This paper analyzes the current practices of Indigenous data sovereignty in environmental research and activism in the United States, as known by the settler government. The CARE principles are a widely adopted set of guidelines for Indigenous data sovereignty with guidelines being collective benefit, authority to control, respect and ethics, yet there exists little detail on current practices of operationalization and implementation of the CARE principles. This research specifically identified opportunities to further clarify how environmental data can be managed in accordance with the CARE principles. Using current literature, we examine how sustainability and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research could better incorporate Indigenous data sovereignty and governance. Through three interviews with Indigenous environmental practitioners, we use inductive and deductive analysis to understand current thoughts and practices. In a forestry analysis case study with the Penobscot Nation, we examine specifically how the CARE principles could be implemented into a research project. The interviews and case study reveal design considerations such as emphasizing roles in responsibility and ethics to be taken into future HCI research involving Indigenous data sovereignty in environmental contexts.
Pyxide jars are not uncommon to excavate, as they were standard possessions of women throughout a significant portion of ancient Greece. However, the pyxis jar on display at the W.G. Hardy Classics Museum in Edmonton, Alberta, is suggested to be from a time period that is limited in terms of comparable pyxides. The W.G. Hardy Classics Museum gives no explanation as to where the pyxis jar was contextually found beyond originating from Corinth, and an estimation of being produced sometime within the seventh–sixth century BC. This article narrows the suggested time of production from the two-hundred-year period, as claimed by the museum, to specifically the Early Corinthian period, through a process of relative dating, as Corinth was becoming the production centre for pottery during the time within ancient Greece. Through an analysis of the physical condition, artistic motifs, and comparable pyxides, we are able to ascertain the particular context in which it would have been found, in addition to the timeframe of production, and the likely tools used through the manufacturing process.
This paper analyses the suitability of a Fuzzy Logic (FL) AI-trained machine learning model to assist IoT-based smart hydroponics for deployment with South African rural subsistence farmers. To answer these questions, a fuzzy logic model was developed to accurately determine and adjust outputs, based on inputs received from IoT sensors monitoring the nutrient solution and environment conditions in the hydroponics system. We conducted an initial evaluation of the FL-AI, followed by a real-world test based on an existing data set and finally conducted testing on simulated data to ensure that the AI can accurately determine crisp values to pass to a cloud based IoT platform accessed by a micro-controller which adjusts the environment variables of the hydroponics system. This approach was followed to ensure that we respect the time and availability of our research participants. We found that the system was able to accurately determine the necessary crisp values needed by the microcontroller. We further report on the suitability of FL-AI for rural subsistence farmers as the AI is less complex, reduces energy consumption, and resource waste, and the burden of manually monitoring and adjusting hydroponics systems, and is easy to use for first-time growers. We further discuss crucial lessons learned particularly in the South African and other Low to Middle Income Countries (LMIC) context, such as the necessity of solar power-enabled systems and local wifi networks rather than cloud-based IoT platforms.
With rapid urbanization and increasing traffic congestion in major cities, alternative modes of transportation have gained significant attention. The ride-sharing app revolution also has sparked a significant transformation in the transportation industry, along with “Khep”, an unusual ride-sharing approach where individuals negotiate fares directly with drivers personally, which has become a popular means of transportation. In this research, we investigate various factors that influence the preference for such unconventional contractual rides over ride-sharing apps, such as cultural norms, trust issues, affordability, and accessibility. Moreover, we explore the role of technology literacy, marketing strategies, and regulatory frameworks in shaping the adoption landscape. After conducting a survey and interviews, we conduct a thorough analysis to determine the expected findings and uncover meaningful insights regarding the utilization, preferences, and challenges within the ride-sharing industry in Bangladesh. The findings of this study reveal that cultural factors, such as the preference for bargaining and personal connections, strongly influence the popularity of contractual rides. Additionally, concerns related to safety, data privacy, and trust act as barriers to ride-sharing app adoption. Being associated with UN SDG Goals 11 and 9, the implications of this research extend beyond Bangladesh and can provide insights for policymakers, transportation companies, and technology developers seeking to understand the factors shaping the adoption of ride-sharing apps in similar contexts.
