eploring role of information and communication technologies in community radio stations in india

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Exploring the Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Community Radio Stations in IndiaZahir Koradia

Supervisors

Bhaskaran Raman Aaditeshwar SethApril 2015

PhD Defense

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Motivation: Role of Media in a Democracy

Checks and balances against those in powerInformation and knowledge sourceSocial Media– Can be producers of information– Can express opinion about relevant issues

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Motivation: Media in rural India

Literacy– 26% illiterate

Connectivity– 80% disconnected

Devices

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Motivation: Community Radio a Viable Alternative

Short range (10Km - 15Km) FM stations– Literacy not required– Connectivity available– Devices affordable

About 200 CR stations operational in India– Predominantly rural locations– Run by non-profit organizations– Local information, Community participation– Improve local governance– Promote local culture

Thesis theme: How can Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) help community radio stations?

Mix of Ad-hoc Technologies for Daily

Tasks

Little usage of High Mobile Penetration

No Content Sharing

Challenges

● GRINS design• GRINS at 40 CR stations across 4 countrins in India and Africa • Usage and impact analysis of GRINS

• PhonePeti answering machine to increase participation

• Gurgaon Idol singing competition for IVR usability analysis

Cellular data measurements to inform design of a content sharing platform for CR

stations

Contributions

Telephonic interviews with 10 stationsPhysical visit at one station in Feb 2009

Thesis theme: How can Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) help community radio stations?

Mix of Ad-hoc Technologies for Daily

Tasks

Little usage of High Mobile Penetration

No Content Sharing

Challenges

● GRINS design• GRINS at 40 CR stations across 4 countrins in India and Africa • Usage and impact analysis of GRINS

• PhonePeti answering machine to increase participation

• Gurgaon Idol singing competition for IVR usability analysis

Cellular data measurements to inform design of a content sharing platform for CR

stations

Contributions

Telephonic interviews with 10 stationsPhysical visit at one station

Summary Detail

Summary: Mix of Ad-hoc Technologies for Daily Tasks

Schematic of how GRINS fits into a CR station

• GRINS plays pre-recorded audio, records live speech, puts calls live on air and records them, manages contacts and content.

GRINSPC

To Transmitter

Pre-recorded audio for broadcast

Microphone Input

GSM/PSTN to SIP

gateway

Broadcast feed for recording

and streaming

To streaming server

Key Challenges

GRINS DesignGRINS Training and

Support

Challenges

• How to ensure audio quality in low end commodity hardware?

• What software design strategies are relevant for products built for developing regions? (Medhi '07, Parikh '03, Huenerfauth '02)

● How to provide support to remote technology users that are not technologically proficient?

● How to train users with no prior exposure to ICTs in using technology?

● How to evaluate GRINS usage? (Davies '05)

GRINS Evaluation

What software development strategies are relevant for building products for developing regions?

• Features built in the second iteration are used more by the stations.– Learning: Subjects in developing regions are often unable to conceive their

requirements. Iterative software development is necessary in such contexts.• Usage of different features of GRINS varies across stations because of difference in

ideologies and process.– Learning: Design of tools for developing regions must use larger sample of target users in

design phase, to avoid Overfitting.

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How to provide support to remote CR stations?

• Support calls can come any time.– Standardize configuration to avoid remembering station wise

configuration

• Most faults can be identified on phone calls• Most faults can be fixed on phone or remote connection

Mode of Communication Identified Fixed

Phone Calls 41 16

Remote Desktop 0 9

Remote Desktop and Phone 3 6

Reverse SSH 1 5

Reverse SSH and Phone 0 2

Physical Visit 0 6

Summary: Little usage of High Mobile Penetration

Challenges and Related Work

IVR Learnability IVR Design

Challenges

● Focus on context of IVR usage. (Plauche '06, Sambasivan '11, Sherwani '07)

● Experiments on input modality: DTMF vs Voice (Patel '09, Plauche '06, Sherwani '09)

• Local dialect important (Lerer '10)• No learnability studies

● IVR Design for menu based systems (Agarwal '09, Grover '09, Sambasivan '11)

● IVR Design for peer-to-peer information sharing networks (Mudliar '12, Patel '10)

● No studies on IVR design for voting and recording audio

Related Work

IVR Experiments

• PhonePeti– 24x7 Ansering machine system– Over 1000 calls in 6 months– Studied self learnability with variations in prompts

• Gurgaon Idol– Singing competition over IVR and Radio– Formal usability studies with 130 subjects– ~350 calls over 2 months

IVR Learnability

● Only 40% of calls had useful content

● Across people who made at least three calls 36% could not learn to use PhonePeti even after three calls.

