that there is a definite need to empower young women and to provide role models to inspire them to achieve their goals. But now I wonder if I am widening the gender gap that I seek to bridge.

In my first blog post, I reflected on my startup. Here, I’ll go a bit deeper into rethinking why it failed to evoke the social change I had planned. To use the schematic provided by Lessig, the full scope of the problem involves the constraints created by the market, by the law, by social norms, and by the architecture of the solution.

In the case of my company, I think I had done a good job of understanding the market dynamics in general. The product I created would realistically create more opportunity for all players in the space… but it could potentially pose an issue to incumbent powers. As I stated in my first blog post, in order to make our model as best as it could be, we needed access to a massive amount of high-quality ticketing data… and yet, I had failed to see that the only people who had that kind of data were the very monopolies we were trying to undermine. This ultimately meant that if we wanted to make something that worked, the practical use of what we made would be determined by the company that owned it. This created an aspect of the regulation of the technology that we didn’t have control over.

While the threat to the incumbent powers proved a problem, theoretically, this could have been overcome with the other constraints. For example, we could have found a way to shift the social norms of artists. The reason that the big monopolies are the only place to find quality ticketing sales data is that they are private data sets. There are public data sets available—in fact, we tried to train our model on them. These free public datasets were of poor quality because promoters who ran events would self-report the data. Often wanting to influence musicians to work with their brand or venue, we found that this data was often inflated or inaccurate. In a similar way, musicians had no benefit of posting public data… it took effort, tech-savvy, and could contain information that hurt their brand. Indeed, one of the benefits of having a privatized data set from a big conglomerate is that they, just like our models, needed to understand why shows performed badly so they could figure out how to avoid making the same errors in the future. Because the data was internal to the company, there was no downside of honesty. If we had created a platform in which we worked directly with middle-class musicians to collect the data about their shows and show them how working with us would benefit them, we could have become the locus of the data set we needed. As a team, we were afraid to take on such a big challenge (we’d need lots and lots of artists to be valuable enough) and for that reason didn’t pursue this option. As for law, right now the major conglomerate is under investigation for potentially violating anti-trust laws, but that process is slow moving.

As for architecture, I believe the solution I outlined of working with the musicians themselves to collect the data is the best bet… and that, of course, depends on the structure of the platform used to deliver our AI model. Strangely, the company we exited to is actually best positioned to deliver the solution I outlined, provided that there are enough venues able to get out of their exclusive relationships with the large conglomerate. I guess I had been thinking of this as a failure when actually, we most likely lucked into having the product land at a place where it now has the highest likelihood of impact.