Event Detail

Monday, September 15, 2008

Mobile Phones in Africa: Education, Entrepreneurship, and Research

Today's mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of the 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide. An increasing fraction of these users live in Africa, currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. I will briefly introduce three projects that have been made possible by this unprecedented technology adoption in Africa:

The EPROM initiative aims to foster an entrepreneurial mobile phone developer community within Africa. Computer Science departments within ten Sub-Saharan countries are currently teaching the EPROM curriculum. I will discuss a selection of the hundreds of mobile phone applications being designed, developed, and field-tested by the African computer science undergraduates that have taken part in the project over the last 3 years. http://eprom.mit.edu

txteagle is a mobile crowd-sourcing application that will be launching in Kenya this October on the Safaricom network. It enables people to earn and save small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones for companies who pay them either in airtime or cash. http://txteagle.com

Most recently, we are engaged in a data-sharing agreement with mobile phone operators in Rwanda and Kenya. To complement the telecommunications data we received from British Telecom in 2005 and from Viva Telecom in the Dominican Republic, we will be using the Rwandan and Kenyan anonymized data to study the dynamics of their 10 million subscribers' behavioral patterns including communication, travel, product adoption, and airtime/money transfers. http://reality.media.mit.edu

Nathan Eagle is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves applying machine learning and network analysis techniques to large human behavioral datasets generated by mobile phones.  He holds a BS and two MS degrees from Stanford University; his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory on Reality Mining was recently declared one of the '10 technologies most likely to change the way we live' by the MIT Technology Review magazine. Nokia recently named him one of the top mobile phone developers in the world. http://web.media.mit.edu/~nathan

• Location:
  Fainsod Room (Littauer 324)
• Date:
  Monday, September 15, 2008
• Time:
  12:00 PM

Contact Email