Computing for Voice: Advancing Technology to Reduce Marginalization

计算的好处通常局限在拥有某种特权的人群中。这些福利很少惠及世界各地与赤贫、文盲、性别歧视、强迫移民和各种其他剥削和边缘化作斗争的数十亿贫困人口。通过计算提供的服务往往不能满足他们的需求和限制。由于缺乏对他们生活的了解，以及在解决他们所处环境的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，让世界各地服务不足的社区发出声音，并将他们的声音纳入到设计新的计算服务中。将边缘化的声音纳入计算技术涉及到设计、方法和理论方面的几个不小的挑战。例如，民族志研究经常被用来了解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。我的目标是引入社会科学、政治哲学和国际发展的广泛理论、工具和技术，为所有人建立新的和包容性的计算平台。更准确地说，我打算开发新的网络、社交和移动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，满足他们的正当需求，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。本研究的理论框架基于诺贝尔奖获得者经济学家阿马蒂亚·森对“发展”的定义，他的模型同时提出了需要技术进步和社会变革的增强能力的工具手段和构成手段。社会科学方法和计算方法之间的历史差距是实现这一发展的关键挑战。我建立在“价值敏感设计(VSD)”的人机界面方法上来克服这一挑战，该方法通过人种志提取社区的价值观，然后通过严肃严格的评估过程将经验教训反馈给计算工具的设计。将虚拟可持续发展与广泛的发展理论结合起来，既是一种新的方法，也是一项重大挑战，可以显著推进人文和信息技术促进发展的研究领域，并对世界各地数百万贫困人口的生活产生积极影响。

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.