Code is under further development to add even more cool ML features. Our submission to the semi-finals was as follows.
Semi Finals:
Briefly explain your World Citizenship’s technology and concept here; who does it impact and how is your project the solution to a clear need, problem, or opportunity. Describe the technology and functionalities.
Over 4 billion people lack access to internet. Recently proposed solutions aim to provide internet access to this geographically dispersed population through drones or mobile broadband. Unfortunately, such solutions require widespread literacy and are either too expensive for rural end-users in developing nations, or impractical with existing technologies. Lack of internet has created a void that prevents the society to take advantage of the existing internet-based solutions. This void is especially problematic for rural populations who may be cut off from modern medical know-how, where immediate access to basic health-related information may be lifesaving. Providing adequate information services to geographically dispersed communities in the developing world an unlikely, unprofitable and incredibly expensive investment into these countries infrastructure, or a radical rethinking in approaches to providing high quality first-world information.
WhatsUpDoc is a vital and practical solution in this direction. WhatsUpDoc circumvents the construction of expensive infrastructure by making use of existing voice-call and SMS infrastructure. Users do not require an access to steady or high bandwidth internet connection to resolve their queries. They are empowered with first world information. Users who are literate may browse the internet over existing free SMS systems through text queries to Microsoft Bing; users who struggle to use traditional internet systems may dial a centralized toll-free number that allows them to interact with an automated system in their native language. WhatsUpDoc then gathers the data from the user calls and texts, and applies metrics on it to gain meaningful insights. Such a data set can be used for tracking spread of fatal diseases, timely generation of preventive measures, pinpointing areas facing scarcity of water and food, and other relevant local issues.
WhatsUpDoc tries to bridge the information gap between rural developing areas and 21st century economies. These rural developing areas currently face crippling social and economic costs from problems such as: (1) deaths or disability from diseases such as ebola, diarrhea and malaria; (2) high childhood mortality; (3) and, illness from nutrition methods. While these issues could be easily solved with increased connectivity, the telecom companies of developing countries see little incentive to establish connectivity in these areas. From their perspective, even if the locals were able to read and write well enough to use traditional net technology, such subsistence farmers would not be able to afford to pay for mobile broadband or other internet services.
WhatsUpDoc endeavours to empower these disconnected people with existing information at no cost. WhatsUpDoc will provide information-over-voice through a series of modules that provide information on a range of topics. The ability of WhatsUpDoc to effectively relay information over voice is best shown in our medical module, which can already provide relevant and concise medical information over a voice based system. Such success suggest that early rollouts of WhatsUpDoc will include this feature among its suite of voice information modules, as inadequate health care inflicts some of the greatest social and economic costs on village economies in such dispersed, tropical regions. By increasing access to information, WhatsUpDoc aims to reduce such costs and increase their productivity, which in turn will help bring them into the 21st century.
The current implementation of WhatsUpDoc consists of a medical module which the people can use to state their problems and receive quick solutions and of a SMS module, in which users may query Microsoft Bing for more information via text. Both voice and SMS services are widely available extremely affordable even to local residents, suggesting that WhatsUpDoc would be able to thrive in markets where mobile broadband is unavailable, or where users are unable to use traditional web interfaces. WhatsUpDoc aims to fund itself through mining relevant user data and generation of statistics. Early product development suggests that insights can be invaluable; Team Platypus is currently implementing an epidemiological tracking suite to WhatsUpDocs voice medical module that provides analytics for early disease outbreak detection, pinpointing of contaminated water sources and tracking of how diseases in developing countries spread between villages. All these services could provide life-saving insights in order to mitigate the devastating cost of diseases on local economies. Early results with the medical module show that WhatsUpDoc acts as an effective data suite that can be used by medical firms, government organizations and multinational corporations to generate useful products.
Summarize your World Citizenship in one or two sentences. Think about what the value of your World Citizenship technology and if addresses a problem that genuinely makes life harder for people? Provide a one or two sentence summary that is clear, concise, and to the point.
WhatsUpDoc uses existing infrastructure to cheaply provide information to underserved, undeveloped and geographically dispersed communities through an intuitive voice-call and SMS interfaces; our medical module and SMS internet search show such services can be effectively implemented. By collecting resellable data on data-scarce populations, WhatsUpDoc can provide a free service to poor end-users while also providing aide organizations with life-saving insights.