● Learning to use IVR is a challenge

● Repeated use does not help learn IVR use

● One-to-one training over phone call and in person handholding are significantly better training methods than pre-recorded instructions and repeated use.

Learned – 1 CallLearned – 3 CallsDid not learn

PromosMultiple IVR use

Training on phoneIn-person handholding

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

% s

ubje

cts

com

plet

ed t

ask

IVR Design

• All voting methods – Thumbs-Up-Thumbs-Down, Best-of-Two, and Best-of-Four – were easy to use– 100% task completion rate for all methods

• Interesting social preferences for the methods that deserve further study– Calling a song bad is impolite– Easier to compare two songs that rating a single song without

knowing all the songs in the playing field

Detail: No Content Sharing

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Motivation

Content sustainability is a serious challengeVariety across stations in created content and its treatmentStations have developed various techniques to optimize staff efficiencyExisting approaches of email, content sharing websites have failed

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Research Questions

What type of connection is available? (2G/3G)What is the throughput achieved?Are there diurnal patterns?What is the latency to different landmark nodes?What are the DNS look up times observed?What is the network architecture like?

Existence of HTTP Proxy, NAT, Firewall

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Related Work – 1

Early GPRS, 1xRTT, WCDMA measurementsConducted in late 1990s – early 2000s

• Chakravorty '02, '03, Alcaraz '06, Inamura '03

Small initial CWND + high latency = inefficient short flowsLarge buffers impact interactive flows

Combined with lack of TCP SACK delays recovery

Most of these studies are at least a decade oldInitial CWND, Commonly used TCP MSS, receive window size have increased since thenTCP SACK is common

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Related Work – 2

Recent 3G measurements– Mehlfuhrer '10, Tan '08, Elmokashfi '12, Jurvansuu '07

Norway: Latency influenced by configurationUS: 4-6 gateways for the whole country

Residential broadband network measurementsKreibich '10, Dischinger '07Netalyzr used to test existence of web cache and NAT.

Measurements to study Internet usage in developing regions

Du '06, Chen '14 Complimentary to our work.

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Measurement Design Considerations

Choice of measurement typeActive vs Passive

We chose active measurements for better control

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Choice of locations7 locations – 5 rural, 1 semi-urban, 1 urban

Choice of locations were dependent on logistics partners: Gram Vaani, PRADAN, Air Jaldi, Vikas Samvad.

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Choice of service providers3 GSM based, 1 CDMA based

Provider G1 G2 G3 C1

# of locations 6 6 5 3

We chose ‘best’ available connections at the locations.

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Choice of service providers3 GSM based, 1 CDMA based

Choice of measurement node device

Provider G1 G2 G3 C1

# of locations 6 6 5 3

We chose netbook with dongles for faster deployment and battery backup


• Choice of tests

Test Decription

Throughput Iperf uplink and downlink for 5 minutes

Latency Ping (30 packets per test) & Traceroute to 20 landmark nodes

DNS Lookup Two consecutive DNS lookups. Use second as the lookup time.

New Connection Tests Log IP address, DNS sever, and default gateway assigned.

One Time Tests Netalyzr to note existence of NATs, HTTP proxies, and web caches

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Measurement Suite – Flow Diagram

Control ServerMeasurementNode 1.

Req

uest

Test

s

2. T

est l

ist

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Control ServerMeasurementNode

MeasurementServer

3. Conduct tests

1. R

eque

st Te

sts

2. Te

st lis

t

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MeasurementServerData Server

3. Conduct tests

4. Send Data4. Send Data

1. R

eque

st Te

sts

2. T

est l

ist

30




3. Conduct tests


Email Daily Test Report

1. R

eque

st Te

sts

2. Te

st lis

t

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3. Conduct tests


Email Heartbeat Failure

Heartbeat

Email Daily Test Report

1. R

eque

st Te

sts

2. Te

st lis

t

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Practical Challenges

Symptom Root Cause Resolution/Workaround

All 3 modems not connecting to the netbook simultanously.

