 Hello everyone, and good afternoon, good evening, depending on when you're joining us from welcome to engineering for change or if you see for short today, we're pleased to bring you if you see the virtual salon in partnership with IEEE on the topic of ICT access and IOT in low resource settings. My name is Mariela Machado and I'm program manager here at E4C. I'll be your presenter for today's session. The salon you're participating in today is sponsored by IEEE in partnership with the IEEE Africa sections in Tunisia, Uganda and Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. Salon topics are informed by the professional and regional interests of these sections. Participating sections schedule their meeting during the salon and will receive Q&A priority during the special event. So for those of you connecting from IEEE student sections, please be sure to type which section are you joining us from when you write your Q&A and comments. 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We invite you to visit our website, engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up if you haven't already. Very important housekeeping items before we get started. So I just want to be sure to highlight before we do that are one of our resources available online, which is our solutions library as you're seeing on the slide here and here is one of the examples of the solutions included in the solutions library. So be sure to check it out as well. It's a resource that it's also free of charge. A couple of housekeeping items before we get started. You can use this window and you can use the chat window to share remarks and comments. So let's take a moment now and practice using the WebEx platform. Please type right now in the chat window what part of the world are you joining us from. If you want to see the chat window, it's located at the bottom right of your screen and just type your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slides. Let's see where everyone is joining us from. Burkina Faso welcome. Copenhagen, Zimbabwe, Seattle, Colorado, Zimbabwe, Nigeria. Welcome everyone to our virtual salon today, UK. Excellent. So before we move on, I just wanted to highlight a couple of instructions. You can use this window, the one that you just used to share your remarks during the webinar. If you don't have any technical questions, you just send a private chat to engineering for change admin. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening WebEx up in a different browser. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window located below the chat to type in your questions for the presenter. Again, if you don't see it, click the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slides. We will gather these questions to ask to the presenter at the end of this webinar. We will have a 20 to 30 minutes for Q&A. So be sure to type your questions while the speakers, while the webinar is going on so that we can gather those questions at the end of the virtual salon. A one last item is that if you would like a certificate of attendance, please be sure to send us an email to webinars at engineeringforchange.org. So before further, without saying anything further, I would just like to pass it along to our moderator for today's webinar. I'm very proud to introduce you to Mustafa Nafim. Mustafa Nafim is a clinical assistant of information in Michigan and Harbour. He's also his interest liar in the intersection of technology and poverty, and his recent work has focused on the use of information and communication technologies to improve public service delivery in global health, water and sanitation sectors. Mustafa has taught and led ICT design and entrepreneurship programs in six countries in Africa, Asia and North America. And prior to joining Michigan, Mustafa was the ICT expert in residence at the Atlas Institute, University of Colorado Boulder. He received his master's degree from the Atlas Institute on a full bright scholarship and was shortlisted among 12 finalists, Rolex awards for Enterprise Young Laureates in 2016. I think this slide speaks for itself. We're very proud to have Mustafa moderate this incredible virtual salon. So without further to say Mustafa over to you and thank you so much. Thank you, Mariella. It's an honor to host this panel. I'm really excited to introduce our panelists today. Our first panelist is Melissa Densmore. She's a coordinator of the House of Plartner Institute at the University of Cape Town. She's also a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the University of Cape Town Center in ICT for development. Melissa got her PhD in information from the University of California at Berkeley. Our second presenter is Matthew Haltz. Matt is a professional electrical computer and software systems engineer and has experiences in embedded devices and digital communications. Matt has a range of experiences from satellite data link systems to open BTS, which is an open source cellular infrastructure platform. And Matt has worked, has worked experience in deployments and training engineers in Latin America, West Africa and the Indo Pacific regions. We're excited to have Matt. And last but not least, our panelists joining us from Sweden. I'm sorry, from Italy is Marco Zenato. Marco is a researcher at the Addislam International Center for Theatrical Physics in Italy. Marco did his PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. And his research interests are in ICT4D, as well as in IoT and developing countries. And Marco beats me by about a margin of five X in terms of the number of countries that he's given lectures in. He's given lectures in 30 countries, and we're excited to have all of you here. I'm really grateful that you're giving us a talk and I'm really looking forward to learning from you. And without further ado, I'll pass the mic on to Melissa, who's going to be talking about our work in South Africa. Thanks. Thanks, Mustafa. I'm happy to be here. So I'm going to talk about my work in South Africa. And I'll just start with a brief introduction to the Center in ICT4D. It's a multidisciplinary hub that brings together academics from across UCT around ICT4D, at the intersection of ICTs and sustainable development. So the salon title is about access. And for a long time, that conversation around access has been about connecting the last mile. And I believe that from a tech perspective, this problem is largely solved. We've got the technology, and while I don't think that we need to stop innovating in that area, I think the final barriers to connecting everybody are primarily economic and political, from spectrum policy to the ways in which capitalism always leaves people at the edge with lower speeds and more expensive rates. But I think we've reached a point where we can start talking about what happens after access. There's still a problem. If you even imagine right now, which isn't true, that everybody has access to the internet or access to communications technology. It's not all equal, right? Consider mobile service. Social and low income areas have poor quality coverage. They only get upgraded to next generation equipment when it's decommissioned for more central areas. And so they're always running a little bit behind in the race. And so as more, as they get faster connections, more higher bandwidth connections, then they suddenly find that all their applications are demanding more data, right? Or let's say the solution is providing free Wi-Fi to everybody. But even that feels a little bit limited. The new Google program in the townships in Cape Town have a 30-minute limit on use. And you use it when you're standing out in the middle of a township that is full of gangsters and somebody could run by and steal your phone as you use it. So what happens if you want to use it at home? But it's not just about that. I think most people here have probably experienced banging those constraints on your own. And some people have, you know, always on and they don't have to worry about how much data they're consuming. But for a lot of the world, we have caps on our data. Like you buy these bundles and once they run out, you have to buy another bundle. Or like to take it back, let's say you are on an airplane and suddenly you don't have internet. We change our behavior based on what our internet connection is like. And that change in behavior is in response to what I call bandwidth constraints. Let's talk, like, what's that I can consider what's being constrained? Okay, so these constraints occur. We watch how much data we're consuming. We change our behavior when we're on mobile data versus Wi-Fi. What is causing that? Some of that is data and bandwidth affordability, how much it costs. Some of those constraints are actually because of what device we're using. The small screen or maybe we have a slower phone and that affects what websites we might want to access, whether we can install more apps on our phone. I think the other thing that we often don't talk about is the scarcity of locally relevant content. And the example I often give is looking at local income areas are not well-represented on, let's say, Wikipedia articles about them. Or the other example I give is when I was at home with my newborn baby, I decided to go and look for videos about how to play with a newborn baby because even though I'd had two babies before this, I just couldn't figure out how you're supposed to play with this thing that just eats and poops. And I realized that almost all of the mommy blogs were coming from the UK and the US and they were giving you examples telling you to eat foods that were commonly available where they were, but not as locally situated. Not talking about the foods that are more commonly available in South Africa. Not talking about the materials that are more commonly available in my household. And I think that's something that a lot of moms can experience. And some of us are very adaptable. We can take this knowledge that we've gained from these videos and then we can translate it to our context. But I think there should be locally relevant content. There's also scarcity of home language content as well. We already know that the internet, the representation of languages on the internet doesn't reflect the representation of languages spoken in the world. And the ones that are spoken by the smallest populations are the least represented. Okay, so we're talking about access to the internet, a global resource of content in many languages by many people about many things. It's a repository for ideas both noble and controversial, but also a place of businesses and services. But when you connect to people on the internet, think about who are you connecting to most? And for us right now, we're connected all over the world. But the people I often connect to the most are my family members, people within my locality. Those are the people I talk to more often than anybody else. And every time I'm sending a chat message to my husband via WhatsApp, when we're in the same house, we're using data. And that data is going across the world and coming back, or at least across the country and coming back. It doesn't have to be that way. That's not something that's fundamental to information and communications technologies. So I want us to start rethinking network infrastructures. It's rethinking network infrastructures to design for bandwidth constrained use and also local interaction. So low-hanging fruit number one, better design for bandwidth caps. And so there's a few kind of design principles that I've put up here, making the data usage transparent, making it optional, supporting cache line and offline use. It drives me crazy when I'm using an app and I get disconnected from the Internet because I've run out of data and suddenly the app completely stops working. Even though that data was already on my phone, it could have just kept it up there, but because it's disconnected, the app decides it just won't work. Supporting intelligent management of data use and just handing the control over to the user for how the data is managed. And what doesn't work, some of the research my students have done is things like zero-rating websites, having a different version of Facebook or Wikipedia. When people interact with them, they don't like the experience because they feel constrained, they feel limited. They don't like suddenly hitting this wall, it says, oh, you're going to pay for it. They'd rather actually pay for accessing normal Facebook and Wikipedia if they can afford it. No hanging fruit number two, make open digital resources available locally and people have been doing this for 20 years now. I put a copy of Wikipedia in an orphanage in Tijuana in 2004, 2006, a while ago and these solutions have only gotten more affordable and better over time. I think this is still incomplete because if you look at these open digital resources, they still haven't found a way to make it not just something that you can access but something that you can actually contribute to. So if you were to edit the Wikipedia on a local server, it doesn't edit the Wikipedia on available to everybody else. So low hanging fruit number three, community-owned wireless networks and these are becoming much more widespread and our partners have attended workshops where there's 20 different community wireless networks just meeting together and sharing their stories. And this is because mesh wireless is easier and easier to deploy, it's becoming more affordable. And so this is a picture of Marius Waries who is one of our partners based in OceanView. He's the director of the OceanView Community Dynamic Cooperative that runs the community network and what you see behind him is a map of the OceanView community and the white squares or the white rectangles are the current access points that they have deployed. And so we've done a lot to give them the skills to train them on how to actually set up all of the wireless access points and how to manage the network, but we haven't actually done any of the installations ourselves over the last three years. They've acquired the skills and acquired the confidence to actually deploy and choose locations on their own. So we helped them with an initial set of equipment and now using any income that they get from the service, they're able to actually grow the network and maintain it. But one of the things that we're doing with this particular community wireless network is that we're exploring local content. And so anyone connecting to this network can get low-cost access to the Internet, but they can get free access to community-based resources. And so what we've done first is to start out with putting a bunch of services on there and to put in all the sort of Internet-in-a-box content. And so coming back to what is the hard-to-reach fruit? So I gave you three low-hanging fruits and I think our research agenda and the stuff that we're really working on and have questions about is how to motivate locally contextualized content and services, moving from a read-only access to the Internet to a right-enabled, active participation and representation. And I think that's something where, yes, in theory, they could do this if they had unlimited access to the Internet, but in practice it's not happening because of the existing bios on the Internet. Stupid things like if I'm looking for a picture of a baby to put into a presentation and I search, if I don't search for a black baby, I only get pictures of white babies. And so this is the Internet. Do people connect to it and give it as their Internet or do they connect to it and think of it as something that is from the outside? And in our ideal world, they say, oh, look, there's something that's not there about me. Let's put something on there so I can be represented too. But I don't know if that's happening as much as we like. So my approach is to start by understanding existing communicative ecologies, both digital and non-digital, how are people sharing information? How are they getting access to information? How are they talking to each other? How do they find out about services in their own communities? What are their data needs? And then the second is establishing co-design readiness. And that's something where we say, okay, we want to work with communities to have them develop their own resources, but we can't expect them to ramp up as designers from the very beginning. Give them a chance to be comfortable with the concepts that we're putting forward, with access to the Internet, and then start doing community-led co-design workshops around content and service creation. And that last thing is to work on how to best communicate what's going on in the network. And so what we've developed to support this so far is a project called Inetti, and this is just a diagram of the network architecture. It's very basic. You have a community. We have a server sitting in the middle of a high school in Oceanview, and that server is hosting several applications, content services, as well as like chat services and other things. They can get access to the Internet through that server, and so we've also installed a radio staff so that we can do voucher-based access to the Internet. And it starts out with these bootstrap services. Once they familiarize themselves and become co-design ready, we work with them to figure out what kind of community applications they want. And so this is a list of ideas that they've presented to us as priorities for how they want to use this network and what content that they want to see on there. And we hope that this leads to innovations in how we do content and services. And we hope that this also leads to other communities being able to pick up and use what they've seen other communities create. It's a combination of locally relevant stuff actually being something that can contribute to what's going on in the rest of the world. The next application of Inetti is actually in a different community setting, not the township but within a community-based organization. And so we're actually deploying Inetti in my own church around how people are thinking about the first thousand days of a child's life from conception to two years and saying, okay, we want parents to be able to connect to each other and they can use Inetti to access existing content, either the church's content or stuff that we've downloaded from the web but they can also talk to each other using bulletin boards or rocket chat. They can actually have conversations but that community creation workshops, content creation workshops are something that will empower moms to contribute, empower them to make their own video blogs to share with people. And this is thinking about, okay, if we take away the bandwidth constraints in the communities, then we can actually help them strengthen what's going on in the community itself. And so that's the end of my talk. I hope you guys have lots of questions about what we're doing and I just want to thank you for listening to me. Thank you, Melissa. Over to Matt if you can pass the ball to Matt. Yes, I'm trying to figure out where the ball went. There was a whole list of attendees a second ago. I think Matt has the ball now. It looks like Matt, are you able to control the fight? Yes, greetings everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Melissa and Melissa as well. It's an honor to follow Melissa and actually to build upon many of the points that she talked about during her section. In a few minutes, I just also wanted to contribute to the panel by sharing a bit about me for everyone that's attending and then tell a story around low connectivity and impact on cloud services from an engineer's perspective at a scale problem set. And so I'm going to talk about some work in the health sector in West Africa where in the low resource settings and we have extreme demands not just at the community level but the types of businesses and public services that are dependent on the internet and the impact on how low resource settings can vastly change the ability for society and folks to respond. I'll wrap up with a few lessons from that although there are some good and some that we also need to work on as engineers and folks that are affecting ICT for change. So with that, let me tell you folks a bit about myself. So my background is in direct engineering. I'm an electrical software systems and telecommunications engineer and have worked in everything from satellite communications to mobile telephony and all the way down into the chips and camera systems that go into mobile phones for the big for like Ericsson and Nokia and Apple. But my passion is really in the connecting work. So I also think that as we heard from Melissa the impact of people connecting to each other and connecting to use the internet is the strongest value in a lot of the connectivity technology that's out there even if I have been working at the enterprise or at the scaled sets in due time. I think that networks and challenging environments this is the first network I worked on in 2006 that was in northern Peru in the Amazon jungle where you have extremely long distances and there's no market for mobile operators to provide even 2G services. But over the last 15 years we have come a long way with trying to build the investment case for operators or the commercial sector to invest even at the slowest level and a lot more needs to be done. But when you start from the opposite end when you start from the community level you're already alleviating a lot of gaps that I think Melissa alluded to in what's happening with people being able to connect to each other with local content or serving the needs locally. So this network that's running across the tributary of the Amazon river here the primary use was actually for health and education services to coordinate and accurately assign resources whether they were medical professionals doctors or mobile vaccine clinics as well as teachers with a limited amount of tertiary or university professors that could visit to provide education along the river and coordinate across using localized but direct networks to kind of support public services for greater communities. And one last piece kind of about myself and the engineering background is my work with open BTS which is an open cellular network platform I would I call it kind of like it's the Linux of mobile network towers right so one of the biggest barriers towards seeing the commercial sector investing in a lot of the last billion the last billion that are not connected or having like commercial or even regular access to the internet is just in the cost prohibitiveness of fueling generators from mobile tower sites or paying for the big infrastructure that Ericsson or Huawei whoever requires to run a 2G 3G or 4G switched packet that's happening at that level so the more that can be done with open source or community network infrastructure models that can provide either village networks or community networks or smaller local service providers that can use more open and affordable infrastructure that's built off the principles of digital development to connect the more rapidly we'll start to see more people being able to participate in the internet example as a whole. The last so as I kind of talk widely and certainly there's a lot more to be sharing even though my background is engineering I've also worked on a lot of the issues that most alluded to early on that are still challenges for you know this generation around the political and policy access around spectrum rights or the investment market to the types of services that are being pushed downstream that are coordinating with type people so while infrastructure is still an ongoing issue there are greater challenges at the service application and the policy level that we also need to work on and they're starting to have a bigger impact on specific sectors that respond to that so with that I want to transition into a story kind of from the health sector around not just how communities use the public health services are becoming more and more dependent and the challenges in a low resource setting that any engineer or technician working in the space is going to start to see becoming more and more prevalent so let's jump into the health sector context specifically around ICT usage more and more in the health space you're starting to see what we're already using in education for delivering education materials or in the business space around collaboration for businesses or even at the community space for collaborating on the internet of the technologies like cloud hosting mobile data collection or mobile tools that are benefiting the public health space and bringing the advantages of internet connectivity into delivering health services within the cloud for example you have data storage systems that are collaborating medical records or payroll the list of health workers or the services that might be used you have the integration across that are traveling between health ministries or health facilities or patient information or reports that are going to coordinate health delivery the supply chain of pharmaceuticals commodities that need to be distributed in certain locations registries and examples that are sent from one facility to another for analysis of data collection dashboards that are used by folks of internet based technologies that are supplementing and providing the health space for this kind of work and at the community level that's just kind of back end right you see a lot more cloud happening at the back although people may still be filling in a lot of forms that are uploading to that work but you also have at the fields level I would call or at the front line level more appropriately surveys that are being used patient information that's being coordinated SMS or telemedicine delivery of services all that are internet or communication based technologies that are pivotal towards advancing public health outcomes in a community or providing for the opportunity to deliver health more effectively and while you have a lot of health professionals or people in the health space that are working on this their jobs and the ability to deliver services effectively are more and more dependent on the internet or the technologies or people that are advancing the use of those technologies in that space and generally it's pretty good but in a lot of areas we can see that it comes challenges that we as engineers or people that are working in the space need to bring in intelligent design like some of the ideas that Melissa and Marco will eventually talk about to more around the considerations for how it could impact at scale society and big problems so let's keep going with health for just a little bit longer and I want to talk about an example of the massive some of the issues we're having with the disease outbreak of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa from 2014 to 2017 and still ongoing in the Congo and spread it on the borders of Uganda and Uganda that folks are probably familiar with that started a year and a half ago and it's continuing now tracking a national affected disease like that is requiring all types of cloud based health data systems whether it's health records laboratory samples managing information that all function and sort of connects to each other with the point of services and data and I want to talk about how when that's not designed with the content with the low resource context how we as technical professionals coming into this space have a responsibility to make sure it's serving and not creating the problem more the slide that is in front of you now is actually generalized framework of the open HIE model the open health information exchange model which is a new which is a framework architecture that's deployed both the state level as well as the systemic level of different types of information and data systems that need an interoperability layer or the internet in many cases whether it's SMS2G or IP packets moving between cloud services to coordinate across types of systems and while we expect that as a common requirement in a lot of systems when it's not there because we're sometimes in low resource settings can have massive problems so let's dive into a quick example of what the current state of work and this is just a snapshot of over dozens of different systems and it's certainly not exhaustive that are deployed that use the internet or communication technology just for the specific purposes of health across regions in West Africa you have health information systems that are commonly used the district health information system 2.0 platform is widely used by national and community level districts that's a cloud based system for coordinating health data and records you have mobile based systems that are like out that will be SMS such as com care rapid pro that are used by ministry that are used by the health sector for communication to patients or communication to frontline workforce around that work you have open medical record systems