Ph.D. Student - Annenberg School for Communication
Master’s Degree, University of California - Berkeley
Deepti Chittamuru is a graduate student in the Annenberg School for Communication (ASC), University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie mainly in the field of ICT4D. She began by studying the influence of cultural and social forces on the adoption and use of technology in rural India. Her most recent work investigates the role that persuasive technologies may be able to play in influencing the behaviors of semi-literate or illiterate populations in the developing regions.
She started doing research in ICT4D during her Masters in Information Management & Systems (Majored in HCI, ICT4D) at the School of Information, UC Berkeley in 2008. In the past she has worked with Dr. John Canny on a mobile phone based education tool (MILLEE) for teaching English to children in rural India and Dr. Tapan Parikh on a voice based online community (Awaj De) for farmers in rural areas of Gujarat, India.
She is currently working with Dr. John Jemmott to design a mobile-phone based behavioral intervention (Mobiles For Mothers) to persuade pregnant women and their families in India to adopt recommended maternal health practices. She expects to deploy and evaluate this intervention as a large-scale, long-term randomized control trial.
She is one of the lead organizers of the ICT4D Seminar Series being collectively hosted at Penn by five of its graduate schools - ASC, GSE, SEAS, SAS, and PSOM.