Netbook USB bus cannot supply enough power to all the modems

Use USB adaptors with external power supply.

All 3 modems not connecting to the Internet

NetworkManager not designed to handle multiple modems.

Use wavdial dialer utility and write scripts to manage connections.

Disconnection in rural locations followed by repeated reconnection failures.

Suspected firmware bug.

Requires manual disconnection of the modem to cut power supply and restart the firmware. Monitoring script built.

Signal strength measurement failure.

Standard AT command not accepted by all modems

Use device specific AT command

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Results Summary

450 hours of measurement data3 Months4 Experiment sets per day7 locations4 service providers

Results – Availability

- Availability in rural areas is at 75%, about 15% less than urban regions.- Content sharing platform needs to be disruption tolerant

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Results – Throughput

- Diurnal patterns observed in throughputs in G1 and G2- Content sharing platform can leverage higher night throughputs

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Results – Throughput vs Signal Strength

Little correlation between measured signal strength and throughput.

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Results – Connection Stall

Frequency of Connection Stalls

High frequency of connection stalls across service providers and locations

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Results – Impact of Connection Stalls

Strong correlation between connectionstalls an reduction in throughput.

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Connection Stall Causes

Transport protocolLocationService providerAccess technologySignal strength variationsOut of order bufferingModem hardware artifacts2G/3G switching (Balachandram '14)

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Results – Content Placement

Four landmark nodes served by Akamaidig www.timesofindia.com => a1521.g.akamai.net

Akamai uses service providers to host contentReturns IP from same service provider as requester

Service Provider Percentage of In-Network servers returned by DNS lookup

G1 2.15

G3 72.86

C1 87.75

~50% reduction in latency in G1 and G3No reduction in C1

Results – Content Placement

• Download 5MB file 25 times from one in-network server and one outside-network server– Using G1 & C1 3G: 98% and 17% increase in throughput – Using G1 and G3 EDGE: Little increase in throughput

• Very few gateways serve large areas– G1 – 5, G2 – 3, G3 – 4, C1 – 2– Content placement ‘near’ these gateways can provide

performance benefits

Future Work

Community participation continues to be the primary goal of CR stations– Explore other forms of IVR systems to enable community

participation– Explore use of social media and the Internet

Ground work for understanding networks at CR stations has been done– Build a robust and useful content sharing platform for CR

stations– Explore mechanisms for stations to learn from each other

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Thank you …

Acknowledgements: Kapil Dadheech, Balachandran C., Rohit Jain, members of Gram Vaani team, Piyush Aggarwal, Amitsingh Chandele, Gaurav Aggarwal, Goutham Mannava, Aravindh Raman, Vinay Ribeiro, PRADAN.

Extra Slides

How to ensure audio quality on low end commodity hardware?

• GRINS can have up to 5 parallel audio streams• To ensure that audio did not suffer from audio clicks (gaps in audio due

to processing delay) or high latency on low end commodity hardware we designed novel experiment setups.

Machine 1 Machine 2GRINS

H/WLine out

Line out

Line in

Line in

A sine wave audio is sent from machine 1 to machine 2 via GRINS h/w. Fourier analysis of the received audio shows audio clicks.

Q: What strategies help provide technical support effectively in developing regions?

• Technical support was provided most often over phone calls– We standardized the cabling, IP address, usernames and passwords (in spite

of security risks) to avoid remembering station specific configuration.

• Identifying faults over phone calls was possible, but resolving them often required remote access.

Phone Calls

Remote Desktop

Remote Desktop and Phone

Reverse SSH

Reverse SSH and Phone

Physical Visit

Faults Identified 41 0 3 1 0 0

Faults Resolved 16 9 6 5 2 6

Q: What was the qualitative impact of GRINS?

• Telephony is used by stations to connect communities with authorities – traffic commissioners, candidates for local elections, mayor, etc.

• SMS is used to run competitions, conduct polls, receive feedback and song requests

• Search and contacts management has been used to better “connect with callers”

Background – Impact of Community Radio

Soni Rana

Listener, Henvalvani.

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The problems of the community people would not have been forwarded and resolved if Henvalvani was not established. Henvalvani Community Radio station … has provided us a platform wherein we can raise our voice.

During the municipal election in 2011, Gurgaon Ki Aawaz broadcasted live for 14 hours. From voting to result declaration people called and participated … and gave updates by calling from their booths.