file formats you have health registry payroll and data management systems that are widely used across the region already usually at a central level sometimes at a state or district level for coordination and the dependence on the internet communication technology to keep the health system running is growing is a requirement so how would this effect at scale issues that we as professionals coming into this space or soon to be engineers the kind of case let's take so I'm going to take ask everyone to kind of put a pause on being a technology internet professional and put ourselves in the health space right now but still using the engineering caps that we all kind of were to think about this so in the common example of a routine reporting right which is you are a health facility or a health district and you have people working on collecting information around okay maybe some people some patients are affected with malaria or you want to report on birth statistics or you need to report on supply chain initiatives with vaccine or nutrition facts from the community so you have your district health offices that need to come to a centralized level where that data is compiled on behalf of a country often from a public actor like Ministry of Health and now as we just talked about a lot of that is augmented by technology you have connectivity that's there and you have technical professionals that are specifically around working with cloud based tools or technologies or maybe they're communications engineers that are maintaining satellite uplinks or long distance point to point wifi systems that augment and support just that use case of technology used at scale to support health you also have a lot of complexity added to this right so it's not just some type of data you have multiple frameworks within the health space like for example the laboratory systems that might be doing samples information sent that's collected at the field level sent to not only the data office at the central district level but also towards a laboratory network right or supplementary and laboratory could be juxtaposed here with all the other support services that are used so you already have parallel layers that are dependent on connectivity and technical professionals to try to deliver and keep the efficiency of the health sector rolling okay now let's take it to the national level which is even if that's happening around communities countries or centralized districts or big or secondary cities you also need to consolidate all that data into maybe like a data warehouse or a national system these are the reports that would go up to maybe the World Health Organization or a country's minister of health around what's happening at a country level and the faster this can be with technology augmenting cloud-based tool to support this you have a powerful way to augment the health sector using technology it seems to be working great with technical professionals working alongside health okay so this network will expand as more reliability comes onto there you have secondary networks coming on and you have not only the health professionals but more technical professionals like ourselves supporting the use of technology for public services and you already start to see some of the complexity that happens there so then the example I want to get to is what happens if we start to if the system becomes under strain so in the examples of the Ebola epidemic that had spread or that we continue to see with challenges around HIV AIDS or malaria problems you already have task teams and augmentation of additional people coming in to work on these health problems in a lot of the areas and markets that we care about and so you have additional folks that are dependent on the communication and the tracking of data moving back and forth across that so you have a lot of people already depending on these networks and if there is a big problem such as something that's beyond the capacity of normal health system to do you'll start to see the emergency services activate in the countries like what we saw happening with what we see happening now with Ebola or what happened a while ago with a big response to HIV AIDS epidemic is you see a lot more targeted programs of staff depending on this network of systems coming into work and try to support our communities or countries at the national level to deal with this work and then if it becomes really bad you might have the international response of fellow neighboring state actors or the World Health Organization or even other countries coming in with all kinds of resources and the non-government organizations and the NGOs and the response groups that are building upon this already tough network adding additional clinics to deal with that case with additional staff all dependent and being laid upon the existing health data network that's happening there you have additional services coming in and all of a sudden this fragile network assuming it's built strongly is moving and happening across the field level to communities all the way to the coordination level and the central level that's happening for that but what we a lot of us know from working and being in a lot of these areas where we don't have strong internet access or connectivity infrastructure is that without that you can basically remove all the arrows and you have an extreme amount of people resources mobilized and a lot of problems and no ability for data to move between anything so at national scale problems and just using health example here but there's plenty of other context without strong access you can start to see how this story of enterprise services or the things that were already depending on to meet public need now collapse without appropriate pieces what I want to say is in sort of closing as I wrap up the story is that a lot of the similar lessons around good design dependent on data or pieces that we can use as we graduate becoming engineers that are trying to serve a good public need most highlighted a few around being smart around data design choices that are dependent on that and I just wanted a plus one or second nose around data systems that can work or function in asynchronous or offline data system low load messaging systems that give the option to develop related platforms that aren't codependent around being always online standardization this screenshot of is kind of the whiteboard walkthrough of what the case management system I was in Liberia in 2016 for the epidemic which was all people centric and that was the design path thinking around how do we move information around dealing with in this public sector and you can see that on a whiteboard it was pretty hard to execute at a national level and support that with stronger or a better design communication ICC services we as engineers or professionals coming in to build technology that can support and make an impact in this regard needs to be done in such a way that takes into the factor the design that impacts low resource settings that we all eventually hope will become connected and contributing but can still support the need of society to function and support services of the public so with that I wanted to thank you for coming with me on this little sub story through the health space and the example of at scale systems and services that are dependent and I'll be sticking around later to answer more questions or talk things with that I'm going to pass the panel to our final presenter that I'm excited to share with Dr. Marco Zanaro so thank you all for joining my story and Marco over to you thank you thank you Matt Marco looking forward to your talk okay hello thank you very much for inviting me tonight and let me see if I can move on with this slide okay so what I'm going to talk about today is listening in IoT and development so my name is Marco Zanaro I got a PhD from KTH in Sweden and I have been working in IoT or what at that time was called Session Networks for Development since 2004 so quite a long time I coordinate a lab here at the CDP called telecommunications and ACT for development and in our lab we divide even the hour time in research deployment and training so we really like to deploy stuff you know following our research or you know fueling our research and we also are active in a lot of training activities so why is IoT interesting because it's a technology which has been extremely fast so in the last you know 10-15 years we have seen an incredible growth of IoT devices in fact as we talk today there's about 20 billion IoT devices you know sending data on the internet so if we compare that to the number of people sending data to the internet it's about you know five times more so it's really interesting technology with many many applications all over the world so it's you know many devices and it took very few years to get this huge number of devices deployed as you can imagine the deployments of IoT is not evenly distributed so this slide comes from a website called Thinkful which shows IoT devices that publish data openly on the internet so there's many many devices in the northern hemisphere US and Europe you can see there's many in the sea those are ships sending information about you know water quality or their position in the sea when you zoom to the southern part of the world of course you see less devices not as many devices at the northern part although there's many many applications where this low cost and low power devices can be really useful so this slide I think was produced a couple of months ago I checked today and now there's more so you know kind of situation is improving there's more devices sending openly on the internet as someone that had been