Computing for Voice: Advancing Technology to Reduce Marginalization

计算的好处往往局限于具有某些特权的人群。这些好处很少能惠及世界各地数十亿贫困人口，他们与极端贫困、文盲、性别歧视、被迫移民以及各种其他剥削和边缘化作斗争。通过计算提供的服务常常不能满足它们的需求和限制。由于对他们的生活缺乏了解，以及在解决其环境限制方面面临的挑战，导致他们缺乏适当的技术。为此，我的研究目标是设计工具和技术，为世界各地服务不足的社区提供声音，并将他们的声音纳入设计新颖的计算服务。******将边缘化的声音纳入计算技术涉及设计、方法和理论方面的几个重要挑战。例如，民族志研究通常用于了解边缘化社区的广泛文化、社会和政治背景。将如此广泛的人种学课程与为边缘人群建立可访问和安全的计算平台联系起来是一项挑战。此外，设计具有丰富的多维多声值集的计算技术仍然是人机交互（HCI）研究人员面临的关键挑战。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，为所有人建立新颖而包容的计算平台。更确切地说，我打算开发新颖的网络、社交和移动硬件和软件应用程序，帮助世界各地被边缘化的社区保护自己，获得他们的正当需求，建立他们的身份和代表，提出他们的关切，团结、合作和繁荣。******本研究的理论框架基于诺贝尔经济学奖得主Amartya Sen. Sen对“发展”的定义，他的模型提出了能力增强的工具和构成手段，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。为了克服这一挑战，我建立了“价值敏感设计”（Value Sensitive Design， VSD）的HCI方法，通过人种学提取社区的价值，然后通过严格的评估过程将经验教训提供给计算工具的设计。将VSD与广泛的发展理论相结合既是一种新颖的方法，也是一项关键的挑战，可以显著推进HCI和ICTD的研究领域，并对全世界数百万贫困人口的生活产生积极影响。

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.