The Center is expanding its impact in education and healthcare by crowdsourcing its developmental projects via an online platform.
At the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, the emphasis has always been on research, especially the translatable kind. In order to give concrete shape to Prof. Raj Reddy’s (Turing award winner and Founding Chairman of IIITH’s Governing Council) vision of creating tech solutions with maximal societal impact, a center in his honour was established. The Raj Reddy Center for Technology and Society (RCTS) has been pursuing innovations in education and healthcare to ultimately reach people at the grassroots. “We do this by engaging with NGOs to find out the kind of issues they are facing and if our AI and ML solutions can assist in any way,” remarks Arjun Rajasekar, Senior Research Scientist at RCTS. Unfortunately for the team, the Center often lacks the resources to address every issue that comes up in conversations with the stakeholders. “After 3+ years, we still have funds sufficient only for a small team of 7-8,” explains Prof. Ramesh Loganathan, who is part of the Center’s Steering Committee. “At a very high level, the thinking was that for the social sector, there will never be enough bandwidth and resources available to build solutions. That’s when the idea of supplementing our bandwidth via crowdsourcing took shape. We can now enable more NGOs with this,” he reasons.
How CrowdSourcing Works
The model works such that the Center formulates solutions for problems articulated by the NGOs and then invites corporate partners to undertake development of the same. “We have a core team that works on solution architecture or ML modelling that is done in-house or in collaboration with other research labs at IIITH. These are then published as development tasks on our platform named ‘Badal’ that any contributing developer can take up. In this case, companies contribute their employees’ efforts and time via their CSR activities. Once the developers fulfil their requirements and submit their work, the core team from RCTS puts together the different modules and integrates the solution which is then tested out in the field,” says Arjun. He cites the instance of a digital library application project that required Android developers to be part of it. “As a Center, we did not have Android developers available because our tech stack is different. Infosys, on the other hand, being a larger company had Android developers who could contribute time for this and took up the task.”
Testing The Platform
In order to fine tune the process flow where a project is broken down into smaller dev tasks and can be picked up by developers with minimal amount of interaction with the core team, a series of pilot runs were held in collaboration with Kakatiya Institute of Engineering and Technology (KIET), Andhra Pradesh. “We have an ongoing college affiliate program with them in addition to another initiative known as the K-Hub where we shortlist 3rd and 4th year engineering students to work as part-time developers so that they can gain real-world experience through our projects,” explains Arjun. When the requirement arose for the creation of a digital library wall by an NGO named Nirmaan, the RCTS team decided to test out their pipeline – this time with a corporate partner pitching in for the actual development. Explaining the solution sought by the NGO, Arjun says that they wanted an e-reader of sorts but instead of an individual device, the idea was to enable multiple children to read simultaneously. ”The goal is to encourage community reading and have it as a group activity where children learn from one another. Infosys stepped in and contributed to the project by offering the assistance of 7 developers who developed the application for us,” says Arjun. Infosys also assisted by having a manager track progress of the deliverables, and liaison both with the developers as well as the RCTS team.
Current Status
The platform is undergoing an upgrade in terms of UI and ease of features in the dashboard where newer metrics are being added to assist corporates in tracking the projects. “Presenting information at-a-glance that is relevant to the contributing partners in a condensed manner is important and these improvements are underway,” elaborates Arjun. The digital library wall application was the first solution that was fully developed end-to-end on the Badal platform. It has been successfully deployed in the field in over 5 digital classrooms run by Nirmaan with plans on expanding its footprint to many more in the coming months.
“As a CSR activity, developers have an incentive to put in effort towards such initiatives,” reasons Arjun, while explaining the Center’s rationale of engaging only with industry partners at the moment. “Once we have fine-tuned the workflow processes, the aim is to open up to anyone who wants to freelance. If there are student developers and interns who are good at development, and willing to contribute time for social causes, we’d be happy to accept such effort,” he says. The naming of the crowdsourcing platform itself alludes to two things – बादल – which in Hindi refers to a ‘cloud’ and बदल which means ‘to change’. “We’re in effect trying to do both, bringing out a social change via the cloud,” concludes Arjun.