MobileWorks provides a platform that gives underemployed and impoverished individuals in the developing world the ability to earn supplemental income by doing work through their mobile phones. The organization accepts data entry and transcription contracts from a variety of sources-government programs in India, Western crowd sourcing companies, and traditional outsourcing companies–and sends this work to workers’ phones over a locally-accessible interface, handling payment to workers and guaranteeing quality to companies. Over time, MobileWorks users have the opportunity to earn data entry certifications and lift themselves out of poverty.
Many students who died during the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech tried to text 9-1-1 for help, but their messages were never received because police departments did not have the technology to receive text reports. Crime Fighter is a technology that revolutionizes the way we report crime. Crime Fighter is the first mobile technology that allows users to be completely anonymous and report crimes in less than 2 minutes for any situation using a text-based application for all smartphones. The technology includes the mobile application for general users and a software system for the police department and university safety services. Currently, no comparable product exists in the market, enabling Crime Fighter to lead the path to a safer community using the modern and popular technology of texting.
The lack of a central county database of patient hepatitis B statuses in the Bay Area results in an inefficient allocation of resources in the fight against hepatitis B. This project will address that issue by utilizing existing databases of non-sensitive patient data to create dynamic maps of hepatitis B prevalence and at-risk populations in the Bay Area. The mapping project will combine Geographic Information System (GIS) technology with an easy-to-navigate interface, allowing users to visualize the areas of greatest need for preventative and disease management services. The project aims to ultimately consolidate all sources of hepatitis B patient data to help public health officials and community organizations target at-risk and affected populations in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.
Local, community-based service agencies in developing countries are increasingly attempting to collect data in order to measure the social impact of their work in areas such as education, healthcare and infrastructure development. Several institutional, technological and cultural barriers remain to achieving success in such data-collection attempts, however. Shreddr is a low-cost, on-demand data digitization program that will bridge these barriers. The program helps individuals and organizations quickly transform stacks of paper into usable data, with minimal additional investment in technology, training, or staffing. By increasing the availability of high-quality data, Shreddr aims to improve service provision in developing countries.
This project seeks to develop low-cost, web and mobile-based software that will increase transparency, traceability, and quality assurance along the global commodity chain for coffee. By digitally aggregating information during the coffee production cycle, the project will increase farmers’ access to capital, mitigate risk for loan providers, and provide transparency for producers and consumers. By increasing the transparency, traceability, and quality assurance throughout the coffee industry, From Crop to Cup hopes to provide increased economic opportunity for low-income communities, and increased effectiveness of all organizations involved.
Development organizations around the world are increasingly reliant on accurate and timely data for decision-making at all levels. Unfortunately, the infrastructure and capacity for data entry and management have not kept pace, especially for low-resource organizations in the field. Even though millions of dollars of aid money each year is spent on data collection, entry and cleaning, most data efforts suffer from delays, inefficiency and difficulties in maintaining quality. Shreddr provides organizations an affordable and effective data digitization service that ensures accurate paper data entry with minimal additional investment in technology, training, or staffing through a series of simple “microtasks.” (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Entrepreneurship Category” category.)
This research aims at the design and realization of a high-precision, low-cost, handheld, pulsed-based, reflection-sensing imaging module in microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies. The device termed the Time-Domain Ultra-Wideband Synthetic Imager (TUSI) would be capable of accurately detecting minute reflections and by capturing the data from multiple transceivers form a synthesized image of the object. The transceivers are synchronized using a common reference clock and individual locking circuits. The TUSI system is designed for battery operation and given the integrated processing unit, could be interfaced to a laptop PC or another display device for image visualization. Some of the applications are the detection of breast cancer, leukemia, melanoma and also non-invasive blood glucose monitoring as well as assessment of internal injuries at the accident site.
Through the introduction of an all-access computer center at San Quentin State prison, we propose a feasibility study and a pilot impact study of computer training in two distinct educational programs: one program will focus on instructing basic computer literacy to inmate students in the GED preparation class, and the other will concentrate on teaching advanced computer-aided design (CAD) to inmate-students in the prison’s vocational-training machine shop. This will be the first study of the ability of Information Technology to reduce the crisis of overcrowding in California’s prisons. This project has the full support of San Quentin’s administration and expands upon a thriving service-learning project that we coordinate, in which 70 UC Berkeley undergraduates teach and tutor weekly at San Quentin.
We are developing a novel, easy-to-use, patent-pending, point-of-care platform for multiplexed, digital disease detection. We have applied digital Integrated
Circuit (IC) technology, the same technology that has underpinned the IT revolution, to encapsulate the performance of a laboratory assay in the palm of the hand. We envision that our device will be capable of communicating with computers via Ethernet and with cell phones via Bluetooth to enable truly distributed, low-overhead, diagnostic testing.
