Geek of the Week: Yaw Anokwa: UW Ph.D. Student, Open Data Kit and Change

One of the goals of GeekWire’s “Geek of the Week” feature is to shine a light on extraordinary people in the Pacific Northwest technology community. Yaw Anokwa, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Washington, certainly fits that profile — from his Open Data Kit research project to his work as a co-founder of the group Change at the UW.

Continue reading for more details through his answers to our questionnaire — including some great advice for better efficiency in work and life, and a particularly interesting answer to the question of what he would do if someone gave him $1 million to launch a startup....

...Coolest thing about what you do: My current project is Open Data Kit (ODK), a free and open-source set of tools which helps organizations create mobile data collection solutions with smartphones and cloud infrastructure. In addition to socio-economic and health surveys with GPS locations and images, ODK is being used to create decision support for clinicians and for building multimedia-rich nature mapping tools.

All this is possible because the cellphone has become the ubiquitous computing device. In places where there is no running water or reliable power, you’ll often find a cellphone and Internet connectivity. ODK started as a research project to use that ubiquity to make data collection and information delivery more efficient.