Soumya Jha

Station Manager

Gurgaon Ki Aawaz

CR Improves Local Governance


Sharmila

Staff, Gurgaon Ki Aawaz

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Once we got a call from a person on the occasion of his brother’s marriage, saying they have not booked a DJ because they want to listen to ‘Raghini’. They requested us to play Raghini on air.

I like the songs played in our local language – Gadhwali. In the way a Punjabi speaks in Punjabi, a Marathi speaks in Marathi, but a Gadhwali shied from speaking their language but with Henvalvani, people feel proud of their language and speak in Gadhwali

Jabbar Singh


CR Promotes Local Culture


Dr Sudesh

Listener, Gurgaon Ki Aawaz

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I used to go late to clinic, but after listening to Gurgaon Ki Aawaz programs I have started reaching clinic on time.

My family and I listen to Gali Gali Sim Sim, which has changed my children in terms of cleanliness and studies. Earlier we used to say to our kids to go to school, but now they get ready and go themselves.

Hari Kishan

Listener, Alfaz-e-Mewat

CR Leads to Behavior Change

Protocol Stack for GPRS


Soni Rana


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The problems of the community people would not have been forwarded and resolved if Henvalvani was not established. Henvalvani Community Radio station … has provided us a platform wherein we can raise our voice.

CR Improves Local Governance


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I like the songs played in our local language – Gadhwali. In the way a Punjabi speaks in Punjabi, a Marathi speaks in Marathi, but a Gadhwali shied from speaking their language but with Henvalvani, people feel proud of their language and speak in Gadhwali

Jabbar Singh

Listener, Henvalvani.CR Promotes Local Culture


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My family and I listen to Gali Gali Sim Sim, which has changed my children in terms of cleanliness and studies. Earlier we used to say to our kids to go to school, but now they get ready and go themselves.

Hari Kishan

Listener, Alfaz-e-Mewat

CR Leads to Behavior Change

Voting over IVRS: Thumbs-Up-Thumbs-Down vs Best-of-Two

• Thumbs-Up-Thumbs-Down (TUTD)– Listen to a song and then vote it up or down.– Quite similar to the Facebook 'like' or Google '+1'

• Best-of-Two (B2)– Listen to two songs and choose the best one– Can use existing methods to get global order from pairwise

preferences

Experiment Design

• 9 subjects used TUTD to vote on 5 songs followed by B2 to compare 5 pairs of songs

• 8 subjects used the VUIs in reverse order• Radio program provided explicit instructions on how to use the VUI

TUTD vs B2: Results

• All but one subject were able to use both VUIs. The lone exception could not use either VUI

• Several cultural factors impacted VUI preference– “It is impolite to call a song bad. It is easier to state one

song better than another”– “I can't rate a song good or bad without knowing all songs

in the field. Comparing two songs is better”– “I feel uncomfortable rating one song better than another” -

She voted all songs UP in TUTD, while B2 gave more information

B2 vs Best-of-Four VUI (B4)

• Common ranking algorithms require lots of pairwise preferences to obtain global ranking– Glicko requires at least five preferences per song

• Using Best-of-n instead of Best-of-Two– Gives n-1 preferences per vote– But usability may drop a n increases

• How usable is B4 compared to B2?• How do the rankings obtained using the two VUIs

compare?

B2 vs B4

• Usability– 10 subjects used B2 followed by B4– Another 10 subjects used the VUIs in reverse order– All voters complained about the difficulty of using B4 due to

difficulty in remembering earlier songs

• Voting reliability– 10 university students used B2 to rate 4 well known Bollywood

songs, and another 10 used B4– Glicko was used to obtain ratings for the 4 songs in both cases– Ratings were similar, rankings were same

• Impact of order of songs in B4– Yet another 10 students used B4 with song order reversed– Ratings were similar, rankings were same

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Measurement Suite – Architecture Requirements

Allow changing tests and test parameters post deployment

Deploy new scriptsInstall new software

Monitor and notify failuresPowerUSB modem detachment from netbookInternet disconnectionsNumber of successful/failed tests

Provide recovery mechanisms

eploring role of information and communication technologies in community radio stations in india

Technology

grins usage

cr station grins

community radio stations

cr stations operational

community participation

software design strategies

africa usage

role of information