working in ICT4D for some time when I started learning about internet of things and central networks I checked what is it really useful does it really fit with ICT4D so really interesting paper comes from the tier group in Berkeley Brewer wrote this paper in 2005 but I think it's still very relevant today the name of the paper is Case of Technology in developing regions it was they checked lots of ICT projects all over the world and they analyzed why some were successful and some weren't successful and they came up with the conclusion that there's four technological requirements for an ICT4D project to be successful so first one is autonomous connectivity so you shouldn't depend on any existing connectivity infrastructure second one is low cost equipment, appropriate user interface Melissa spoke about that and power resilience so I saw there was some question about low power devices and low power infrastructure so if you think about IOT it actually fits these four needs so you don't really rely on any existing infrastructure so these devices can communicate one with each other without the need of a SIM card of existing infrastructure the really low cost devices so now you can buy these IOT nodes for really few dollars on the market there is no user interface so you need to come up with your own user interface so there is no translation of data you have to come up with a way to communicate results and data to users and they're extremely low power devices so now we're talking about milliamps or microamps devices so with an IOT node you can easily survive 5 to 10 years with a small battery so those are really low power devices as I said I have been working in training so I have been working in about 35 activities in a number of countries ranging from Latin America to African countries to Asia as well so in all these training activities we talked to people how to operate IOT networks and then people came up with their own applications so in some cases that I would list now we supported universities and communities in deploying IOT networks so what have we learned here let's start with Benin this was 2004 quite some time ago and the problem they wanted to solve was measuring air quality so they had no air quality sensors got to know and they wanted to come up with some low cost solution to measure air quality so we had a workshop there for a week and then we had few days for a hackathon and people came up with prototypes you see it is officially a prototype on the device so they deployed a number of these devices in the city collected some data and came up with some information about air quality that was quite successful we were even finalists of the Sensors for Global Development competition but the lesson learned was again Melissa covered very well this bandwidth constrained access so 3G was not available everywhere so we had to come up with an SMS based solution which is great except that there is no SMS based solution on the market so you need to come up with your own solution so IOT again many applications, low cost devices but it doesn't really fit conditions in many countries 3G lesson learned was also quite interesting but data privacy and openness so measuring air quality is great but then when you publish data about air quality everyone is happy so you need to balance how open is your data and who owns the data second example comes from Asia Asia Institute of Technology in Bangkok different environments but again at university so again we had an IOT workshop and then the application they were interested in was fish farming so can we use these low cost devices to measure the condition of the water temperature, oxygen and then can we come up with a model so at the end of the year we know how much fish we are going to have so that was their application it was inside the campus so in that case we used wifi but lesson number most interesting one was number 2 so sensors need maintenance so when you talk about IOT the devices can be cheap the sensors might be cheap but then you have to account for maintenance of sensors so if you have something in the water that has to be cleaned every couple of months and you need to have someone in charge for the maintenance third example comes from in Rwanda again in 2016 it was at the University of Rwanda in Kigali and in that case there wasn't an issue so networking is great in Rwanda for G's available in almost all the country and the application they had in mind was tea factories so can we get more tea can we optimize growing tea or processing tea in tea factories using these IOT devices so if you look on the bottom left side you have the way they normally measure temperature and humidity with manual sensors and then how you can do that automatically with this $5 device and you can get data much more often and with much higher precision in that case the interesting one was again number three so data ownership so who owns the data and especially where is this data moving to is the data going to be stored in Rwanda is my competing company going to get access to the same data is that going to some other continent some other country we want to know where our data is stored next example 2017 was in Ethiopia in mind was traffic monitoring so can we measure the number of cars and in a way try to optimize the traffic condition in this and lesson learned was number two in this case so type approval so then again these devices might be cheap, might be low cost might be low power but we need to get them in the country and in some countries that is a big big issue another slide from 2011 so Kenya's communication authority wants to scrutinize IoT devices before sale so again even if you have an interesting application and these devices are appropriate for your application it might be an issue to get the devices in the country finally one was in Asia in Indonesia and then we had another one in Mauritius and this was about low cost weather station huge issue in many countries now very very few weather station the whole continent of Africa has the same number of weather stations as Germany and so there is need to get this low cost weather station but in that case there were two issues one was connectivity so you want to get data from places which are far away which have no connectivity infrastructure so you need to come up with some long distance technology long distance links to connect this weather station and especially number one calibration is an issue if you want to share data openly well this data should be good enough to be shared and used by other people so in the case of weather station calibration is an issue so there is many many projects about low cost weather station but very few of them are decently calibrated and I think that's all from my side if you want to read more about this and other projects there is an interesting report published by the ITU and Cisco a couple of years ago called harnessing things for global development and it covers IoT and many similar projects thank you Thank you Marco One of the things I wanted to point out is that the paper that Marco highlighted at the start of his talk by Eric Brewer at all in 2006 Melissa was one of the co-authors on that paper as a graduate student in the tier lab at Berkeley at the time it happens to be one of the seminal papers in our field presented there 13 odd years ago is still very relevant in 2019 so I highly encourage you all to go read that paper I'll put the link to that paper in the chat window as well I want to start with a question that came in from Brian and this is from IEEE Uganda and Melissa you've already mentioned a couple of links in the chat window so Brian if you haven't seen them please go and see the response there but the question is ethics have always emerged as an issue whenever technology is introduced what guidelines actually comes to you the ethical governance of digital transformation especially around emerging technologies Melissa I know you've done a lot of work where the ACM code of ethics as well as a lot of there's a lot of talk about ethics around participatory design or co-designing your own work could you just highlight some brief snippets around what are things that as developers we should be considering when we're developing technologies for these parts of the world yeah so I mean in the participatory design context there's a lot of I think ethical issues that we haven't really sorted through like if you if you're claiming co-design who owns the IP who should be benefiting from the knowledge that's generated and as researchers we all actually like succeed in helping the community or forwarding development we still get to travel around the world presenting our papers and so I think reflecting on that sort of inequality and what it really means to actually consider the people you're working with equal to yourself and then I would say there's a lot of issues around like professional ethics and the ACM code of ethics actually provides a lot of guidance for many questions that you should ask yourself when you're doing this kind of any actually computing innovation whether it's like machine learning or you know the HCI stuff that I do and I think what's coming up that's really big ethical issues that people haven't really figured out is how we work with data and what we find or what I've seen with developing countries is that all the data doesn't represent or include people from developing countries because it's so hard to collect that data but on the other side of that people are trying to get this data but they're doing it in an exploitative manner and so for me the ethical stance that I take and I recommend is really thinking about whose voice on whose terms is