Dritte

Kenneth Keniston's Keynote

2008-07-17T11:57:40Z

Kenneth Keniston is scheduled to give the keynote address at NSDR this year. The keynote will focus on key issues like lessons learnt from previous efforts e.g., in India, understanding the current ICT4D boom, and future directions for ICT professionals and researchers.

Kenneth Keniston is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Human Development at MIT and Director of the MIT India Program. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. He received his D. Phil. from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and MIT. He is the author of nine books including IT Experience in India: Bridging the Digital Divide and The State, IT, and Development.

More information on the keynote here. More information on the NSDR 2008 program here.

NSDR 2008

2008-01-15T12:50:08Z

After organizing the first ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR 2007) (with SIGCOMM 2007), we are organizing NSDR again this year. NSDR 2008 will be held with SIGCOMM 2008. You can have a look at last year's papers and presentations.

ChOpaal: SMS-based Group Communication

2007-12-28T12:37:22Z

Check out ChOpaal - an SMS-based communication system that brings together people with similar interests (e.g. football, protest, IEEE). ChOpaal allows you to make 'tags' about stuff (e.g. earthquake) and then other people can join these tags to get updates. The system is currently functional only with cellular providers in Pakistan.

New Scientist Features Poor Man's Broadband

2007-11-16T15:29:33Z

This week's issue of New Scientist has published an article on our research on Poor Man's Broadband. This project has resulted in a modified version of a P2P system (BitTorrent) designed to bypass the "bottleneck of the Internet" in the developing-world. The system employs direct point-to-point POTS connections to exchange data at the maximum speed afforded by a modem. This project was funded by Microsoft Research's Digital Inclusion Grant.

Google's Android

2007-11-13T14:55:57Z

Waiting for the "GPhone"? Well keep waiting because it will never come out, atleast not in the form that you thought it would. Say hello to Android instead - an open, and free mobile platform. There is a USD 10 million incentive (or bribe) for developers to start hacking on Android, called the Android Developer Competition (ADC). Applications in service of global economic development are included in ADC. For more information about Android, check out the demo below:

OLPC Review by NY Times

2007-10-18T22:51:14Z

NY Times reviews the features of the $100 laptop, i must admit that some of the features are pretty cool.

Meraki: Internet for the next billion

2007-02-12T05:14:22Z

Meraki is coming ... well almost.

Founded by Ph.D. candidates from MIT (Sanjit Biswas and others), Meraki Networks is hoping to provide consumer wireless mesh Internet network designed to “unwire the world,” and bring Internet access to the next billion. Meraki recently closed a $5 million funding with Sequoia Capital and Google is also financing them.

Read their SIGCOMM ExOR paper to get an idea of the underlying technologies behind Meraki products. This paper actually got the best paper award at SIGCOMM'05.

Hari Balakrishnan and Robert Morris are on the technical advisory board of Meraki, and what I personally found amusing was this line in Robert Morris's bio in Meraki's team profile:

"In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public."

For those who don't know that line actually refers to the Morris Worm. Quite an interesting way to refer to the Morris Worm!

Since Meraki wants to enable Internet access for the next billion by solving the "last mile" problem then their products could make a lot of sense in the urban population of the developing countries where last mile is the main problem?

Muhammad Yunus wins Nobel Peace Prize

2006-10-13T20:55:01Z

Muhammad Yunus the founder of Microcredit concept and Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize 2006. Yunus has been a supporter for technology research for developing countries and now with the Nobel Peace Prize in his hand he could help bring the attention of world leaders towards ICT for developing countries.

Read the CNN news article here.

Linux Mobile Phone (Qtopia Greenphone)

2006-08-21T19:36:53Z

The power of Open Software Development comes to the Mobile Phones market with Trolltech announcing the first Linux-based mobile development device that would open the doors to "unlimited" software innovation. Although it seems that the target market for this effort is not developing countries but I believe that this could have an enormous impact on technologies for developing regions. While the fate of the MIT $100 laptop is yet to be decided, some critics (including myself) believe that "somehow" using mobile phones as the primary computing device in third world regions might be the way to go. The Greenphone effort by Trolltech is an encouraging step towards this direction.

Completel story here.

Development Gateway Award

2006-07-28T05:17:03Z

The Development Gateway Foundation is calling for nominations from around the globe for the third annual Development Gateway Award. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the lives of people in developing countries.

More details here.

CFP: AI in ICT for Development

2006-07-11T04:37:13Z

The call for papers for the "AI in ICT for Development – Workshop" is up. The workshop would be held with Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Important Dates
Abstract:	September 1, 2006
Submission:	September 25, 2006
Notification:	October 23, 2006
Camera-ready:	November 15, 2006
Workshop:	January 6-8 (exact date TBD), 2007

WiMAX rollout in Pakistan

2006-06-09T21:37:34Z

Developing countries like Pakistan have slow-Internet speed (mostly dialup connections) and less number of users covered (as a percent of the overall population). Can WiMAX change all that? I have been thinking about providing low-cost high-speed Internet connections to Pakistani users since the WiFi days and we launched an effort similar to Digital Gangetic Plains (low-cost rural connectivity for rural india). Read their HotNets 2003 paper for an overview. Such long-distance WiFi technologies could enable applications like rural healthcare e.g. Aravind Eye Hospital. When WiMAX plans were released (atleast to me) it seemed like WiMAX would simply override all these previous efforts of 802.11 mesh-networking or long-distance WiFi and it could be an ideal last-mile solution specially in third world countries where telephony connectivity is less in numbers and of low-quality. Deploying a WiMAX network in Pakistan seemed like an idea that even venture capitalists could be interested in. Recently, Motorola announced that "Pakistan to roll out the largest mobile WiMAX network yet". So some big fish jumped in with the WiMAX roll out eventually!
Read the complete story from ZDNet here.

Next Generation Sensor Hardware

2006-06-07T16:27:52Z

2006 brings new technology jumps in hardware for sensor network nodes. Sun released their SUN SPOT system (image on the left). It uses a 32-bit processor and IEEE 802.15.4 compliant radio. See their June 2005 white paper for details.
Intel Mote 2 is also a 32-bit sensor platform using the PXA271 INTEL XScale Processor and 802.15.4 radio.

Wireless Networking in the Developing World

2006-06-07T16:12:40Z

"Wireless Networking in the Developing World", a free book released under a Creative Commons license. They also have a Wiki for case studies, useful-sites, and translations.

The Four Digital Divides

2006-04-25T20:34:29Z

Some interesting bed-time readings (mainly by Kenneth Keniston):