Research to Impact Collaboratives

Final List of RICs

Goals of the RICs

COMPASS RICs are conceived to provide a platform for the COMPASS community to come together in partnerships with multiple stakeholders including academia, industry, NGOs, social enterprises, and impact funding agencies, with an aim to create measurable impact, broadly along the lines of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. RICs will provide the means to work on goals over multiple years along with partners to translate research efforts into impact on the ground as well as to unearth new research challenges to address. The first cohort of RICs will be launched at COMPASS 2024.

The RICs are envisaged to address the current silos and gaps in the landscape of computing for societal impact.

1. Academic researchers address core research problems and publish in venues like COMPASS. However, due to the importance placed on novelty, technical depth, and pilot demonstrations or PoCs, there are no incentives nor resources available to academics to take the next step of translating their research into real impact on SDGs at scale with measurable outcomes.
2. Individuals working with NGOs and social enterprises that are actively pursuing projects that have impact on SDGs rarely have the resources or incentives to publish their work in academic conferences, nor are such works usually recognised as novel by the current benchmarks for conference publications.
3. Many successful enterprises and NGOs are creating significant impact on the ground and they do not bring their learning to the academic community to address new research challenges that they encounter on the field.
4. Many academics and practitioners do have collaborations usually initiated by the academics to understand and address genuine issues on the ground with the support of the practitioner. However, obviously with exceptions, these collaborations are short-term and may or may not continue after a paper gets published. Identifying and building even such short-term partnerships requires considerable investment of time by academics and these efforts are usually not recognized or incentivized by the current academic metrics. Early career researchers thus have a serious disadvantage in building such partnerships.
5. The added complexity is that major challenges in attaining the SDGs are in the global south and hence the most challenging research problems and proving grounds are in the global south. Thus, building meaningful long-term collaborations with practitioners in the global south is a challenge for researchers in the global north. Hence there is a need to connect researchers and practitioners across this divide. Most of these partnerships are established due to informal networks and connections, and hence the diversity of partnerships that are possible remain unexplored.
6. For any technology solution to deliver positive impact at scale, funding is critical. However, academics may not have access to such funds since research funding is tied to novelty rather than deployment. NGOs get funding to deploy and scale well tested solutions but do not receive funding for exploring new solutions. Impact funding agencies usually depend on responses to their CFPs and do not have visibility to emerging solutions in this space.

The intended role of RICs with respect to the other elements of a conference like COMPASS is captured in the following figure.

 

Updates Before April 30th

 

We have received more than 20 proposals for this new initiative. The details of the proposals, including the Lead proposer and the details of the collaborators can be found in this Google Doc.

 

Separate Emails have been sent to the proposers with Edit access to the above Document to enable them to take up the next steps listed below.

 

Current RIC Proposals

Note: The list will change based on the collaborations that shape up from now until the conference.

1. Mobile as Assistive Technology
2. AI for Inclusive Access to Public Services and Public Grievance Redressal, especially through voice interfaces in non-English languages
3. Exploring the Role of LLMs in Global Health
4. Research with and for Community Networks
5. ICTs (including GenAI) for empowering teachers to improve STEM and CT education for children with vision impairments
6. CoRE stack: A Digital Public Infrastructure for Climate Change Adaptation by Rural Communities
7. AI and the Internet of Things for Food Security, deploying AI and IoT enabled hydroponic grow tents in rural settings
8. Digital Health Innovations for Universal Health Coverage – Advancing Health Benefits and Primary Care Ecosystem
9. Assistive & Accessible Technology Transfer & Adoption
10. Socially Responsive Design
11. A Novel Standard Development for Geospatial and Mutimedia Data Exchange with Built-in Free Software to Read and Interpret
12. SoochnaPreneur Model: The Economic Impact of Last-Mile Service Delivery
13. Scaling Digital Empowerment for Women’s Health: The Saathealth Family Health Intervention Initiative for Global Well-Being and Gender Equality
14. ML for humanitarian demining
15. AI for Talent Transformation
16. Open Network for Urban Computing (ONUC) – scaling air quality networks to 100,000 locations in India
17. Secure Benchmarking for Bias Detection in Large Language Models
18. Towards Equitable Healthcare: Empowering Rural and Underprivileged Communities in India through LLM-based Knowledge Dissemination and Decision Support
19. Closing the Educational Gap in India with Large Language Models
20. Leveraging Multi-Modal LLMs for Personalized Training and Problem Resolution of Farmers in India
21. Bridging the Governance Gap: An LLM-powered Governance System for Indian Citizens
22. Improving Citizens Experiences in Developing Countries via LLM-driven Streamlining of Organizational Workflows
23. Data science and IoT for water infrastructure systems
24. Knowledge Delivery via Digital Work
25. Humanitarian and AI
26. Diverse localized datasets for inclusive poverty estimation
27. NLP-based financial indicator that motivate impact investment behavior
28. HCI Across Borders

For inclusion in the RIC Conclave at COMPASS 2024, the following requirements have to be met: