SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, Carnegie Mellon

The challenges facing developing countries have been longstanding and devastating lack of economic opportunity, insufficient education, tragic health outcomes, and poor governance. The Internet, and the resulting outpouring of diverse product innovations, has clearly transformed rich countries in the ways we do business and live our lives. Can the Internet be a similar force in tackling some of the worlds most intractable problems?

Ann Mei Chang is the Senior Advisor for Women and Technology in the Secretarys Office of Global Womens Issues at the U.S. Department of State, where she is serving as a Franklin Fellow. Prior to State, she spent 8 years as a Senior Engineering Director at Google, most recently leading product development for Emerging Markets, with a mission to bring relevant mobile and Internet services to the half of the worlds population which is not yet online. During her tenure at Google, she also led worldwide engineering for Googles mobile applications and services, including products such as search, ads, Google Mobile Maps, GMail, YouTube, Goggles, and Voice Search across all major mobile platforms. She oversaw 20x growth of Googles mobile business in just three years, delivering over $1B in annualized revenues.

Ann Mei has more than twenty years of engineering and leadership experience in diverse sectors of the software industry. Prior to Google, she served as the VP of Engineering at There, a high-tech startup building an online virtual world. And, while at both Apple and Macromedia, Ann Mei led engineering for the first release of Final Cut Pro, an award-winning professional video editing software product. She has also held leadership roles at several other leading Silicon Valley companies including Intuit, SGI, and a few startups.

Ann Mei is a member of the 2011 class of Henry Crown Fellows at the Aspen Institute, the GSMA mWomen Working Group, the International Steering Committee of the Mobile program at the Cherie Blair Foundation, and the Global Telecom Womens Network International Steering Committee. She holds a BS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

The potential is real. The dramatic proliferation of mobile phones and networks has set the stage for connected services on mobile platforms. Yet poor infrastructure, high prices for connectivity, low literacy, lack of locally relevant content, usability challenges, and a troubling gender gap in access remain daunting obstacles to practical delivery. Successful products have taken smaller steps and deftly and judiciously used technology not as a panacea, but as one tool among many in a complex and constrained environment.

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