Computing for Voice: Advancing Technology to Reduce Marginalization

语音计算：推进技术以减少边缘化

• 批准号: RGPIN-2018-06185
• 负责人: Ahmed, SyedIshtiaque
• 金额: $ 1.68万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=750018
• 关键词: Computing; Voice; Advancing; Technology; Reduce

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.

计算的好处往往局限于拥有某些特权的人群。这些惠益很少惠及全世界数十亿与极端贫困、文盲、性别歧视、强迫移徙和其他各种剥削和边缘化作斗争的弱势群体。通过计算提供的服务往往无法满足他们的需求和限制。由于缺乏对他们生活的了解，以及在解决其环境限制方面的挑战，导致缺乏适合他们的技术。为此，我的研究目标是设计工具和技术，让世界各地的弱势群体的声音，并将他们的声音在设计新颖的计算服务。在计算技术中消除边缘化的声音涉及到设计，方法和理论的几个不平凡的挑战。例如，民族志研究通常用于学习边缘化社区的广泛文化，社会和政治背景。这种广泛的人种学经验教训很难与为边缘化人群建立可访问和安全的计算平台联系起来。此外，设计具有丰富的多维多语音值集的计算技术仍然是人机交互（HCI）研究人员面临的一个关键挑战。我的目标是从社会科学，政治哲学和国际发展中引入广泛的理论，工具和技术，为所有人建立新颖和包容的计算平台。更准确地说，我打算开发新颖的网络、社交和移动的硬件和软件应用程序，帮助世界各地的边缘化社区保护自己，获得他们的合法需求，建立他们的身份和代表性，提出他们的关切，团结，合作和繁荣。本研究的理论框架是基于诺贝尔经济学奖获得者Amartya Sen.Sen对“发展”的定义，他的模型提出了能力增强的工具性和结构性手段，这需要技术进步和社会变革。社会科学和计算方法之间的历史差距是实现这种发展的关键挑战。我建立在“价值敏感设计（VSD）”的HCI方法，以克服这一挑战，通过民族志提取社区的价值观，然后通过一个严肃严格的评估过程，将经验教训反馈给计算工具的设计。将VSD与广泛的发展理论相结合既是一种新颖的方法，也是一项重大挑战，可以大大推进HCI和ICTD的研究领域，并对世界各地数百万贫困人口的生活产生积极影响。