Support plays a vital role in the teaching profession. A good support system can empower teachers to regulate their emotions and effectively manage stress while working in isolation. The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a hybrid form of education, necessitating the acquisition of new skills by teachers and compelling them to adapt to remote teaching. This new development further amplifies the sense of isolation prevalent amongst the teaching community. Against this backdrop, our study investigates the availability of sociotechnical support infrastructures for teachers in low-income schools while also looking into the support practices embraced by this class of teachers following the pandemic. Through 28 qualitative interviews involving teachers, management and personnel from support organizations, we demonstrate how teachers have largely taken the initiative to establish their own informal support networks in the absence of formal support infrastructures. Smartphones have significantly augmented these support practices, serving as both a valuable source of support as well as a medium for facilitating support practices. However, in comparison to other forms of support received from these sources, the availability of emotion-focused support for teachers have proven to be inadequate, creating imbalances in their support seeking practices. Our paper provides different contextual ways to reduce these imbalances and improve the occupational well-being of teachers.
Food waste presents a substantial challenge with significant environmental and economic ramifications, and its severity on campus environments is of particular concern. In response to this, we introduce FoodWise, a dual-component system tailored to inspire and incentivize campus communities to reduce food waste. The system consists of a data storytelling dashboard that graphically displays food waste information from university canteens, coupled with a mobile web application that encourages users to log their food waste reduction actions and rewards active participants for their efforts. Deployed during a two-week food-saving campaign at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in March 2023, FoodWise engaged over 200 participants from the university community, resulting in the logging of over 800 daily food-saving actions. Feedback collected post-campaign underscores the system's efficacy in elevating user consciousness about food waste and prompting behavioral shifts towards a more sustainable campus. This paper also provides insights for enhancing our system, contributing to a broader discourse on sustainable campus initiatives.
The process of financial portfolio optimization involves choosing the most suitable mix of assets to meet a particular investment goal. Conventional portfolio optimization primarily focuses on maximizing returns and minimizing risks while overlooking the importance of social responsibility or sustainability in financial investments. In this paper, we present a Python-based multi-objective portfolio optimization library for sustainable investments (MOPO-LSI). MOPO-LSI is able to take Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors into consideration in financial portfolio, where investors’ assets can be well allocated to mutual funds towards the ESG optimization along with their financial goals in the investment. MOPO-LSI is easy to be configured and used, and it is capable of production solutions in two scenarios – when client preferences are known or unknown. The developers can also easily customize the library to adapt it to their own financial objectives.
This paper presents a Smart City Hunt app, which was developed to engage diverse citizens by raising awareness, providing smart experiences and collecting data to guide strategies to transform the City of Windhoek into a smart and sustainable city. The project was done in collaboration with the UNDP accelerator lab Namibia, the City of Windhoek, and youth from informal settlements to explore alternative mechanisms of involving citizens from different backgrounds. Twenty-five participants took part in the half-day city hunt, making use of different modes of transport on their journey. The participants were guided via a location-based smart application, built with Locatify, which triggered challenges and important information such as identifying high carbon emitters and job vacancies respectively. A post-experience survey revealed that the participants recommend the use of the Smart City Hunt app for further citizen engagements, acknowledging the format of creating awareness and providing information on smart cities.
Working as Software Engineer in the healthcare industry for four years. There were rules guiding the work environment of healthcare professionals but none for Software engineers, who tend to overwork. Such resulted in health issues. Not ICT-based organizations need an understanding of the working factors of the Software Engineer to make them effectively produce. The panelists will discuss this and give their recommendations.
Usability is the key to making future technology useful to the world, yet it is often ignored. This workshop will introduce Usability, and brainstorm ways to incorporate it into UN SDGs. One example is our effort to add World Usability Day (WUD) to the UN calendar. We will explore implications for technology design for the Global South. We will also identify concrete next steps that we all can take to advance Usability worldwide.
