Kuntal Das participated in three academic research projects under the supervision of Uttaran Dutta from the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University from June to July 2015. The projects focused on using technology to provide information to underserved populations, developing a mobile application for qualitative research, and empowering local youth through social innovation. Kuntal contributed to the projects by writing computer programs, participating in design discussions, organizing workshops, and collecting and documenting research data. Dutta was impressed by Kuntal's research abilities, work ethic, and potential to be a successful academic researcher.

1. An academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
PO Box 871205, Tempe, AZ 85287-1205
480-965-5095 Fax: 480-965-4291
www.humancommunication.clas.asu.edu
September 5th, 2015
To whom it may concern
Kuntal Das participated in academic research activities under my supervision from June-July 2015 in
communication design research projects. These research projects were organized and conducted by
the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University, USA.
First, I would like to share a brief description of the projects:
Information and Communication Technology for Development: A vast majority of the underserved
population, who are low literate and facing linguistic and communicative barriers, lacks access to
information on aspects critical to their livelihood, such as market prices, education and jobs. This
project seeks to co-create access to information and feedback mechanism, and collective content
generation to reduce existing information gaps, and will situate community members as key stake-
holders for taking context-specific decisions in real-time from their local spaces in local language.
Communication for Development Qualitative Method project: An android application was developed
to conduct qualitative research and collect primary data while doing field research in remote villages
among low-literate and economically marginalized population.
Social Innovation project: This is a transformation project, which seeks to motivate local youth to
become innovators, so that they would creatively solve local issues using local resources. The
processes of capacity building and empowerment of the local population would improve the local
economy and development, which would contribute to the national and regional growth.
In long term, these projects would help in reducing the digital divide and social injustices, and in
promoting and protecting human rights in underserved spaces.
As a research associate, Kuntal wrote computer programs, codes for GUIs; participated in project
designing/ discussion/ brainstorming sessions, participatory designing and co-designing activities,
organizing innovators’ workshops, interface designing, co-creating website and application
development (using C, Java, CSS3, Andriod, PHP, and machine learning) and refinement, documenting
research data/ideas/iterations; and contributed in data input and data collection mechanism.
Kuntal is open-minded, co-operative, flexible and adaptable. His devotion to his work and his interest
in it contributed theoretically and methodologically to the success of the research program. During
the research activities, I have found his to be industrious, willing, conscientious and intelligent.
I am quite impressed by Kuntal’s research abilities; his research was always thorough and
comprehensive, and he successfully managed to complete all work assigned to him on time. I
certainly believe he was what it takes to make a wonderful academic researcher and the creativity
and perseverance to be a successful scholar someday. I wish Kuntal the very best in his future
academic endeavors.
Sincerely,
Uttaran Dutta
Assistant Professor
Hugh Downs School of Human Communication
Arizona State University