the technology being developed, is it being developed on our terms as the implementers as the researchers, as the practitioners or is it being developed actually on the terms of the community and reflecting on the differential power that makes them just agree to what we what we offer because they have to so I think that highlights some of them I'm not sure if it actually gets at like a specific answer I don't know what do you guys think I think Melissa I think ethics is such a huge topic it's hard to answer in a particular response but some of the resources that you've guided us to are really useful as a broader framework the two things that you highlighted there in terms of participatory design or co-design really starting to think through the ethical constraints there as to who has who has voice in the experience but also like in terms of intellectual property when you're creating something together how is the intellectual property shared afterwards and similarly with data one of the things that I've started to deal with in my work for example is Marco mentioned this like who owns the data and so if the government of Pakistan owns the data in health for example but I use that data to train my algorithms I've designed the algorithm but I use somebody else's data to do that and then I go to all the algorithm elsewhere do I get credit for that how does revenue get shared etc I think these are large questions that our field is grappling with and some of these answers are emerging I think we need to have a more broader conversation around ethics and as the field progresses it's moved from ownership to data governance for example we can come back to this in a little bit one of the questions that I want to frame to meant is around our supplies and so one of the questions that came up is what are the components for an infrastructural framework for communities in a developing country and Marco hinted to the framework that was presented by Brewer at all in 2006 but especially around things like and I really like the phrasing here epileptic electricity supply in some of the communities that we work with and so Matt in some of your work when you've worked on backhaul or otherwise how do you manage power how do you manage electricity outages what are some of the technologies that are being used to get it to power constraints sure thanks most of them I'll actually try to answer two questions of this as I saw another question in the feed around TV white space and maybe what we will call alternative technologies because there's a combined answer there traditional you know communication infrastructure that's being deployed if it's internet over mobile 3G or 4G or Wi-Fi point-to-point Wi-Fi is often co-located with point-to-multipoint mob cellular towers which are often equipped with a generator set you know that can be supplying 24-hour overnight power to giant radios that are doing microwave backhaul for the mobile operator provider or the cellular network these are huge OPEX or operating expenditure costs for operators or if they're public or national infrastructure to like fuel like reliable constant 100% uptime whether it's for cloud applications or just 24-7 mobile service the downside so even at if you have a solar or photovoltaic system at the client site you're often dependent on somebody putting forward the operational costs to provide expensive power solutions for the middle hall right or the middle hall network or even if your data goes to an urban connectivity center you know you're dependent on a grid that it may not be 100% reliable so in this regard the the community networks model is usually going to be dependent a lot more or we're seeing come out with a lot more Wi-Fi or open spectrum like 2.4 or 5.1 gigahertz spectrum areas that people can use that are going to be a lot less power than the microwave backhaul that's required sometimes the uplink like the vSAT services are going to be dependent however I do think that a big consideration for the future us going into this or for folks that will be entering into partnerships or seeing you know working with networks that are coming online is the alternative technologies like I saw mentioned in the chat TV white space we're using the frequency where the radio powers are going to radio powers not going to be requiring so much IP like mobile like LTE hotspots or the lower frequency like 700 megahertz like some band work and also way down the line coming maybe five years from now when we first to start see the first low-earth orbit constellations and maybe some like low power systems there are all going to be important considerations because the barrier of power it's not just unreliable power it's the operating cost of maintaining reliable power that is usually going to be the big bottleneck in providing reliable services so as new technology comes online that takes effective of lower power methods it's not just so much that that's more reliable it's cheaper so we'll see it more at scale with more use across it so I encourage folks to be working on those kind of technologies finding them in the partnerships or the networks they may be designing or the deployments they'll be using to be looking at that to help that need thank you Matt so the question around power supply was from Udo Chukwu I apologize if I didn't pronounce the name correctly and then the question around TV white space that you answered Matt was from Virginia I'm Marco I'm going to phrase the same question around TV white spaces to you just phrasing it slightly differently have you seen examples of innovations in spectrum policy that have opened up applications such as TV white spaces or for example I was trying to work in with long range Lora in Pakistan and whether Lora is on the ISM band or not it takes a while for a number of countries to update the spectrum policy are there examples of countries that are really innovative as far as spectrum policy is concerned where these innovative applications around IOT are concerned yes there are yes and okay I've been working on TV white space in two countries in Malawi and Mozambique and it's quite interesting because TV white space in a way is a no brainer so you get long distance which is what is needed you can cover more communities which again is needed so what's the issue with TV white space so we started from the idea that we should measure spectrum usage first of all so in many of these countries there was little or really no information about the use of spectrum especially in remote areas so we developed a system whereby people could measure with a lot of spectrum analyzer the use of spectrum so we have data from about 30 countries and in two countries were successful to convince the regulator to you know allow us to do some TV white space trials because we showed that there was no use of the spectrum in you know special in particular regions of that countries and that was quite successful both Malawi and Mozambique regulated TV white space so now a commercial operator can come in and can deploy TV white space you know with a license from the government and when you're talking about Lora and Lora1 one limitation in Africa is the 1% duty cycle so you can use these radios for only 1% of the time so the idea is that you're using ISM band so anyone can use so you shouldn't use them for more than 1% of the time which of course makes sense in cities in urban areas but then again when you go to remote areas that doesn't make much sense they're the only one using that application so again Mozambique was very you know open and they decided they're going to have a legislation whereby if you're using Lora devices in remote areas then you can use more than 1% of the time you know airtime usage Thank you Marca for those examples the next question I want to phrase to all three a few panelists and I think it's relevant because some of the applications that we've spoken about in each of the talks is linked with privacy and security so the question is Raminak and it says any challenges of privacy and security implementations both in health information systems as well as IOT if yes how are you able to curb these challenges we're starting to collect increasingly more sensitive data as we're overcoming some of these access issues we're starting to deploy applications that collect sensitive data whether it's health data or otherwise when we're thinking about IOT how are we managing sensitive applications one of the stories that I share from my work in Pakistan is they have one of the projects that we were working on had a username and password for a very sensitive health portal as admin and admin one two three and so I'm wondering there are privacy and security challenges on the technical side there are also privacy and security challenges on the human side are there challenges that you've come across in your work and how have you overcome some of those privacy and security challenges maybe we can maintain the same order so start with Melissa and then go to Matt and then Marco but privacy and security challenges with the data that we're collecting so I think one of our biggest challenges is that the current like designs around passwords and as you said it just don't work they're not really usable and so all of the systems that we have on the NetDea platform they have user authentication systems that require email addresses that require phone numbers, require an internet connection to back it up and so we need to redesign the authentication platform first to work both offline and online but secondly maybe consider maybe that passwords aren't the right way to go and explore other authentication mechanisms that will actually work with communities that