Nimmi Rangaswamy

I am currently a Professor at the Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad. I will be bringing an anthropological lens to understanding the impacts of AI research and praxis. I served as Adjunct Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Hyderabad from 2013-2023 where I taught courses at the intersections of society and technology.

My Google Scholar page is here

https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=cGn5oUQAAAAJ&hl=en

I am currently Member, Advisory Board, United Nations University, Macau

Formerly, I was a senior research scientist and lead the Human Interactions research area at the Xerox Research Center India. I worked in the building of technologies in the areas of consumer-centric health care and urban mobility.

Previously, my job at Microsoft Research was a combination of theoretical analysis and ethnographic field research to understand technology use in developing countries. These are studies of patterns of technology adoption in various social contexts and spaces in India, ranging from middle-class consumption of domestic media, the business models of cyber cafés, and the use of mobile internet and Facebook among urban slum youth.

You can reach me

nimmi.rangaswamy@gmail.com

nimmi.rangaswamy@iiit.ac.in

HCI - HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

As a social scientist, my engagements with HCI studies are attempts to re-imagine computing technologies for populations in resource-poor, digitally unstable, and diversely literate environments. My research extends the HCI frame of reference to include and articulate local practices surrounding technology diffusion and their widespread implications for entrenching ICT use through sharing, learning, training, renewing, and extending use and access. We do this by discussing processes at the intersection of technology consumption, resource constraints, and cultural production specific to low-income communities in India.

AI and HUMANITIES

At the Kohli Centre on Intelligent systems, IIITH, I have embarked on a research project around socio-economic impacts of work automation, with a focus on the Indian off-shored IT industry. Whether it is automated data entry/capture, software systems driving quality assurance or smart keyboards, the rise of autonomous systems is a big concern for employability. Our research proposes to set the tone for research, evaluation and learnings from a purported qualitative research study on the advances in the scope of work automation and ensuring socio-economic impacts on the Indian job sector with a focus on IT and the offshore industry. The primary aim is to look beyond hearsay and dig deeper into the reality of work automation and purported socio-economic impacts by bringing together industry experts and throwing open a discussion

We need to ask several questions: What kind of jobs will be impacted? Is upskilling mandatory at every level of work? Will people with tech skills be needed in every industry to create, run and maintain automation systems? How far and with what intensity will machines impact human centered jobs? What are the verticals and domains of businesses currently under the wave of automation and job replacement? Though we are very interested in investigating the immediate impacts on the off-shored job sector in India due to work automation, there is a dire need to think ahead and reflect on the long-term impacts of changes to job profiles, work content and career paths.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES FOR LEISURE IN DEVELOPMENT

This project studies ICT adoption among teenagers and young adults in low-income urban setting and explores how information about everyday ICT use may be relevant for development research even if it is largely dominated by entertainment uses. To understand how ICT tools are used, we need to study the spaces users inhabit, even if these spaces are dominated by mundane, non-instrumental and entertainment-driven needs. The key here is to situate insights from anthropological studies within an understanding of what drives a specific user population to adopt technologies in particular ways. Adopting a narrow development lens of technology use may miss the actual engagements and ingenious strategies marginal populations use to instate technologies into their everyday.

URBAN SLUMS AND ICTS

We discuss the adoption of information and communication technologies in the context of urban slums. We are conducting ethnographic research amongst ICT based business like mobile phone stores and services, cyber cafes, PC assembling units and computer training institutes. Through in-depth understanding of informal business networks we are mapping the business ecology of mobile phone repair and servicing and PC assembling demand and the demand for the internet/mobile internet, mobile phones and PCs in low-income settings. Some of our field sites in Mumbai included the slums of Dharavi and Behram Baug.

TV AND DOMESTIC MEDIA

The project focuses on the middle classes in India to understand choices influencing domestic media consumption. The focus is on the home computer and the mobile phone. Using qualitative ethnographic methods, we explore and foreground particular socio-cultural contexts and behavioural practices of Indian families shaping decision-making to buy and use domestic ICTs. We investigate how the mobile phone and the PC become objects representing social mobility and modernity in middle-class families we map cultural patterns that emerge when India’s low to middle-income homes use and adopt the mobile phone and pc into their lives. We have conducted studies in the metropolitan cities of Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi and smaller cities and towns in the states of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Part of this project, funded by MSTV SVC, contextualizes changing television viewership from an ethnographic study of 11 families in Mumbai, India. Over the last decade, Indian audiences have been witnessing rapidly transforming television technology, content, and services. With changing TV scenarios as a backdrop, the study purports to evaluate techno-social scenarios of new TV services in conjunction with family usages of the Internet and mobile

PhD THESIS 1994 -2000

My doctoral thesis analyzed a variety of print propaganda in Tamil politics as instantiation of broader regional political culture. It focused on the identity politics of the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu, erstwhile Madras Presidency, through an analysis of their print propaganda between the years 1937 and 1967 when the movement was a veritable force of revolutionary opposition politics.