Communications of the ACM
w Computer Scientists to Make Financial Products Better and More Available For the Poor
University of Washington computer scientists and engineers plan to develop, test, and deploy technologies to make financial applications better and more available to the world's impoverished.
Credit: Brian Harries/flickr
Using a two-year, $1.7-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, University of Washington (UW) computer scientists and engineers will develop, test, and deploy new technologies to make financial applications better and more available to the world's impoverished.
"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," says UW professor Richard Anderson.
UW's Department of Computer Science & Engineering will set up a new Digital Financial Services Research Group to probe and surmount technological obstacles to widespread adoption of mobile financial services. The core team will include professors Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner, who are experts in uncovering security vulnerabilities. The team also includes professor Joshua Blumenstock, who has developed a technique for measuring poverty and wealth via cellphone metadata, and professor Kurtis Heimerl, who founded the Endaga startup to build locally owned, independent rural cellular networks in remote areas.
"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," Anderson notes.
The team intends to prototype different technologies and develop a UW-based demonstration lab in the next two years.
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