How can modern data visualization and traditional rural data practices be reconciled to make computing services useful and meaningful for rural communities in the Global South?
Assistant Professor Ishtiaque Ahmed is a recipient of a 2023 Google Award for Inclusion Research.
To explore a potential solution to this challenge that integrates local materials, people history and values, Assistant Professor Ishtiaque Ahmed has received a 2023 Google Award for Inclusion Research.
“I’m super excited because this project is being done with marginalized communities in the Global South and rural Bangladesh. It’s often very difficult to get government grants to work with people in another country. However, Google recognized the importance of this work, so I feel really lucky,” said Ahmed.
His awarded project “Developing a Community-Centered Culturally-Aligned Data Visualization Framework in Rural Bangladesh,” aims to bridge the gap between traditional rural data practices and modern data-driven systems and AI applications while preserving and promoting local culture and traditions.
Many rural communities in Bangladesh use embroidered quilts to document their yearly events and expenditures, but NGOs do not usually accept them as financial records while giving microcredit loans, Ahmed explains. This affects the farmers’ livelihoods and excludes them from the modern data-driven financial system.
A rural Bangladeshi embroidered quilt showing key events over several months, featuring a wheel which visualizes financial records. (Provided by: Ishtiaque Ahmed)
Ahmed’s work will look at co-designing a socio-technical data visualization framework with three rural communities in Jessore, Bangladesh, based on his five-year ethnography on artistic forms of rural data practices, such as quilts.
“There is a way in how you build their stories out of a quilt. These are the visualization techniques that are not adopted in modern data visualization. So, what we are trying to build with this Google Award in Bangladesh is to make this connection — how can we use this community tradition to come up with a different kind of visualization tool where people can actually communicate with more scientific communities and NGOs,” Ahmed notes.
According to Ahmed, the expected outcome of this project is to produce important insights into designing next-generation AI systems with historically marginalized rural communities in the Global South.
The project’s framework will be aimed at communicating rural data visualization practices in Bangladesh to help the government, NGOs, researchers, health workers and other practitioners to provide data-driven services to the large rural Bangladeshi community, of more than 100 million people. Local students, professors, researchers and practitioners in Bangladesh will be involved in this project and will receive training developing data-driven and AI systems in a community-centred way.
At a broader level, Ahmed notes the approach in this project could then be used to develop similar frameworks for other rural communities thereby making key contributions toward the development of AI in the Global South.