Vivek Srinivasan

About Vivek Srinivasan

I work with the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University. Before this, I worked with the Right to Food Campaign and other rights based campaigns in India. To learn more, click here.
To truly understand my experience at D.School, you must consider three things: love, terror, and the hillarious outcomes of Indians trying to communicate across linguistic divides. Let’s start at the beginning. I had dreamt of D.School from the far-off Tamil Nadu for a two-and-half years before the life-changing phone call on July 27, 1997. Not knowing Hindi, I asked my father to call the office and confirm my admission. “I am calling from South India…”, my father started and Shukla ji responded with, “Oh, Mr. Vivek, congradulations”. To keep my seat, I had to pay the tuition by July 29, […]

Love, Language, and Terror at the Delhi School of Economics

Do I get to oversee humans if I am right more often?
The Human Mirror Test Designers and Product Managers often come to me with questions about whether we should use AI, given issues like bias, hallucinations, and inaccuracies. These are big concerns that need to be thought through. However, I believe that avoiding AI altogether usually does more harm than good. To help us reflect on this question, I devised a thought experiment called the Human Mirror Test. Identify a specific standard by which AI’s performance or behavior is judged, including the logical consequences of failing to meet this standard. The Human Mirror Test requires replacing ‘AI’ with ‘Humans’ in the […]

Human Mirror Test: Should we use AI?

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Introduction Information architecture (IA) is the practice of organizing, structuring, and labeling content within websites, intranets, and other digital platforms to help users find and navigate through information efficiently. It plays a crucial role in creating user-friendly, accessible, and efficient digital spaces that facilitate effective communication and interaction. As technology continues to advance and user expectations evolve, understanding and implementing the principles of IA and employing research methods to evaluate and improve it becomes increasingly important. Some Factors Used in IA Design 1. Gestalt Principles Gestalt principles, derived from the field of psychology, inform the way human brains perceive and […]

P1: Research Methods for Information Architecture

A few memories of Neelabh Mishra, a friend from the Right to Food Campaign days, who left us two days ago. He was the editor-in-chief of The National Herald and a friend to fellow activists who worked on hunger, the right to information and other political challenges of the last few decades.

Goodbye Neelabh

This is the text of a presentation on the Combatting Corruption with Mobile Phones Project in Portuguese. The talk was delivered online for a conference at UFPA, Brazilian Amazon on 4 Nov 2014. Boa tarde. Meu nome é Vivek, sou um cientista social na Stanford University. Hoje, vou tentar algo muito audacioso: fazer uma apresentação em português. Isso é audacioso porque eu não falo bem o português. Eu aprendi essa língua em um curso de português que fiz por três meses há doze anos atrás. Eu preparei esta apresentação usando o google translate. Agora, você vai entender porque eu falo […]

Combater a corrupção com telefones

With days to go for the Delhi state election of 2015, a group called the Aap Volunteer Action Manch (AVAM) held a press conference to expose 4 checks of Rs. 50 lakh each (a very substantial sum) that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had got from companies that earned very little income themselves.  AVAM argued that the companies were used as a front for money laundering i.e. illegal cash was given by AAP to the company which in-turn issued a check, converting the black money to white to use in the election. Opposition parties, especially the BJP were quick to […]

AAP’s political financing controversy: My take

Aiddata .org provides over 1 million data points of information on aid flows from a large range of donors, creating an unprecedented level of transparency about international aid.  The information covers most official aid bodies (e.g. DFID, USAID, et al) and the latest version (3.0) also includes data on private charity organizations in the US and flow of remittances.  The data can be downloaded in full or visualized online.  There is also a robust API system to build apps on top of the rich database. Based on a quick review of the datasets, I feel that it would be a […]

Aiddata.org: Open data for international development

UReport Uganda is an initiative to do SMS-based polling among a large number of Ugandan citizens on different topics weekly.  The service boasts an impressive subscriber base of over 2,50,000 people as of Oct 2014.  While the base is large, the poll data on the website indicates that SMS polls are sent to a smaller subset of participants each week with responses ranging from 20-50% in the polls I reviewed. The website provides a word cloud on the basis of responses and it also provides charts in case the question of the week had multiple choice responses.  Samples of text […]

UReport Uganda

The fact that common people started becoming assertive only helps us understand why governments became more responsive to popular demands. It does not explain why public services, rather than an alternate policy agenda such as land reforms or rapid industrialization became the favoured policy. This article discusses how that agenda came to be.

Why public services & not land reforms?

In many villages, people had fought for decades to demand one amenity after another. As an activist put it, they would struggle one year and get 100 metres of road, street lights required another protest, and many basic amenities had to be gained through sustained collective action. The impact of such protests over time was to gain an impressive array of services. Such protests date back at most to the 1970s.

The root of TN’s commitment to services