Allen School’s Richard Anderson receives humanitarian award from Association of Computer Machinery

, professor in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, has received the from the Association for Computer Machinery.

The award, given every two years, recognizes an individual or group who has made a significant contribution through computing technology. Anderson’s award, which comes with a prize of $5,000, recognizes “contributions that bridge the fields of computer science, education and global health.”

Anderson co-directs the , which studies how technology can be used to improve the lives of populations in low-income regions. “With his students and collaborators,” the association noted, “Anderson developed a range of innovative applications in health, education, the internet, and financial services, benefiting underserved communities around the globe.”

Eugene Leighton Lawler (1933-1994), for whom the award is named, was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read more about the award on the Allen School .

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91̽»¨chemistry professor Dianne Xiao receives award from DOE Early Career Research Program

, 91̽»¨assistant professor of chemistry, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science to receive funding from its .

The Early Career Research Program, now in its 12^th year, program supports “exceptional researchers during the crucial early years, when many scientists do their most formative work.”

The program provides university-based researchers with about $150,000 a year for five years, to cover summer salary and expenses. Eighty-three scientists were selected nationwide, including 32 from the DOE’s national laboratories and 51 from U.S. universities. The awards were announced on May 27.

Xiao’s , listed under the Basic Energy Sciences category, is titled “New Synthetic Approaches Towards Atomically Precise π–d Conjugated Materials.”

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Charles Johnson guest-edits anthology of Black American literature, parts with archive

, 91̽»¨professor emeritus of English, has guest-edited and contributed to a special edition of Chicago Quarterly Review, “

The Chicago Quarterly Review is a nonprofit, independent journal, established in 1994 that publishes short stories, poems, translations and essays by emerging and established writers.

An essayist, screenwriter and professional cartoonist as well as author, Johnson won the National Book Award for his novel “.”

Johnson wrote the introduction and contributed a story to the anthology — the journal’s volume #33 — called “Night Shift,” which he penned for the 2020 for Humanities Washington. The volume contains work by more than two dozen Black writers. An earlier special edition of the journal was dedicated to South Asian American writers, and an upcoming issue will focus on Native American literature.

Also, Washington University in St. Louis in May that it has acquired the Charles Johnson Papers, an archival collection of materials related to Johnson’s work as an author and illustrator. “Spanning nearly six decades, the collection brings together manuscripts, drafts, correspondence, artwork and ephemera, and serves as a testament to Johnson’s wide-ranging career as a public intellectual.”

In Kenya, the ease of has increased incomes in rural areas, enabled small businesses to thrive and reshaped the country’s economy.

Thanks to this mobile money revolution, a taxi driver working in Nairobi can give a local merchant $50 in wages and the cell phone number of his wife in the family’s home village. The wife gets a text message, then goes to a rural merchant who either immediately gives her $48, or distributes some portion of the wages and keeps the rest for her in savings.

But the success of that service — called — has been difficult or impossible to replicate in other parts of the developing world.

91̽»¨ computer scientists and engineers, with a grant from the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will develop, test and deploy new technological solutions to make financial products better and more available to the lowest-income people around the world.

“This technology can have tremendous impact — both for allowing people to send remittances from the city back to rural regions, and to establish savings accounts so people can have reserves so that an event like an accident or a pregnancy doesn’t send them over the edge,” said , a 91̽»¨professor of computer science and engineering.

With a new $1.7 million, two-year grant awarded by the Gates Foundation in December, the 91̽»¨Department of Computer Science & Engineering is establishing a new Digital Financial Services Research Group to investigate and overcome technological barriers to widespread adoption of mobile financial services.

Those include protecting money transfers from cyberattack, quickly but securely verifying the identity of users, designing an interface that doesn’t require too many numbers, enrolling and tracking thousands of banking merchants, and developing technologies that will work across different mobile phone platforms in countries with multiple providers.

Kenya’s success, in part, stems from having a single, dominant mobile phone company that operates throughout the country. Sending money from one cell phone provider’s system to another cell phone company introduces technological and logistical complications.

Previous research on mobile money service adoption has largely resided in the social sciences. Applying a computing and technological lens to this type of financial service research is a relatively new piece of the puzzle, Anderson said.

The UW’s computer science and engineering department brings deep expertise in privacy and security. Computer science and engineering professor and assistant professor — who have in everything from automobile computers to wirelessly reprogrammable pacemakers to online browsing — will be part of the core 91̽»¨team.

Other members include Information School assistant professor , who recently and wealth via cell phone metadata, and computer science and engineering assistant professor , whose startup has helped build locally owned, independent rural cellular networks in remote regions of the world.

The 91̽»¨also has a track record in deploying tools that have been widely used in the developing world. The , for instance, is a set of free, open-source tools that enable mobile data collection and analysis.

Organizations have used Open Data Kit to monitor election fraud in Afghanistan, track agricultural practices in Haiti, survey refugees in Lebanon, and diagnose and map disease in Uganda, among many other applications.

“We’ve been successful in getting a software system out that’s fairly widely used around the world,” said Anderson, who helped develop Open Data Kit. “To build this research group, we’ve identified a set of initial challenges to look at — the security of mobile applications for financial services and the user interface and tools to make it easier to build financial applications.”

Secure, robust mobile money transfers could also simplify distribution of humanitarian funds. A non-governmental organization, for instance, could provide a cell phone company with a list of 10,000 farmers and their phone numbers. Each could receive a $5 voucher for fertilizer via text, which they could redeem at their local agricultural stores.

Because technological solutions won’t succeed without local context and alignment with local regulations, the 91̽»¨team will seek in-country experts and mobile money players to test new ideas.

Over the next two years, the team plans to prototype different technologies and develop a demonstration lab housed at the UW. With the help of those outside partners, the research group will identify technology projects that show potential for large-scale commercialization and warrant further investment.

“The long-term plan is that we’ll work with larger teams and mobile operators on refining the technologies and toolkits so they can be tested and developed in-country,” Anderson said.

For more information, contact Anderson at anderson@cs.washington.edu.