Today, we held an informal workshop for students involved in MSc. projects related to the VOICES project and other activities associated with “the Web for Warm Countries”. The goal of this meeting was for the students to inform eachother about the current status of their research project and to sketch the bigger picture. I gave a short talk decribing the various running projects (VOICES, Furoba Blon, IDSWrapper, SemanticXO) as well as possible future projects (ICONS, the ICT4D course).
Six students presented us with their updates:
- Henk Kroon told us a bit about his efforts into creating a client application that uses the Linked Data based on RadioMarché.
- Rokhsareh Nakhaei presented us with extensive models for her design of a serious game that will be used to gather voice fragments in different languages.
- Albert Chifura is talking to many stakeholders to identify sustainable business models for the M-Event use case of VOICES
- Binyam Tesfa is also developing a crowdsourcing application. He is doing this for digitizing pluvial data from the Sahel. He targets a specific niche (the African ‘diaspora’) to do this.
- Deepak Chetri is doing literature research into the design of Voice-based interfaces for low-literate users in developing countries.
- Gavarni Winter is the newest addition to the W4RA family, he is still contemplating the specific research questions.
Also present were Pieter De Leenheer, supervisor for a number of projects and Wendelien Tuyp from CIS, who could answer a number of questions about the African context. From my point of view, the meeting was a succes and we agreed to organize a second installment later this year.