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 development of new voice-based applications. […]
In track 5 of the NDDHO event (Nationale Duurzaamheidsdag in het Hoger Onderwijs): “Sustainability and ICT for development (ICT4D)” Presented by Anna Bon, Victor de Boer, Francis Dittoh, André Baart and others 11.15 – VU Hoofgebouw, Auditorium Prototype demos of ICT4D systems for rural Africa: Master students Information Science, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence in the ICT4D course. […]
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, France and the Netherlands will […]
Many farmers in Africa are in urgent need for weather forecasts and rain data services, to better plan and improve their harvests. However, language and illiteracy issues, as well a total lack of computers, smartphones and internet, pose obstacles to access this very relevant information. Last week, the W4RA team from VU Amsterdam held a […]
The VU ICT4D course 2017 will make you experience the “Unconnected World”, or rather: how large populations do not reach the Web. While we spend our lives in the era of live-streaming (twitch), cloud-computing (google drive) and voice-based home assistants (amazon alexa), billions still live without an internet connection and are unable to read and […]
Bamako, 15 October 2016 – VU collaborates with Malian farmers towards Regreening to mitigate the effects of climate change and improve food security in rural Mali. On 13 October 2016, the W4RA team organized and co-chaired, a Green Climate Funds workshop together with Malian farmer organization AOPP (l’Association des Organisations professionnelles paysannes). The objective of […]
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 below). These papers describe a […]
From 20 to 24 June 2016, the W4RA team was in Gourcy, Burkina Faso a facilitated a new ICT4D requirements engineering workshop with farmers-innovators of the Yatenga and Zondoma regions, Burkina Faso. The workshop was organized and hosted by W4RA’s local partner, the NGO Réseau MARP. The workshop was dedicated to the theme of meteorology. Why is meteorology […]
From 7-9 May 2016, the second TMT-AOPP workshop was held in Bamako, Mali. This workshop was held in the context of the Tailor Made Training project that VU Amsterdam participates in together with the Malinese farmer organization Association des Organisations Professionnelles Paysannes (AOPP). During the workshop, which was attended by around 25 AOPP members from all over Mali, […]
