Computing for Voice: Advancing Technology to Reduce Marginalization

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The benefits of computing are often confined within the populations with certain privilege. Those benefits rarely reach billions of underprivileged lives around the world fighting with extreme poverty, illiteracy, gender discrimination, forced migration, and various other exploitations and marginalization. The services that are available through computing often fail to address their needs and constraints. The lack of knowledge about their lives, and the challenges in addressing the limits of their contexts, result into a paucity of appropriate technologies for them. To this end, the objective of my research is to devise tools and techniques that give voice to the underserved communities around the world, and incorporate their voices in designing novel computational services.******Incorporating marginalized voices in computing technologies involves several non-trivial challenges in design, methodology, and theory. For example, ethnographic studies are often used for learning the broad cultural, social, and political contexts of the marginalized communities. Such broad ethnographic lessons are challenging to connect with building accessible and secure computing platforms for marginalized people. Furthermore, designing computing technologies with a rich set of multi-dimensional poly-vocal values still stands as a crucial challenge for the researchers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I aim to bring in a wide range of theories, tools, and techniques from social science, political philosophy, and international development to build novel and inclusive computing platforms for all. More precisely, I intend to develop novel web, social, and mobile hardware and software applications that will help the marginalized communities around the world to protect themselves, get access to their rightful needs, establish their identity and representation, raise their concerns, unite, collaborate, and flourish. ******The theoretical framework of this research is based on the definition of “development“, given by Nobel Laureate Economist, Amartya Sen. Sen's model advices both instrumental and constitutive means of capacity enhancement that requires both technical advancement and social change. The historical gap between the methods in social sciences and computing is the critical challenge toward doing achieving such development. I build on the HCI method of “Value Sensitive Design (VSD)” to overcome this challenge, which extracts the values of a community through ethnography and then feeds the lesson to the design of a computational tools through a serious rigorous process of evaluation. Incorporation of VSD with broad developmental theory is both a novel approach and critical challenge that can significantly advance the research areas of HCI and ICTD, and positively impact the lives of millions of underprivileged people across the world.