cannot memorize a password like me that has uppercase, lowercase, symbol, number in it like making passwords more complex isn't actually making us more secure so yeah from the usability and I know Enoch is one of our grad students and so he's doing a lot of work with DNS security and the simple thing that every URL you go to is totally open to everybody so like there's so many privacy and security questions and when you move to shared content in these community networks I think those are things that we need to figure out both teach people about security and privacy considerations but also figure out with them what the norm should be thanks I'll add two pieces to this too just kind of trends and what I think we can do as a community around privacy and security so the first is maybe what we can't or shouldn't necessarily be focusing our efforts on I'll focus on maybe the African markets in that I think that at the security online is a global concern issue like I believe that distance rights online in the global space does cross boundaries and you're entering into spaces that you can't necessarily rely on state actors so we see a lot of people kind of knocking on the door of internet censorship or internet data portals or data that's within a country needs to be owned by that country or located in that country and that's interesting worth exploring for the principles of what data privacy means as a society or community as a country but I think it's a lot different than participating in like the global internet security movement the global rights of a citizen online and global privacy so for those that are engineers or technicians the second point I want to get into is there are so many trans boundary and cross state privacy actors and non-traditional like internet users the African markets specifically you have the mobile money space where you have banks coming in with KYC data that already has a wealth of personal information that's now transacting across the internet this is ignoring the context of whether your health medical records are on the national state data center or if they're stored in the cloud where that data center might be located in different country the geolocation of the data and where it's happening is not going to be as important as engineers and technology practitioners designing with just better global internet privacy methods and whether they're going to be whether all of us are going to be working in academia or for the banks or for the public sector or for the operators the global concerns around privacy and networks should stay applied because the global rights assistance line will only grow and cross the boundaries and communities level so with those design perspectives please open your systems so they can benefit from the global security environment that's investing in this beyond just sort of the local challenges as well which are important but will rapidly eclipse based on what's happening in the global internet space in the coming years Marco do you have anything to add to that? Yes just shortly so security was a big issue with sensor networks and IoT up to a couple of years ago so engineers and technicians that called them that didn't really care much I would say about security so we're more interested in the application than any security fix so things have changed quite a lot with the Laura one so Laura one Laura is you know long distance IoT protocol and there is an interesting movement called TTN or the things network has been extremely popular here in Europe this is a community network model for IoT so the idea is that you share infrastructure with other people and this has been really well designed so it's long distance and in that case security and privacy are really you know kept into account so your links are you know encrypted there's no way other people can read your data very very nice except that if you want to use that from Africa the servers are based in Europe so there's no server on the African continent so when you send your architectural data from Kenya you're going to go travel all the way to Ireland and get back so again as researchers you know working in IoT and as there's so many applications you know in Africa and in other countries as well of course and we're trying to push TTN to move their servers close to the final users and you know to set up some infrastructure in the African continent as well so again from the technical point of view things tend to be solved but then you have these kind of policy level or you know you know higher level which is a bit more complicated completely agree Marco I think one of the challenges that we're starting to see is as we're starting to get into mass amounts of data collection from governments especially and these foreseeable security challenges that aren't getting fixed as quickly as would like for them to get fixed a lot of countries are closing their doors on the data collecting and they're saying we're going to hold on to it tightly and we're not going to share it with researchers etc and so that's one of the side effects of not being able to figure out the security piece as quickly as we'd like there are security researchers around the world who are trying to figure out how to best go about solving the challenge one of the things that I've looked at is researcher from Stanford is starting to do a startup where the idea is instead of having to share data you're able to run your algorithms on the data where it's housed and so there's this non-transparent API where you're able to write your algorithms and run the algorithms on the data without ever having access to the data itself and so there's somewhere going on that there's a lot that needs to be done I'm going to go back to the first question that we started which was around ethics and start to link it to the data conversation that we're having and here's this question from Gertran once down that says how do you see the extraction of data from Africa for processing outside of the continent so this is something that Marco mentioned in terms of where the data is being housed and so how do you see the extraction of data from Africa for processing outside of the continent that IODs can facilitate this represent a continuation of colonial behavior expecting resources from Africa to the western world Marco where the communities and authorities sensitive to that issue where you were working but I think I'd love to hear from Marco first and maybe we can go in the reverse order this time around but I want to start to get into the nuances and into the weeds of the ethics questions around data and hear from all of the panelists around that it is a big issue it is a huge issue and to answer the last part communities weren't worried about that in a way they had no idea about their data moving from one place to the other not at all so yes I would say that is a huge issue and when we're talking about ethics in the case of IOT that's also final users so again we have been working in projects where you're measuring things and people involved in measuring things manually get worried so what's going to happen I'm measuring water quality manually I'm collecting water quality daily so now I have this IOT system which is doing that in an automatic way high precision doing that every hour or so what's going to happen with my job so those are the concerns that we get you know ask all the time yes I think raising awareness around some of these challenges and some of the communities that we work with is an important thing that we all can do as part of our work Matt do you want to add to that briefly I'll just plus one and actually re-emphasize one of the points that Melissa made earlier which is that I think that more data there's not yet a critical mass of data coming necessarily out of the continent of Africa where we're starting to where people can contribute or leverage that value in the conversation you know the example of googling images online and seeing white babies getting more participating in the internet is going to require allowing that data to contribute I think and maybe it's water quality data and influencing the global conversation around challenges with watersheds or water usage or water rights I think contributing that data to the global data space certainly there are going to be some agents that will exploit that and use it whether it's for profit or maybe even against it so that's a risk but if it's paired earlier question around like good security and privacy practices where everyone can be has rights online as a citizen then I think that it will both meet the need for building agency and participation and getting it out there as well as still being noble and honorable in the rights of people coming online Melissa do you have any thoughts on the data colonization aspect of things? Probably too many thoughts to actually voice the time that we have left and I think I already talked a little bit about some of the problems that are there but I do want to encourage any students on the webinar that if you are interested in doing a PhD or a master's at University of Cape Town we do have our center in ICT4D and we do have scholarships available for PhD students about 5 years annually and so you're encouraged to pursue that but also that there's tons of great organizations that are doing great ICT4D development work around access and around connectivity and around health and water and everything so just get out there connect to the people that are there and start doing the work I can't emphasize this enough there's a lot of good work to be done and we need good people in this space and more we can start to figure out how to get smart individuals from the