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In some corners of the world, you'll still be hard-pressed to find necessities like clean water, reliable electricity, and robust medical care, yet it's often relatively easy to pick up a mobile phone or Internet access. Yaw's research focuses on using this increasingly available technology to improve the lives of people in low-income regions. He has a special interest in bolstering medical recordkeeping in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yaw has become the public face for a free, open-source set of software tools—called Open Data Kit (ODK)—that he co-created with a team including other UW doctoral students and faculty and Google employees. The goal of ODK is to make it easier to collect data. The tools allow people on the ground to capture and deliver a variety of information through mobile gadgets of any kind, replacing the need for separate paper forms, cameras, and GPS units. In part because of its robust features and integration with Google applications, ODK now counts thousands of users on six continents—and one user on the International Space Station.
ODK has already made a big impact on managing healthcare in low-resource areas. An organization called AMPATH, which treats more than 120,000 HIV-positive patients across Kenya, sends health workers with ODK-equipped phones from house to house to provide counseling and testing. "Through this on-the-ground tool, AMPATH has reached some 70,000 individuals and has been able to rapidly and cost-effectively identify individuals at significant risk from HIV, saving lives," Yaw said.
Other ODK users have used the software to track human rights violations and monitor environmental conditions in the Amazon rainforest. The tools recently won the Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest and the Washington Technology Industry Alliance Award for Best New Product in the Non-Profit Sector.
As a young child in Accra, Ghana, Yaw liked to play engineer, taking apart his toys and putting them back together. When he was nine, his family moved to Indianapolis, where his father had accepted a faculty position at Butler University.
During his teenage years, Yaw dabbled in computer programming after he found a tantalizing opportunity: an online contest to win a speedy new modem. In the early days of the World Wide Web, this prospect was a big deal. Through trial and error, Yaw hacked together a program that would connect to the Internet daily at midnight and enter his name and address in the contest entry forms at 56 participating websites. After a few days of running the application, Yaw won the prize. "That day was pretty much the greatest day of my life," he told the publication Geekwire in a recent interview.
Yaw went on to launch a technocentric career, studying computer science and electrical engineering in college and continuing that course in graduate school. "I came to the UW because of the unique culture of the CSE program," he said. "It's an incredibly supportive and collaborative place to do research."
Yaw has financed his education through teaching and research assistantships, a National Science Foundation fellowship, a Ford Foundation fellowship, and a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge grant.
By the time Yaw completed his master's thesis in computer science, he realized he wanted to use his education to tackle some of the inequalities he'd seen as a child in his African village. So he took a six-month break from his doctoral studies to work at Partners in Health, a rural hospital in Rwanda, where he helped to roll out an electronic medical record system for HIV/AIDS patients.
Back at the UW, he found himself with "renewed purpose and strong beliefs about the role technology could play in the lives of the very poor." He cofounded the group Change, which connects students and faculty from departments across campus to explore technology-based improvements to problems faced by low-resource regions around the globe. Change's members lead more than 20 projects, ranging from ODK to a Digital Study Hall that acts as the "educational equivalent of Netflix and YouTube" for low-income students in India.
In recognition of his active civic engagement and scholarly work, Yaw won the UW Graduate School Medal in 2011.
The Graduate School Medal is a $2,000 award to a Ph.D., D.M.A., Au.D., D.N.P., D.P.T., or Ed.D. candidate who displays an exemplary commitment to both the UW and its larger community. The medal recognizes the "scholar-citizens" whose academic expertise and social awareness are integrated in a way that demonstrates active civic engagement and a capacity to promote political, cultural and social change. The medal is funded from the UW Graduate Fellowship Fund, which is supported primarily by annual gifts from alumni and friends of the UW.
"Students like Yaw come along rarely," said Gaetano Borriello, the Jerre D. Noe professor of computer science of engineering, who co-advises Yaw. "He has a potent combination of scholarship, technical prowess, initiative, strong motivation to help others, incredible leadership abilities, and a friendly and gregarious personality."
Yaw says his time at the UW brings to mind one of his favorite proverbs from the culture in which he was raised: "If you want to go fast, walk alone. If you want to go far, walk together."
"The University of Washington has taught me how to walk with many others, and for that, I am grateful," he said.
"Whatever it is that you are doing, make sure you care," Yaw said. "If you care, you'll work hard, and if you work hard, good things will happen. Guaranteed."
Photo: Hélène Martin