Define the degree and impact of the project scope. Tell us how large the scope of your project is and the geographic area. Within the world describe the population affected and the effects of this problem on life. Is this project new in scope or an improved way of doing something? Is your project easily usable as a solution?
We believe access to reasonably priced public domain information is a fundamental human right; the information-gap access between residents in the Western world and residents in developing nations perpetuates the wealth gap between these populations. Inadequate information access leads to increased deaths and morbidity from preventable and treatable illnesses, poor crop yields due to non-optimal farming methods, economic and social problems stemming from poor childhood nutrition, deaths due to natural disasters, etc. In regions such as rural Africa, where affordable mobile broadband connectivity cannot be established, but cheap cellular call services and SMS services are already readily accessible, access to information deemed trivial factoids for most people the western world --- such as knowledge about the signs and symptoms of Vitamin A deficiency, and the certain fruits and vegetables that treat it --- could literally mean the difference between life and death. WhatsUpDoc aims to serve individuals living in such geographically distributed and disconnected areas where the construction of internet infrastructure has not yet shown cost effective. According to a study conducted by Miniwatts Marketing Group in the year 2015, only 46% of the world population had access to internet, while a 2012 World Bank report states that more than 75% of the human population has access to a cell phone. These numbers are even more startling in case of Africa, where the majority of Africans own a mobile phone but only 13.5 percent have access to internet. While literacy tends to be poor in these areas, a significant portion of these regions are able to converse in at least one of the commonly translated languages, such as Swahili, French or Arabic. WhatsUpDoc aims to use Microsoft Translator API and other Microsoft technologies to serve as a voice-call intermediary to satisfy these populations’ desperate need for high quality information. Our success with our medical module show the effectiveness of voice-call queries for internet information and its extension into foreign languages is already under development. WhatsUpDoc uses existing infrastructure to cheaply provide such information to underserved, undeveloped and geographically dispersed communities through intuitive voice-call and SMS interfaces. By collecting resellable data on data-scarce populations, WhatsUpDoc can provide a free service to poor end-users while also providing aide organizations with vital statistics that can be used in services such as: (1) epidemiological tracking for early outbreak detection and prevention; tracking the locations and needs of refugees; (2) supply-chain management of aid supplies; (3) education on more effective farming methods; (4) and, tracking the needs of rural subsistence farmers. Implementation and rollout is easy: By using the existing voice-call infrastructure, WhatsUpDoc could provide cheap information access to this disconnected population. The current implementation of WhatsUpDoc bridges the data gap by providing quick solutions regarding medical issues, information on weather conditions and other essential information that ameliorates the lives of local population. Through our voice medical module and SMS internet search, we aim to help to play our part in solving -- (i) the refugee crisis who lack the basic services, (ii) underdeveloped populations who experience impact due to fatal diseases, and (iii) unconnected farmers who are unknown to the improved farming methods. In this way, WhatsUpDoc could serve as a transitional technology that could provide information which would immediately secure gains in productivity and standard of living for these people. That being said, WhatsUpDoc does not discriminate between its callers and can also be used by other people. For example, people with access to traditional internet may choose to use our service for reasons including but not limited to poor eyesight, a learning disability, or poor local internet connectivity. The ease of use of our medical module and our SMS text module suggests that WhatsUpDoc may gain traction in the domestic market in addition to the international market.
TECHNOLOGY
Core Technologies
Talk about your technology and how your World Citizenship Technology works. This includes your key platform(s) as well as specific technologies such as the Kinect SDK, the Unity game engine, or other elements that you believe will be critical to your project’s success.
