Do you see the CITE lab at MIT as connected with jobenomics and integral purpose of green tv. I too am bothered by students experimenting with hundreds of separated solar projects not how the whole needs to scale
ardoso moved to the U.N. headquarters in Rome, where he was privy to the high-level funding decisions that eventually trickle down to the local level. The experience, along with a chance meeting with the late MIT professor Alice Amsden, who taught a class he was taking, motivated Cardoso to apply to a PhD program at MIT.
“In theory you have all these projects, all these amazing things that are supposed to happen, but they don't, the execution doesn't work out,” says Cardoso. “And I was like, I have to understand that pattern.”
Combining theory and practice
At MIT, Cardoso has embraced the opportunity to combine theory and practice, while also working to understand the growing role of technology in communities worldwide. Cardoso, who works with Bish Sanyal, the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning, has mainly been involved in a project called the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation, or CITE.
“The idea is one simple technology can have this huge impact on someone's well-being,” explains Cardoso. “But today there are a lot of technologies out there such as solar lanterns or water filters, and there's no way to systematically evaluate what works and what doesn't work on the ground.”
With CITE, Cardoso and the project’s other team members are working to develop an objective methodology to assess the usefulness of various technologies. To assess a product, CITE focuses on three main categories: suitability (does the technology work properly?), scalability (can the technology actually reach the consumers?), and sustainability (will the technology create a long-lasting impact, and will the business model supporting it survive long-term?). For the past five years, Cardoso and the rest of the CITE team have been organizing pilot studies all over the world, from solar lanterns in Uganda to water filters in India, and now they are in the process of compiling their results and developing the best methodology.