Daily Archives: February 20, 2017

Snunit CEO Revital Rubin in January with Geoff Cohen, the principal of the Herzliya School in Cape Town, South Africa. (photo credit:Courtesy)

The Snunit Center for the Advancement of Web-Based Learning, the largest educational web portal in Israel, is seeking to launch a new site dedicated to connecting Jewish children and youth in the Diaspora with Israel.

Snunit was established in 1994 as a project of the School of Education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and in 1999 officially became a non-profit NGO established by the university and the Nir and Beverly Barkat family.

Responsible for launching the first Hebrew language website, today Snunit creates, develops and manages innovative educational sites for elementary and middle schools pupils, reaching hundreds of thousands of users throughout the country and the world.

The easiest way to transfer educational messages to a critical mass of people, especially to youth, is by technological means with the push of a button, Revital Rubin, CEO of Snunit, recently told The Jerusalem Post.

For youth, Rubin explained, the technological world is their first world.

We take advantage of this media to reach wider audiences of youth and provide them with knowledge, she said.

Snunits latest project, in the process of development, includes a new English site and application aimed at connecting and teaching Jewish children from the Diaspora about Israel.

As a Jew who lives in Israel, I understand the importance and necessity of doing this, Rubin explained, crediting this latest endeavor with her visit last month to South Africa, organized by Community, a joint program of The Gesher Leadership Institution and the Diaspora Ministry to expand and deepen the connection between public opinion leaders in Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

As part of her visit she toured South Africa and also met with pupils and school principals in Cape Town and Johannesburg. She explained that while there, she saw firsthand how little adults and children alike in the Jewish community knew about Israel or had any connection to the country.

They study the bible and Jewish holidays but they dont learn anything about the State of Israel and the culture and what troubles youth in Israel, she said.

It is important that children learn that Israel is not only about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or politics, or the ultra-Orthodox, of course these are issues but there are a lot of other parts of Israel that youth should get to know, she added.

Rubin said she was shocked to discover that around a third of Jews in the world have no connection to Israel whatsoever.

Due to this journey, I understand this need to create connections [with the Diaspora] and today I see this as a mission, she said.

She stressed that it was important to understand that religion is not everything when speaking about Jews and Israel.

If we keep presenting this to the world, we will lose a lot of Jews along the way and the Jewish people cannot afford this, she said. We have to understand that there are also Jews in the world that currently have no link to Israel and there are people in Israel who are secular and we must think how to connect between them to develop a diverse Jewish synergy.

Rubin explained that the applications aim would not only teach Jews about Israel but would also serve to connect between youth and create a dialogue on issues that are important to them.

There are children and youth who deal with the same problems that youth in Israel do, wherever they are in the world and it is important that they make that connection, she said.

Still, she added, it is a two-way street. While children in the Diaspora know little about Israel, so too do Israeli children know very little about their counterparts abroad.

I believe in reciprocity we also need to teach kids in Israel to get to know the Diaspora, she said. And I believe that we need to start establishing roots of this connection at a much younger age, and not only focus on adults or young adults.

Rubin stressed the positive effects of web-based learning in reaching out to youth in the Diaspora and connecting them with Israel.

Israel has brought children and youth to Israel on trips [like Birthright and Masa] but how many children can you bring? Two hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? With this technology we can reach out to millions of children, she explained.

She acknowledged that it is no substitute for bringing youth to Israel but said it could serve to complement their physical presence in Israel and provide them with knowledge about the country.

We dont need to stand on our two hind legs I think it is a good thing, both tactically and strategically that there will be Jews in the Diaspora and our responsibility is to strengthen our connection with them and to strengthen them with all the challenges they face such as antisemitism, Rubin stressed.

If we dont understand this we will distance youth and adults in the Diaspora from the Jewish people, she said.

Overwhelmed by her experience in South Africa, Rubin ensured that the pupils and teachers in the two Jewish schools she visited would be provided free access to Snunits educational portals.

