Despite the fact that more than 70% of Africa’s population depends on agriculture for basic life needs, and in Africa’s drylands rain-fed agriculture is widespread, reliable meteorological data about rainfall and weather forecasts — in Europe timely and accurate — is often not available for African farmers. Recent studies in rural areas of […]
Downscaling the Web
9 posts
Amsterdam, 19 June 2018 – The Kasadaka “talking box” platform, the winning concept, is a platform to develop voice-based technologies for those who are not connected to the Internet, cannot not read and write, and speak underresourced languages. Kasadaka has been developed to allow development of specific, context-sensitive content, in […]
The fifth International Symposium ” Perspectives on ICT4D”, took place at VU on 27th May 2018. This year the Symposium was not a public event, as the past few years, as it was collocated with the ACM Web Science Conference 2018, as one of the 7 pre-conference workshops. This year’s […]
Tha Kasadaka project, that was developed by André Baart and colleagues from the W4RA team, extensively tested by students in the VU ICT4D course 2018 and deployed in the field in Mali, at Radio Sikidolo in Konobougou, has been nominated, as one of the five finalists in the Amsterdam Science and […]
– Collocated with the 10th ACM Web Science Conference – The Web is the biggest open public space for information, communication and knowledge sharing for billions on the planet. However, it is not (yet) accessible for over half of the world population, mostly in the Global South. This symposium addresses […]
The W4RA team at VU is proud to present three new master theses: by Justyna Kleczar (July 2017), Reshmi Sarkar (June 2017) and Jamila Daoudi (May 2017). Justyna Kleczar’s work is on speech technologies for underresourced languages. It comprises a new methodology, including very comprehensive tooling, which facilitates and allows […]
On 18 May 2017, the 4th International Symposium “Perspectives on ICT for Development (ICT4D)” will be hosted by VU Network Institute, the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems SIKS, the Computer Science Department and VU International Office. This year’s theme is “Sustainability and ICT4D”. Invited speakers from Ghana, […]
On 29 August, the 4th International Workshop on Downscaling the Semantic Web (Downscale2016) was held as a full-day workshop in Amsterdam co-located with the ICT4S conference. The workshop attracted 12 participants and we received 4 invited paper contributions, which were presented and discussed in the morning session (slides can be found […]