"We Even Borrowed Money From Our Neighbor": Understanding Mobile-based Frauds Through Victims' ExperiencesMobile-based scams are on the rise in emerging markets. However, mobile users' awareness about these scams and the ways to avoid them remains limited. We present an analysis of a qualitative study to examine dynamics of SMS and call based frauds, collectively referred to as mobile-based frauds in the paper, in Pakistan with 96 participants, including different stakeholders in the mobile financial ecosystem: 71 victims of SMS and voice scam, seven non-victims, 15 mobile money agents, and three officials from regulatory agencies that investigate mobile-based phishing attacks. Leveraging the perspectives from different stakeholders, we make four concrete contributions: First, using the four-step social-engineering attack framework, we identify the nuances as well as specific tactics that fraudsters use to scam mobile users. Second, we look beyond the victim and the adversary to study all the actors involved or affected, the roles they played at each step, and the methods and resources used by the adversaries. Third, we discuss victims' understanding of mobile frauds, their behavior post-realization, and their attitudes toward reporting fraud. Finally, we discuss possible points of intervention and offer design recommendations to thwart mobile fraud, including addressing the vulnerabilities in the ecosystem discovered during this study, utilizing existing actors to mitigate the consequences of these attacks, and revisiting the design of fraud reporting mechanisms to be in line with the sociocultural practices.2021LRLubna Razaq et al.User ExperiencesCSCW
SEMOUR: Scripted EMOtional speech repository for URduDesigning reliable Speech Emotion Recognition systems is a complex task that inevitably requires sufficient data for training purposes. Such extensive datasets are currently available in only a few languages, including English, German, and Italian. In this paper, we present SEMOUR, the first scripted database of emotion-tagged speech in the Urdu language, to design an Urdu Speech Recognition System. Our gender-balanced dataset contains 15,040 unique instances recorded by eight professional actors eliciting a syntactically complex script. The dataset is phonetically balanced, and reliably exhibits a varied set of emotions as marked by the high agreement scores among human raters in experiments. We also provide various baseline speech emotion prediction scores on the database, which could be used for various applications like personalized robot assistants, diagnosis of psychological disorders, and getting feedback from a low-tech-enabled population, etc. On a random test sample, our model correctly predicts an emotion with a state-of-the-art 92% accuracy.2021NZNimra Zaheer et al.Information Technology UniversityMultilingual & Cross-Cultural Voice InteractionAgent Personality & AnthropomorphismVoice AccessibilityCHI
Patriarchy, Maternal Health and Spiritual Healing: Designing Maternal Health Interventions in PakistanWe examine the opportunities and challenges in designing for maternal health in low-income, low-resource communities in patriarchal and religious contexts. Pakistan faces a crisis in maternal health with a maternal mortality ratio of 178 deaths per 100,000 live births, as compared to the developed-country average of just 12 deaths per 100,000. Through a 6-month long qualitative, empirical study we examine the prevalent beliefs and practices around maternal health in Pakistan, the access women have to health-care, the existing religious practices that influence them and the agency they exert in their own health-care decision making. We reveal the rampant misinformation among mothers and health workers, house-hold power dynamics that impact maternal health and the deep link between maternal health and religious beliefs. We also show how current maternal health care interventions fit poorly into this context and discuss alternate design recommendations for meeting the maternal health needs of these women.2020MMMaryam Mustafa et al.Lahore University of Management SciencesReproductive & Women's HealthEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Threats, Abuses, Flirting, and Blackmail: Gender Inequity in Social Media Voice ForumsHCI4D researchers and practitioners have leveraged voice forums to enable people with literacy, socioeconomic, and connectivity barriers to access, report, and share information. Although voice forums have received impassioned usage from low-income, low-literate, rural, tribal, and disabled communities in diverse HCI4D contexts, the participation of women in these services is almost non-existent. In this paper, we investigate the reasons for the low participation of women in social media voice forums by examining the use of Sangeet Swara in India and Baang in Pakistan by marginalized women and men. Our mixed-methods approach spanning content analysis of audio posts, quantitative analysis of interactions between users, and qualitative interviews with users indicate gender inequity due to deep-rooted patriarchal values. We found that women on these forums faced systemic discrimination and encountered abusive content, flirts, threats, and harassment. We discuss design recommendations to create social media voice forums that foster gender equity in use of these services.2019AVAditya Vashistha et al.University of WashingtonGender & Race Issues in HCIEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
"They Don't Leave Us Alone Anywhere We Go": Gender and Digital Abuse in South AsiaSouth Asia faces one of the largest gender gaps online globally, and online safety is one of the main barriers to gender-equitable Internet access [GSMA, 2015]. To better understand the gendered risks and coping practices online in South Asia, we present a qualitative study of the online abuse experiences and coping practices of 199 people who identified as women and 6 NGO staff from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, using a feminist analysis. We found that a majority of our participants regularly contended with online abuse, experiencing three major abuse types: cyberstalking, impersonation, and personal content leakages. Consequences of abuse included emotional harm, reputation damage, and physical and sexual violence. Participants coped through informal channels rather than through technological protections or law enforcement. Altogether, our findings point to opportunities for designs, policies, and algorithms to improve women's safety online in South Asia.2019NSNithya Sambasivan et al.GoogleOnline Harassment & Counter-ToolsGender & Race Issues in HCITechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