Many of our websites are in Hebrew only and so now we are also looking to translate these sites to English and we are looking for a partner who understands the importance of this, she said.

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Technology connects Diaspora youth to their Israeli counterparts - Jerusalem Post Israel News

Melissa Jun Rowley Crunch Network Contributor

Melissa Jun Rowley is a journalist, entrepreneur and activist focused on the intersection of storytelling, technology and social justice. As the founder and CEO of Humanise, Inc., she is developing The Toolbox, a data-driven humanitarian initiative created by musician Peter Gabriel.

Deep in a rural village in India outside the city of Jhansi, children play on dirt roads where goats and cows roam. The humble and colorful homes have mud floors, and women collect drinking water from wells.

All the sights and sounds are quintessential aspects of the region, with the exception of one feature the use of smartphones to save lives. In this village, women healthcare workers, known as accredited social health activists (ASHAs), use a mobile application called mSakhi to help them educate expecting mothers about maternal and neonatal danger signs.

Funded byQualcomm Wireless Reachand developed byIntraHealth International, mSakhi is currently being used by 329 ASHAs to benefit 16,000 mothers. Amobile broadband initiativeaccomplishing such a task in rural India is no small feat.

According to the national health ministry, Indias newborn mortality rate stands at29 per 1,000 live births. The country is aiming to get the number down to a single digit. Additionally, the literacy rate among females in India is low. A background paper done by the New York-based International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity revealed in October of last year that only48 percent of India girlsstudying up to the fifth grade are literate.

As for internet connectivity, according to a Pew Research Center poll, a mere22 percent of Indias adultscould get online in 2015. That being said, there are nationwide efforts being made to get people connected. The countysDigital Indiaprogram aims to digitally empower citizens and provide broadband in remote areas. As part of this plan, the government wants to make mobile connectivity available in more than 40,000 villages by 2018.

In the meantime, mSakhi is still able to have an impact, because the application is designed to manage low connectivity. The data thats fed into mobile devices is stored offline. When theres a network thats available, the data is then uploaded to a server.

Frontline health worker Ram Kumari Sharma travels to villages across India. Using mSakhi , she registers the details of pregnant women, new mothers and newborn babies, and gives them medical examinations. Through text and animated images the tool assists her in describing the day-to-day symptoms patients should look out for and how they should address them.

The mSakhi app also supports auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) working in the field. Anita VT is an ANM who has worked in the village health center for the last 20 years, registering patients, delivering babies and vaccinating children. While the facility she works in is no more than a small room with a few manual tools, the mobile technology she uses brings an aspect of the process into the 21st century.

I can do everything on this, says VT, pointing to her tablet. Why should I do it on paper?

Meenakshi Jain, IntraHealth senior advisor of programs, says mSakhi as a whole is enabling a more cost-effective and efficient health registration process.

The government of India has a program across the county where every pregnant mother has to go into an online system, she explains. Its the duty of frontline workers like ASHAs and midwives to make this happen. So they have the job of identifying and registering pregnant women. The catch is that they have to fill out forms, and then travel 10-20 km, sit with a data entry operator at a community health center, and then get the data fed into the computer. What mSakhi does is it saves a lot of paper time.

To get the funding needed to scale the mSakhi program, IntraHealth is generating evidence to share with stakeholders the federal government, state government and donors that mSakhi is improving the health and well-bring of mothers and children. Jain says she would like the government to implement mSakhi or any similar application, as long as it empowers frontline health workers to do their jobs better and uses the most recent technology. If IntraHealth is able to bring in more funding, mSakhi will continue to evolve and include technical areas such as family planning and literacy.

About 450 kilometers from Jhansi, the nonprofitPlanned Social Concern (PSC)is providing micro-finance opportunities to women in a village outside the city of Jaipur.

A number of PSCs micro-finance participants are able to build their own small businesses. One of the women in the program says she was able to build a new home and send her kids to school, thanks to PSC.

This economic empowerment is being enhanced through the power of mobile broadband. Through a partnership with Qualcomm Wireless Reach, PSC was able to digitize its entire loan-making process in 2014. The program is now 100 percent paperless.

