Early in my career, I published in Computer Science conferences/journals. Recently my work has spanned a broad range of issues around technology in the developing-world, resulting in publications in journals in science, economics, public health and management.   ​

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In the past many years, I have held myself to an unusual standard: I do not publish unless my system/technology/intervention has had "real" impact. A good benchmark is that the work must have impacted at least 10,000 people.  

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• Where Are Pakistan’s Out-of-School Children? Mapping Accessibility of Schooling Using Satellite Data and Machine Learning Methods with an Application to the 2022 Floods, Umar Saif, Amer Hasan, Ayesha Tahir, Koen Martijn Geven, Mohsen Ali, Aliza Masood, Muhammad Abdul Rahman, Sheena Fazili, The World Bank, 2026

• Evaluating tuberculosis service accessibility in Pakistan by analyzing population movement patterns from telecom mobility and survey data, Christina Mergenthaler, John Ifejube, Peter Stephens, Umar Saif et al. BMC Global and Public Health, 2026

• Area-based determinants of outreach vaccination for reaching vulnerable populations: A cross-sectional study in Pakistan
  X Chen, A Porter, N Abdur Rehman, SK Morris, U Saif - PLOS Global Public Health, 2023

• Engaging with teachers unlocks the potential of technology in schools: Evidence from Pakistan, Sabrin Beg, Adrienne Lucas, Umar Saif, VoxDev 2023

• Engaging Teachers with Technology Increased Achievement, Bypassing Teachers Did Not, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol. 14, No. 2, MAY 2022

• Quantifying the localized relationship between vector containment activities and dengue incidence in a real-world setting: A spatial and time series modelling analysis based on geo-located data from Pakistan, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 2020

• Money matters: exploring opportunities in digital donation to mosques in Pakistan, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development 2019

• Voice-Based Quizzes for Measuring Knowledge Retention in Under-Connected Populations, Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2019

• Beyond the basics: Improving post-primary content delivery through classroom technology, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series 2019

• Deep Landscape Features for Improving Vector-borne Disease Prediction, Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops 2019

• The internet of the orals, Communications of the ACM 2019

• Leveraging deep learning and SNA approaches for smart city policing in the developing world, International Journal of Information Management 2019

• Baang: A viral speech-based social platform for under-connected populations, Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2018

• Quantifying the impact of dengue containment activities using high-resolution observational data, bio Rxiv2018

• Rapid Collection of Spontaneous Speech Corpora Using Telephonic Community Forums, INTERSPEECH 2018

• Changing Perceptions of Citizens of India and Pakistan, Development Consortium: HCI Across Borders Workshop at ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2016

• Fine-grained dengue forecasting using telephone triage services, Science Advances 2016

• Iterative Design of an Immunization Information System in Pakistan, Proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development 2016

• Speakmytext: A Platform To Support Crowd-Sourced Text-To-Audio Translations, Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction, 2016

• Real-time Automated Surveys among Low-literate Masses using Voice-based Telephone Services, Proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, 2016

• Villageapps: a platform to educate underprivileged communities in their mother tongue, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 2015

• Rescue base station, Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Symposium on Computing for Development, 2014

• Characterizing dengue spread and severity using internet media sources, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development, 2013

• Job opportunities through entertainment: Virally spread speech-based services for low-literate users, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2013

• Spread and sustainability: The geography and economics of speech-based services, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development, 2013

• Viral entertainment as a vehicle for disseminating speech-based services to low-literate users, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 2012

• Automatic topic identification and classification of text messages in the SMSAll system, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development, 2012

• FluBreaks: early epidemic detection from Google flu trends, Journal of medical Internet research, 2012

• Punjab-IDSS: Dengue surveillance, early detection and containment, 2012 mHealth Summit, 2012

• BitTorrent for the less privileged, Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, 2011

• A dynamic platform for run-time adaptation, Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal, 2009

• Collaborative technologies in international distance education, 2009 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, 2009

• A peer-to-peer Internet for the developing world, Information Technologies & International Development Journal, 2009

• Structured decomposition of adaptive applications, IEEE Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 2008

• Internet for the developing world: Offline internet access at modem-speed dialup connections, 2007 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 2007

• Poor man's broadband: peer-to-peer dialup networking, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2007

• Technique-based programming, 5th IEEE International conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2007

• Medium access control issues in sensor networks, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2006

• Reducing configuration overhead with goal-oriented programming, Fourth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, 2006

• Practical experience with adaptive service access, ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 2005

• Gigabit routing on a software-exposed tiled-microprocessor, 2005 Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), 2005

• Opportunistic file-associations for mobile operating systems, Seventh IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems & Applications (WMCSA'06 Supplement), 2005

• A case for goal-oriented programming semantics, Workshop on System Support for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiSys’ 03), 5th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2003), 2003

• Service-oriented network sockets, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services (MobiSys), 2003

• Goal-Oriented System Semantics, MIT Tech Report 2002

• Pebbles: A Software Component System, MIT Tech Report 2002

• Architectures for ubiquitous systems, University of Cambridge Tech Report, 2002

• Communication primitives for ubiquitous systems or RPC considered harmful, Proceedings 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, 2001

• Internet access to a home area network, IEEE Internet computing, 2001