WINTER 2014
Mezuri: Eight Questions for Eric Brewer
By: Jordan Kellerstrass
To provide a deeper sense of the story behind
the development of the Mezuri Platform
(described on page 12), we asked Eric Brewer,
Mezuri’s principal investigator, the following
questions.
Brewer is a professor of computer science at
UC Berkeley, where he leads the Technology
and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions
(TIER) research group. He is also Vice
President of Infrastructure at Google.
Thomas at Portland State has done the most
work with real users (e.g., economists and
NGOs) and real data with his SweetSense
data collection system; his field experience
is particularly valuable.
Colleagues at
University of Michigan are experts in novel
sensors and high-volume, real-time data
collection. Bringing these elements together
is not easy, but I love the team we have.
1. What inspired the idea for Mezuri?
The economic development space has
a checkered history, which has led to
more intensive efforts to “prove” that an
intervention is effective and thus should be
scaled up — these broadly fall under the
phrase “measurement and evaluation,” or
M&E for short. This has led to techniques
like randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that
really aim to meet this bar of proof. However,
such an approach implies a significant data
management problem: How do you collect,
manage, and protect the data you need?
The tools have been rudimentary, typically
just laptops and Excel. The consequences are
that it is easy to lose data, hard to share it,
and even hard to know what exactly was done
to the data since you got it.
Eric Brewer is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley,
where he leads the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging
Regions (TIER) research group. TIER oversees development of the
Mezuri Data Platform (Photo courtesy of Lisa Chipkin)
2. How does your background help guide
Mezuri development?
A key aspect of Mezuri is leveraging Cloud
computing, which is an area of long-time
interest for me (and roughly what I do at
Google). The Cloud brings reliable data
storage with access control, unlimited
processing power, and the ability to share
not only data but also best practices. Finally,
done well, it provides ease of use, as users
only need web access to participate and not
their own servers or even data centers.
4. Why is this possible now? How is this
project part of the story of computer
science?
The two big enablers for us are the Cloud for
scalable data storage and computing, and
the rise of mobile phones, especially smart
phones, which enable high-quality surveys
and data collection pretty much anywhere
in the world. These two together will change
not only the practice of “development”
but are also one of the greatest shifts not
only in computing, but in the history of the
world. The impact of phones has already
been rema ɭ