WhatsUpDoc is a real-time communication technology which aims to either provide information to the users while they are connected to a call, or provide a web-search service over SMS. We use a set of complementary technologies to enhance the user experience and to provide quick solutions. In short, the idea is to receive the user input through a phone call, process it and provide measures to tackle the problem. The control flow of our implementation for our medical module is as follows: Use of Twilio API for setting up the centralized-server, receiving the user phone call, recording the user’s speech and posting it to a weburl Convert the user speech to text using Microsoft Project Oxford Speech API. Use of Microsoft Text Analytics API to extract keywords from the text Use of Microsoft Azure Bing API to perform a semantic web search using the extracted keywords. The search is integrated with the WebMD database which helps to interpret the user symptoms and find the disease. Searching the discovered disease on the MayoClinic database and fetching the resulting remedy. Use of an effective text summarization algorithm that uses machine learning to generate a relevant summary of the information mined from the MayoClinic database. Use of Microsoft Project Oxford Speech API to convert the summarized results to speech. Playing the resulting speech to the user over the ongoing voice call using the Twilio API again. Asking the user if the condition seems to match their symptoms. If it doesn’t, they may repeat their query. If it does, they may request to hear more about the disease, and the summarization algorithm will return a more complete detailing of the disease, including its nature of illness, prevention and treatments.
WhatsUpDoc also offers an SMS based query systems. Users in the developing world often are on phone plans that offer free SMS. A user sends a message to a dedicated number which is received and processed with Twilio’s API. This message is fed to the Microsoft Azure Bing API to perform semantic web search. The Bing results are used by our summarizer to generate a useful summary. This summary is again messaged back to the user by using Twilio’s API. We allow user to request further information by texting back “more.”
List the Microsoft technologies used. World Citizenship technology must be developed using at least one product in the Visual Studio family and built to require any one or more of the following platforms: Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Azure
The use of Microsoft technologies has been the backbone of WhatsUpDoc. We have used Microsoft Project Oxford API for our speech-to-text Microsoft Azure Text Analytics API for keyword extraction Microsoft Azure Bing API for the semantic web search module.
We have also used Visual Studio: To develop our code using the Python plug-in for the visual studio. To develop UML use-case diagram that defines our product.
The following features are undergoing development and will be present in our next submission if we advance to the finals: Use of a standard machine learning algorithm to gather insights from epidemiological data that our application gathers. Currently, we have a version undergoing alpha testing that takes the location of the caller and their corresponding diagnoses, and generates relevant statistics. Use of Microsoft Translation API and Microsoft SAPI to allow our product to be used in local languages other than English.
BUSINESS
Define the business model and how you will bring the World Citizenship to market. Provide us an overview of the business model. How will the game differentiate and make money? Explain how your plan of how you will bring your game to market, acquire users, and support the game over the long-term. Are you performing any external validation for your game, such as customer surveys, focus group tests, and active beta-test program, recommendations from subject-matter experts, or potential investors?
We aim to provide WhatsUpDoc as a free service to the end-user as WhatsUpDoc would primarily fund itself through selling data and analytics. In order to achieve the sufficient market penetration in the targeted areas, WhatsUpDoc would partner with local and global humanitarian organizations in order to raise consumer awareness about our product. In order to encourage immediate adoption of our service, we could purchase hundreds of cheap prepaid SIM cards with free SMS that can only be used to connect to our application. We would work with our humanitarian aid partners and the community that we adopt culturally appropriate marketing strategies.
Once WhatsUpDoc has gained a large enough product familiarity in these initial trial communities, it would be able to gather meaningful data about the local residents. WhatsUpDoc could either directly sell this data to both government and non-governmental aid organizations, or use the insights from such data as a proof of concept that would highlight WhatsUpDoc’s ability, which in turn would encourage further sponsorship for the product. In short, we believe the scarcity of such valuable data on these vulnerable populations would enable WhatsUpDoc to quickly raise capital and give existing humanitarian organizations stake in the success of the service. In the medium term, TeamPlatypus hopes to expand WhatsUpDoc’s features. We plan to extend WhatsUpDoc’s internet-over-voice service to include modules weather, farming method suggestions, general voice-to-internet searches in addition to our current voice module that provides medical information. By increasing the breadth of services provided and the amount of data that we may draw insights from, we hope to become a functional tool for communities lacking access to traditional internet. In the long term, WhatsUpDoc hopes to be effective enough to make continued usage of its original service unnecessary. By empowering the underserved populations with high-quality information, we hope to reduce social and economic costs and increase the productivity of local subsistence farmers. By improving local economies ability to afford goods and services, we would increase the incentive of regional service providers to construct more robust internet service to these communities. As this process occurs, WhatsUpDoc will either transfer to additional underserved areas, or become involved in establishing these new methods internet service for the local populations.