I can be contacted at mattkam@cs.berkeley.edu
I expect to graduate in August 2008 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. In addition to my CS background, I have completed graduate work on language and literacy at the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley for a minor. I also hold a B.A. degree in economics from UC Berkeley. I am affiliated with the Berkeley Institute of Design, which is a multidisciplinary, human-centered design research lab where technologists and social scientists work collaboratively.
My research integrates my interests in economic development, education and information technology. It focuses on the design and applications of technology that empower underserved communities. For my dissertation work, I am designing and piloting e-learning games on cellphones that target English as a Second Language among low-income children in the rural villages and urban slums in India. You can find out more in my research statement, which also discusses my areas of interest and project management skills.
My research has been published at leading conferences in human-computer interaction, digital games and learning technologies. My dissertation work has received major funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Microsoft, National Science Foundation, Qualcomm and Verizon. It was also filmed on-site by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as part of a television documentary on novel cellphone applications in the developing world. This documentary was recently aired on public television in April 2008. More details in my CV.
My teaching philosophy emphasizes working with students from the entire spectrum of academic and socio-cultural backgrounds in order to strengthen their capabilities. I have and am working with experienced English teachers in India to develop a long-term curriculum for a longitudinal deployment of my dissertation work. Observing how they teach has helped me to better appreciate what I was learning in a part-time diploma course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. As a former teaching assistant in an undergraduate class on human-computer interaction in 2003, I received the highest teaching evaluation among all publicly posted evaluations for this course since it was first offered in 1997.
As a senior graduate student, I have mentored 5 graduate students and 35 undergraduate researchers from both UC Berkeley and premier universities in India. They majored in computer science, cognitive science, psychology and/or economics. Some of them made excellent progress in their work and have accompanied me to India to field-test their individual contributions. For their Master's project, two of the graduate students worked on the multiple-mice shared computing platform for education in the developing world. They received the James R. Chen Award for outstanding Master's projects in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. On looking back, I have the pleasure of watching former mentees went on to graduate school, the computing industry or the Peace Corps.
In terms of my availability for interviews, I am most available from March 2008 onwards. I am attending the ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference in February in South Africa, where I am co-organizing a workshop on "human-computer interaction in international development." I am co-organizing a similar workshop at ACM CHI in April in Italy. I will also present my work at the iConference in late February at Los Angeles.
Matthew Kam, Vijay
Rudraraju, Anuj Tewari, and John Canny. Mobile
Gaming with Children in Rural
Matthew Kam,
Jingtao Wang, Alastair Iles, Eric Tse, Jane Chiu, Daniel Glaser, Orna
Tarshish, and John Canny. Livenotes: A System for Cooperative and
Augmented Note-Taking in Lectures. In Proceedings of
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '05),
Here is my complete list of publications and talks.