Towards Digitization of Collaborative Savings Among Low-Income GroupsRotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA) is a mechanism of informal collaborative savings that is widely used across the globe. Despite its popularity and prevalence, it is not well-studied from HCI and CSCW perspectives. The global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS) for greater financial inclusion but there have not been any DFS-based interventions around ROSCAs. In this paper, we report a qualitative study involving 80 individuals to understand the dynamics of ROSCAs and opportunities for their digitization in the Pakistani context. We also present a smartphone-based digital ROSCA platform designed on top of a simulated mobile money system. The platform was designed to be inclusive towards low-literate users. We present qualitative findings of its evaluation with 15 users (3 individual ROSCA groups). We find that digitization has the potential to support and strengthen traditional ROSCAs by mitigating issues like record-keeping, delayed payments, collection, distribution, and safety of money. It also allows the creation of payment history for individuals that can be used to score their financial credibility.2019HMHamid Mehmood et al.MoneyCSCW
"My cousin bought the phone for me. I never go to mobile shops": The Role of Family in Women's Technological Inclusion in Islamic CultureThe intersection of Islam and gender affect technological and social interactions for Muslim women in significant ways and remains an understudied domain for CSCW and related fields. Building on 73 qualitative interviews with low-income women in Punjab, Pakistan, we analyze the complexity of family relationships and the subsequent dynamics of authority around technology uptake and usage by women within non-Western contexts, and, specifically, within the Islamic world. We argue that a Pakistani woman's experience with technology depends on many factors, including gendered roles, generational differences in a family, and wider socio-cultural and religious influences against the backdrop of a culturally conservative and patriarchal society. Our paper highlights the rich family dynamics, including key life events, that transform the roles of both Muslim women and their relatives. Our work is intended to inform scholars, practitioners within development agencies and industry, and other individuals studying technology and development about household dynamics that influence Muslim women's use of technology to encourage them to consider these dynamics during design and implementation processes for technological inclusion.2019SISamia Ibtasam et al.Technological inclusion and non/useCSCW
Digital Financial Needs of Micro-entrepreneur Women in Pakistan: Is Mobile Money The Answer?This paper studies the use of Digital Financial Services (DFS) as a solution to women's financial inclusion in deeply patriarchal, resource constrained communities. Through a qualitative, empirical study we map the financial life cycles of 20 women micro-entrepreneurs in different cities in Pakistan and the challenges they face. We explore how technology is currently influencing these women's businesses and personal lives and reveal how mobile money is not tuned to the problems they face and their financial needs. We present alternate design directions for meeting the technological and financial needs of these women, circumnavigating the patriarchal structures that constrain them.2019MMMaryam Mustafa et al.Information Technology UniversityVisual Impairment Technologies (Screen Readers, Tactile Graphics, Braille)Sustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingCHI
Voice-Based Quizzes for Measuring Knowledge Retention in Under-Connected PopulationsInformation dissemination using automated phone calls allows reaching low-literate and tech-naive populations. Open challenges include rapid verification of expected knowledge gaps in the community, dissemination of specific information to address these gaps, and follow-up measurement of knowledge retention. We report Sawaal, a voice-based telephone service that uses audio-quizzes to address these challenges. Sawaal allows its open community of users to post and attempt multiple-choice questions and to vote and comment on them. Sawaal spreads virally as users challenge friends to quiz competitions. Administrator-posted questions allow confirming specific knowledge gaps, spreading correct information and measuring knowledge retention via rephrased, repeated questions. In 14 weeks and with no advertisement, Sawaal reached 3,433 users (120,119 calls) in Pakistan, who contributed 13,276 questions that were attempted 455,158 times by 2,027 users. Knowledge retention remained significant for up to two weeks. Surveys revealed that 71% of the mostly low-literate, young, male users were blind.2019ARAgha Ali Raza et al.Information Technology UniversityIntelligent Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.)Augmentative & Alternative Communication (AAC)Developing Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)CHI
Baang: A Viral Speech-based Social Platform for Under-Connected PopulationsSpeech is more natural than text for a large part of the world including hard-to-reach populations (low-literate, poor, tech-novice, visually-impaired, marginalized) and oral cultures. Voice-based services over simple mobile phones are effective means to provide orality-driven social connectivity to such populations. We present Baang, a versatile and inclusive voice-based social platform that allows audio content creation and sharing among its open community of users. Within 8 months, Baang spread virally to 10,721 users (69% of them blind) who participated in 269,468 calls and shared their thoughts via 44,178 audio-posts, 343,542 votes, 124,389 audio-comments and 94,864 shares. We show that the ability to vote, comment and share leads to viral spread, deeper engagement, longer retention and emergence of true dialog among participants. Beyond connectivity, Baang provides its users with a voice and a social identity as well as means to share information and get community support.2018ARAgha Ali Raza et al.Information Technology University, PunjabIntelligent Voice Assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.)Multilingual & Cross-Cultural Voice InteractionEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI