IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2016 - 20

most powerful device in their CE arsenal
might be the US$75 smartphone that
lacks most of the features showcased at
Consumer Electronics Show (International CES) but still invaluably serves as
a business tool, a banking device, a Web
portal, a messaging service, and, of
course, a phone."
GHTC 2015 also included several
panels, including "The Future of Humanitarian Technology: Practitioners' Perspective." A GHTC 2015 highlight was a
panel on the "Humanitarian Applications
for the Internet of Things (IoT)." This
panel featured:
▼ Jen Foxbot-Seattle area IoT entrepreneur focused on agriculture and
gardening
▼ Timothy Lee-communications expert
and president of MTT-S
▼ Tom Coughlin-storage expert and
CE Society governor
▼ Joseph Decuir-Bluetooth and IoT
expert and CE Society governor.
The GHTC committee aspires to have
more impact supporting people in developing countries. Success is measured in
lives saved and lives improved. The team
wanted to address the entrepreneurial
community. We considered hosting a
Hackathon, "Hack the Disaster," about
communications in disaster situations.
We were not able to complete the planning in time. We also approach organizers of startup weekends. The unsolved
problem is: who owns the intellectual
property provided to these events or
coming out of these events?
GHTC 2015 included keynotes from
several financial patrons and industrial
partners, including
▼ William Stefanov of NASA on Earth
Observation from the International
Space Station [9]
▼ Maurizio Vecchione of Global Good
on technologies for developing countries [10]
▼ Paul Mitchell of Microsoft on its
"4Africa" project [11].

GHTC 2016 preview
Region 6 is hosting the 2016 conference
in the Seattle Section again this year,
13-16 October. GHTC 2016 is projected to draw between 250 and 300 participants. More than 250 papers, case
20 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

studies, and humanitarian challenges
have been submitted. A selection of
these will be used as the baseline for
the conference program, along with
invited papers, deployment case studies, poster papers, remote conferencing
sessions, and panels. Panel sessions
will focus on topics such as the societal
impacts of technology, field communications, and remote health provider
solutions. GHTC 2016 plans a workshop on how to effectively disseminate
applied science, specifically including
the work of NASA. The conference
program and the registration information are at www.ieeeghtc.org.
The scope of GHTC has increased. In
particular, we added a technical track
focused on implementation. The track
cochairs are local inventor Roger Johnson of Eidon LLC [12] and entrepreneur Jackie Stenson of ESSMART
[13], who are focused on product distribution in developing countries.
The CE Society is a technical cosponsor again. Vodaphone [14], a major supplier of mobile phones in the
developing world, will be assembling a
panel on mobile communications.
GHTC 2016 will have workshops
for members of volunteer engineering
organizations, which are likely to
include a NASA-sponsored workshop
on using Earth observation data. GHTC
2016 expects more participation by
members of these organizations,
including IEEE SIGHT chapters, IEEE
Smart Village, Engineering for Change,
[15] and Engineers Without Borders
[16]. An ongoing goal of the conferences is to provide new information to
these organizations and to provide linkages among them.

Canada, July 2017 [7]. GHTC leadership
is explicitly connecting with these related
conferences to exchange information and
best practices.
The most important best practices
include common procedures for publishing papers and recordings of conference
events. The GHTC has been testing the
Tech Smith Camtasia software tool [18],
which is an extension of Microsoft PowerPoint. It captures sound from one or
more microphones to narrate captured
slide video. The results are in MP4 format, commonly used by YouTube. The
goal will be that each conference will
list all material, with recordings and
papers where applicable. These will be
conveyed to the volunteer engineering
organizations so that they don't have to
reinvent the wheel so often.

THe FuTure
The IEEE continues to invest more
resources in the Humanitarian Activities
Committee, continuing the board's commitment to feet on the ground. Cooperative work will continue between the
GHTC and related conferences. The conferences will then continue driving the
technology into the hands of the NGOs
and volunteer engineering organizations.
IEEE encourages the formation of
SIGHT chapters [3] attached to geographic locations (IEEE Sections around
the world) and to international IEEE
Societies (e.g., Microwave Theory and
Techniques). This is an invitation to
form SIGHT chapters affiliated with the
CE Society. An example of SIGHT
activities includes finding a locally identified need, exploring solutions from a
conference, and building a locally
implemented and sustainable solution
for that need.

Global ConneCTions
GHTC 2016 follows a successful model
developed by the inaugural GHTC in
2011, expanded and improved through
2015, and now followed around the world.
Recently, there was IST-Africa, Durban,
South Africa, May 2016 [6] and ARGENCOM, Buenos Aires, Argentina, June
2016 [17]. In the next year, there will be
ISTAS (R10 HTC), Kerala, India, December 2016 [5]; MHTC 2017, Mexico, first
quarter 2017; and IHTC 2017, Toronto,

october 2016

reFerenCes
[1] IEEE. IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee. [Online]. Available: https://www.ieee.
org/about/corporate/humanitarian_activities_
committee.html
[2] IEEE. Global Humanitarian Technology
Conference, technology for the benefit of
humanity. [Online]. Available: http://www.
ieeeghtc.org/

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2016