communities where we're working into the space the better solutions that we're going to be able to design just adding on to that there's a question from Rota around how students can start to implement some of their designs from their projects into the real world and so Minister can you give me examples of ways that fast projects or design projects or even dissertation projects have gone on to scale are there examples of students championing this effort beyond the classroom or are there examples where faculty can get involved and help students scale beyond the classroom well what I've seen I see my so what I've seen in universities is almost every university has some sort of software engineering course to actually practical solutions for people that are local and I've seen so many projects that because they're not on the international publication scene nobody's ever heard of unless you're actually physically there and so I want to recognize that there's a ton of innovation that's happening that's just not you know globally well known but it's great that it's there and I think you have to not necessarily wait for things to stabilize but to be willing to experiment with platforms that haven't stabilized so you can it's becoming easier and easier to experiment with internet things to build your own internet in a box locally the equipment the cost is going down lower and so if you are a computer scientist if you're an engineer go ahead and experiment so you can start setting the agenda for how it should stabilize and I think one of the things that bugs me about 5G is that like the communities and people in developing countries like people from rural areas weren't included in the conversation about what 5G should be and it's not going to come with us waiting for our voices to be heard but we have to actually I think go and start pushing for people to listen to our voices I think that's a really good point that you make one of the things that I've seen repeatedly in my work is there's a huge challenge to getting published in the academy and there's these barriers that exist that limit what people who are doing innovative work in a lot of different communities are able to get published and get out there and there's some conferences that are starting to deal with that so for example the ICT and development conference that's happening in Ecuador next year is one that has a separate mechanism outside of the formal papers that are double-blind peer reviewed there's a note section where a lot of my students have been able to get some of their work out it's this short paper that's four pages and then it gets published in an avenue that is in text that can be searched by researchers elsewhere the other thing that's starting to happen is there's a lot of listservs where you can start to post some of the work that you're doing and share it with the rest of the community where it's just an email and maybe if we can all start to chime in and in the chat window start to post the listservs that we're all a part of whether it's IOT based listservs or HCI based listservs or just young researchers and ICTD based listservs and more and more so with social media I started to see the democratization of the conversation itself and so there are closed group communities on Facebook in some of the professional settings that we work in what I want to do now is just maybe give like a minute or so to each of the panelists to see you have any closing remarks or any pointers that you want to give to some of your own work or the organizations that you work and then I'll hand it back over to Mariela to close the conversation about two minutes towards the end of the hour Marco do you want to start and then we'll go to Matt and then Melissa my main point here is that again IOT is not you know future technology it's something that is happening right now and again we have five times more IOT devices than people on the internet which is you know we're shocking and surprising but that's the reality so we may accuse of this new technology for you know the best and for you know the best of communities so yes I'm hoping if you want to you know get in touch with me if you have some you know IOT ideas or projects or you know workshops you want to organize in a country just feel free to get in touch thank you my closing thoughts are that low access is a reality right now there's still upwards of a billion individuals that don't have reliable if any access to the internet at all there are technology barriers that are working on rapidly trying to close that gap to close the access gap a lot of influence in that will be done from the private sector operators or new technologies that are coming online so as this group goes on and we want to contribute in this space whether it is from the academic perspective or for the young engineers that are going to go to to join different initiatives they're working on that whether it's the public or private sector areas we have an ability to shape the influence of that dealing with people coming online to contribute to the global internet space so as that happens the things we've talked about today security local and domain context the agency for actors that are in these areas that are you know coming online to catch up in the area and the data that doesn't exist in that for specifically the IOT you know realm and the sensors the data that's coming out of areas that didn't have access to being online are all you know it's the opportunity to scale and shape that in the global data and internet space going forward so I'm excited for all the engineers that take that into consideration going forward and thanks for the opportunity to be a part of this thanks Matt Melissa any closing remarks well thank you so much for organizing this with Mariela and Jana it's been really interesting hearing from Matt and Marco and from all the participants I'll highlight Hercin has been doing a lot of really amazing work around access in both Zambia and Zimbabwe including community wireless networks including stuff around healthcare so if you haven't seen his papers and stuff I would go and check them out and he's got really great perspectives really useful insightful perspectives on these issues of coloniality and development and you know I encourage people to come to UCT and work with us and to go and spend some time listening to before you act so I think that's it but thank you so much thank you Melissa just to echo the point that I wanted to make in the chat window when you said we need peer review also from outside the scene for instance non-westerners in non-west and so I'm starting to see some of that there's local conferences that are starting to happen this is part of this community of academics in Africa that have started a conference called Africa that publishes some really good work I've learned so much from the work we see that happening in the community in India as well there's local workshops that are happening and the other thing that I talk about a lot in my classes here at the University of Michigan with a lot of my students is what Melissa just said which is we need to start to shift our lens from thinking of ourselves as experts to thinking of ourselves as facilitators and going into the communities that we go into with an open ear and seeing what are things that we can learn from in the communities that we work in and how can we be more respectful as we we're learning when we're going and doing this kind of work I'm really grateful to all of our panelists for joining us I know it's in the middle of the night for you where you are Melissa thank you so much for Matt and Marco for joining us from where you're at in such valuable insights I think brings me hope when I see all of the innovations that are happening in the continent and otherwise and I'm really excited to see where we're going as a community where we've gone from as Melissa pointed out from beyond access to now applications and then what are some of the challenges that we face in terms of the applications whether we see it on IOT or otherwise I'm really excited to see what the space holds and I'm really hoping that a lot of young students that are joining this conversation can start to join us and I look forward to learning from you all as well as you join this conversation thank you Mariela and Jana for giving me this opportunity to host this panel I'll hand it over back to Mariela thank you so much Mustafa this was incredible and telecommunications engineer myself so this was just my dream webinar with all of you there I just want to thank Melissa, Matthew and Marco Mustafa for putting all of them together it was an incredible webinar and very insightful and I'm also excited I'm from engineering for change we're also very excited to see where we move from here in this space there's a lot of challenges but there's a lot of opportunities so I really want to thank you once more for this incredible webinar thank you everyone for attending thank you to the IEEE sections for their insights and their comments and I just want to remind everyone that this webinar will be recorded, it has been recorded and will be hosted on our website so be sure to share it and to check it out afterwards if you haven't signed up to become a member we also remind you it's free and you will have access to all of these resources and if you wish to have the certificate of attendance email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org without further to say I want to just close it out saying thank you again for our great panelists and our moderator Mustafa thank you and have a great end of your day thank you everyone have a good evening thank you alright thank you