panel Share on Approaches to leveraging digital higher education in Africa. Authors: Edward Peter Greenwood White Tampere University, Finland Tampere University, Finland 0000-0002-7046-2740View Profile , Jussi Okkonen Tampere University, Finland Tampere University, Finland 0000-0002-7207-045XView Profile , Reeta Oksa Tampere University, Finland Tampere University, Finland 0000-0002-8007-4653View Profile , Benjamin Ghansah University of Education, Winneba, Ghana University of Education, Winneba, Ghana 0000-0002-1599-6301View Profile , Christopher Yarkwah University of Cape Coast, Ghana University of Cape Coast, Ghana 0000-0003-2446-8188View Profile , Ephrem Kwaa-Aidoo University of Education, Winneba, Ghana University of Education, Winneba, Ghana 0000-0002-2118-9098View Profile , Issifu Yidana University of Education, Winneba, Ghana University of Education, Winneba, Ghana 0009-0008-0877-2984View Profile , Wilson Osafo Apeanti University of Education, Winneba, Ghana University of Education, Winneba, Ghana 0000-0001-9264-5006View Profile , Rosemary Twum University of Cape Coast, Ghana University of Cape Coast, Ghana 0000-0002-8823-7701View Profile Authors Info & Claims COMPASS '23: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable SocietiesAugust 2023Pages 152–154https://doi.org/10.1145/3588001.3609380Published:16 August 2023Publication History 0citation31DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads31Last 12 Months31Last 6 weeks30 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access
The interaction between elephants and their environment has profound implications for both ecology and conservation strategies. This study presents an analytical approach to decipher the intricate patterns of elephant movement in Sub-Saharan Africa, concentrating on key ecological drivers such as seasonal variations and rainfall patterns. Despite the complexities surrounding these influential factors, our analysis provides a holistic view of elephant migratory behavior in the context of the dynamic African landscape. Our comprehensive approach enables us to predict the potential impact of these ecological determinants on elephant migration, a critical step in establishing informed conservation strategies. This projection is particularly crucial given the impacts of global climate change on seasonal and rainfall patterns, which could substantially influence elephant movements in the future. The findings of our work aim to not only advance the understanding of movement ecology but also foster a sustainable coexistence of humans and elephants in Sub-Saharan Africa. By predicting potential elephant routes, our work can inform strategies to minimize human-elephant conflict, effectively manage land use, and enhance anti-poaching efforts. This research underscores the importance of integrating movement ecology and climatic variables for effective wildlife management and conservation planning. Codebase available at https://github.com/shreyaghosh-2016/Elephant-movement
Rising sustainability concerns in the food industry have driven the need for innovative approaches in culinary operations. Redesigning the menus and recipes from a sustainability perspective is a promising approach to reducing restaurants' environmental impact. Chefs, as crucial decision-makers in menu and recipe planning practices, play a vital role in promoting sustainable food services. However, the literature lacks insights into chefs' sustainable recipe planning practices and how information and communication technologies (ICTs) could support these practices. This paper addresses this gap by conducting individual interview sessions (n=10) and recipe generation workshops (n=10) with 20 chefs in total. It reveals four dimensions of sustainable recipes (locality, seasonality, frugality, and food quality) based on semi-structured interviews. It presents a novel interactive recipe planning concept called KNOBIE, which was designed to support chefs' sustainable recipe planning practices by using insights that gathered from the interviews. Lastly, based on an assessment of this concept through online recipe generation sessions with chefs, it provides five design implications for integrating ICTs into the sustainable menu and recipe planning practices to promote sustainable food services in restaurants.
We explored the use of digital stories to support empathy skills training in maternity health workers. Our digital stories build on an existing in-person training approach; the Secret History (SH) that was developed by the Perinatal Mental Health Project. During SH training, health workers are invited to enact scenarios with patients, examining their reactions and responses as they learn more about the "history" of their patients and of their assumed characters as health workers. This training has resulted in improvement in empathic skills for health workers, but opportunities to scale the intervention are limited. The SH is costly to implement, requiring in-person workshops and facilitator training for small groups of workers. Our mobile application may either supplement or introduce the SH concepts at scale to health workers. The stories have been co-designed with mental health experts, midwives, and other trainers, and employ a "choose-your-own-adventure" approach, slowly revealing the histories of the characters, as in the original SH protocol. To inform decisions of the app design, data was collected through interviews, co-design workshops and focus group discussions as detailed in the methods section.
Digital Public Goods (DPGs) play a vital role in achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in low-income and middle-income countries. However, the lack of interoperability among different DPGs could lead to duplication of efforts and/or lack of (inter)-functionality since one DPG is not able to benefit from the features of another. This paper illustrates the need for interoperability, the difficulty of retrofitting interoperability in the numerous mature DPG projects and introduces a middleware application as a solution. The middleware application is a lightweight, technology-agnostic, portable, and modular application which facilitates transactions between the integrating system and the integrated system. By customizing and deploying the middleware, integrating system developers can save time and costs, reducing barriers to prototyping and increasing the adoption rate of DPGs. Furthermore, developers do not need to provision or access a sandbox as the middleware supports mocking responses. A use case involving the integration of two DPGs, a digital identity system and a health information system, is illustrated. The paper also describes future enhancements to the generalizability of the middleware from 1-to-any to any-to-any as well as improving security resilience with WebAuthn and custom cyber-security hardening tools and procedures.