Ravi Gupta, COO of PSC, says that through using 3G-connected tablets and a mobile application called MicroLekha, the organization is able to function faster and be more transparent.

When we were doing it [making loans] manually it used to take 17 to 18 days to process a loan, says Gupta. Now with MicroLekha we can place a loan in three to four days.

Because all the documents are stored digitally, theres no need for customers to submit paperwork each time they apply for loans. When customers pay back their loans they get receipts and account updates via SMS.

This is just the beginning. When Digital India is able to fully penetrate the rural parts of the country, hopefully even more mobile tech designed to assist health workers, educate families and facilitate small business opportunities will be implemented.

My wish is that large tech firms will take cues from these mobile for impact programs, and create similar initiatives for poor parts in the Western world, as well.

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How mobile technology is transforming lives in rural India - TechCrunch

Microsoft and UPMC have partnered to improve healthcare delivery through a series of projects, Microsoft announced Thursday. The health system will work on Microsoft's Healthcare NExT Initiative, which will focus on clinician empowerment and productivity with AI, officials said. The companies will work together to develop new tools that will first be implemented at UPMC before it hits the market.

The partnership will focus on products to empower patients and providers, while advancing UPMC's immunology research.

"Despite UPMC's efforts to stay on the leading edge of technology, too often our clinicians and patients feel as though they're serving the technology rather than the other way around," UMPC Chief Medical and Scientific Officer and President of Health Services Dr. Steven Shapiro said in a statement.

"With Microsoft, we have a shared vision of empowering clinicians by reducing the burden of electronic paperwork and allowing the doctor to focus on the sacred doctor-patient relationship," he added.

The collaboration is part of multiple Healthcare NExT initiatives that include: HealthVault Insights, a research partnership with Tribridge and System C & Graphnet Care Alliance focused on finding insights on patient health, care plan adherence and patient engagement; and Microsoft Genomics, an Azure-powered genome analytics pipeline and partnership with BC Platforms and DNAnexus, among others.

Healthcare NExT also includes Microsoft's AI chatbot, which officials said telehealth provider MDLIVE will use to help patients self-triage inquiries before speaking with a provider by video. Further, Premera Blue Cross will use the tech to improve the way patients find their health benefit information.

Microsoft also launched CGI ProperPay for claims analytics. The new service from its SaaS apps, provides predictive analytics, rules management and best practices to reduce healthcare claims fraud, waste and abuse, officials said.

"At Microsoft, we're grounding our efforts in a set of core design principles that focus on the human benefit of AI, transparency and accountability," officials said in a statement. "We believe that ethics and design go hand in hand. Further, we understand that security, privacy and compliance remain a top priority for health organizations."

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Microsoft, UPMC's technology collaboration includes health chatbot, population health tools - MobiHealthNews

NEW DELHI: DBS, Singapores leading bank plans to hire 100 technology skilled professionals, in emerging and disruptive technologies across cloud, machine learning and Big Data through a hackathon.

The 100 new selects will join DBS Asia Hub 2 in Hyderabad, India, according to a release. This coding challenge, which has already received more than 3000 applications, is open to both fresh graduates and experienced professionals who can apply up to March 12, 2017.

Mohit Kapoor, CEO, DBS Asia Hub 2 said We want to build a culture of experimentation, backed by robust technology solutions and creative intelligence to consistently innovate and evolve our digital journey. Hackathons like this help us connect with top talent across the country who are game changers and will be instrumental in reimagining banking.

The recruitment drive, DBS Hack2Hire, consists of two parts - an online assessment challenge followed by a live two-day hackathon session. Shortlisted candidates from the second round will undergo interviews for full-time roles at DBS Asia Hub 2. The bank has collaborated with leading technology providers such as Amazon Web Services, Cloudera and Pivotal for conducting the hackathon, according to a release.

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DBS to hire 100 technology skilled professionals through hackathon - Economic Times