Forests across the world play a crucial role in the fight against the climate catastrophe as well as mass extinction that characterise the Anthropocene. However, they are also increasingly threatened by destructive human practices such as agriculture and mining, but also climate change itself. This article focuses on forests in Germany, which have been devastated in recent years by heat, drought and bark beetles. Hence, forests and associated forestry practices are in urgent need of adaptation to a different climate. Several digital applications have been developed to assist with this effort. Adaptation is complicated by the epistemological challenge of climate change, that the uncertainty of how exactly climate change will affect specific local sites, as well as future markets for forest products, poses. In this short paper we review how two applications address this uncertainty in their approach to supporting the climate adaptation of forests and draw out preliminary lessons for HCI research and design.
In most American cities commuters on public transit have disproportionately lower incomes than commuters who use automobiles. Given the proven link between geographic and economic mobility, it is critical to offer quality public transit to improve access to jobs, health care and education opportunities. Departments of Transportation (DOTs) routinely measure public transit performance and quality perceptions to assess the need for improvements in the transit systems. Nevertheless, the performance metrics used fail to capture the experiences of low-income individuals who often endure complex, lengthy trips, requiring several modes or transfers. We propose BALTO, a novel toolkit to characterize transit system performance and passenger’s quality perceptions across all types of passengers and trips. We are designing the BALTO toolkit in collaboration with public housing residents from the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) and together with two local transit advocacy groups and the departments of transportation in Baltimore and in the state of Maryland.
This work presents an approach for combining household demographic and living standards survey questions with features derived from satellite imagery to predict the poverty rate of a region. Our approach utilizes visual features obtained from a single-step featurization method applied to freely available 10m/px Sentinel-2 surface reflectance satellite imagery. These visual features are combined with ten survey questions in a proxy means test (PMT) to estimate whether a household is below the poverty line. We show that the inclusion of visual features reduces the mean error in poverty rate estimates from 4.09% to 3.88% over a nationally representative out-of-sample test set. In addition to including satellite imagery features in proxy means tests, we propose an approach for selecting a subset of survey questions that are complementary to the visual features extracted from satellite imagery. Specifically, we design a survey variable selection approach guided by the full survey and image features and use the approach to determine the most relevant set of small survey questions to include in a PMT. We validate the choice of small survey questions in a downstream task of predicting the poverty rate using the small set of questions. This approach results in the best performance - errors in poverty rate decrease from 4.09% to 3.71%. We show that extracted visual features encode geographic and urbanization differences between regions.
In the context of financial gain, hackers are motivated to exploit vulnerabilities that could result in financial or data loss. Therefore, it is crucial for financial applications to undergo thorough testing to identify and address such vulnerabilities. Regrettably, many financial institutions neglect proper testing procedures and sometimes even fail to establish a suitable security release baseline. This report presents an analysis of 18 mobile applications, each belonging to a different financial institution in Africa. The selection of these applications was carefully executed, considering institutions of varying sizes, to enable a comparative assessment of security practices across different organizational scales. The assessment was conducted by evaluating the sampled applications against the Mobile Application Security Verification Standard v2.0. This is a set of checklists and guidelines by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) used as a baseline for mobile application security. Due to the extensive nature of the project, the testing scope was limited to the application itself, as experienced by the end user. This included examining the application’s interaction with the back-end server and observing its behavior on the user’s mobile device. It is important to note that this report does not provide a comprehensive analysis, as it excludes the assessment of the server-side API and testing of business logic that requires elevated privileges within the application. Furthermore, a survey was conducted to gain insights into why developers may neglect baseline security thereby introducing potential vulnerabilities in mobile applications. The findings of this survey are also included in a short summary at the end of this document.
Understanding household practices, beliefs, relationships among the members, and their preferences are often overlooked in the design of home-based interventions aiming to reduce consumption. We conducted a survey in the United Kingdom (22 responses) and a follow-up interview with 13 households to inform the design of interventions for reducing household consumption by: 1) understanding household consumption practices, and 2) identifying the concerns and challenges for household engagement with sustainability practices. Our findings highlight how the perspectives, understanding, and motives for consumption reduction actively shape household practices and their attempts to curtail consumption. Existing non-negotiable practices led to additional household consumption and we found different strategies households use to reach a shared-decision on food and energy use. Based on our findings, we provide opportunities for motivating and fostering engagement with sustainable practices at home.
