Talking About TIER

A recent article mentioning TIER about Umar’s project in Pakistan..

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21264

Monday, August 18, 2008
Spare Some Bandwidth?
Pakistani scientists have a way to boost download speeds.
By Mason Inman

Internet access is growing steadily in developing nations, but limited infrastructure means that at times connections can still be painfully slow. A major bottleneck for these countries is the need to force a lot of traffic through international links, which typically have relatively low bandwidth.

Now computer scientists in Pakistan are building a system to boost download speeds in the developing world by letting people effectively share their bandwidth. Software chops up popular pages and media files, allowing users to grab them from each other, building a grassroots Internet cache.

In developed countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) create Web caches–machines that copy and store content locally–to boost their customers’ browsing speeds. When a user wants to view a popular website, the information can be pulled from the cache instead of from the computer hosting the website, which may be on the other side of the planet and busy with requests. Similar services are offered by content distribution companies such as Akamai, based in Cambridge, MA. High-traffic sites pay Akamai to host copies of their content in multiple locations, and users are automatically served up a copy of the site from the cache closest to them.

In countries like Pakistan, Internet connections are generally slow and expensive, and few ISPs offer effective caching services, limiting access to information–one reason why the United Nations has made improving Internet connectivity worldwide one of its Millennium Development Goals. None of Pakistan’s small ISPs cache much data, and traffic is often routed through key Internet infrastructure in other nations.

"In Pakistan, almost all the traffic leaves the country," says Umar Saif, a computer scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). That’s the case even when a Pakistani user is browsing websites hosted in his or her own country. "The packets can get routed all the way through New York and then back to Pakistan," Saif says.

So Saif’s team at LUMS is developing DonateBandwidth, a system inspired by the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol that is popular for trading large music, film, and program files. With BitTorrent, people’s computers swap small pieces of a file during download, reducing the strain placed on the original source.

DonateBandwidth works in much the same way but lets people share more than just large files. When users try to access a website or download a file, a DonateBandwidth program running on their machine checks first with the peer-to-peer cache to see if the data is stored there. If so, it starts downloading chunks of the file from peers running the same software, while also getting parts of the file through the usual Internet connection. The software could allow people in countries that have better Internet connections to donate their bandwidth to users in the developing world.

DonateBandwidth also manipulates an ISP’s cache. "Say a person with a dial-up connection wants to download a file," Saif says. "When running DonateBandwidth, their computer starts downloading part of a file, while also sending a request for other DonateBandwidth users who have access through the same ISP, and whose computers have spare bandwidth, to trigger them to start downloading other parts of the same file." The file is then loaded into the ISP’s cache, so it can be downloaded more quickly.

Saif compares the project to distributed computing schemes such as SETI@Home, which uses volunteers’ spare computer power to collaboratively analyze radio signals from space, looking for signs of intelligent life. "DonateBandwidth permits sharing of unused Internet bandwidth, which is much more valuable in the developing world, compared to computing cycles or disk space," he says.

The more people who use DonateBandwidth within the same country, the more websites and files could be cached, freeing up the international link. In the developed world, "typical bandwidth savings due to caching are around 30 to 40 percent," Saif says. The program is not publicly available yet, but Saif’s team is currently testing a proof-of-concept version and will collaborate with Eric Brewer and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, to implement it in Pakistan.

"In Pakistan and a lot of developing countries, they are building a good local network, but the international network is not very good," says computer scientist Saman Amarasinghe of MIT. "Having a system like what [Saif] proposed is very valuable."

"Misconfiguration of caches rings true with our experiences in Kenya and Ghana," adds Tariq Khokar of Aptivate, a nonprofit group in Cambridge, U.K., that works on improving connectivity in developing countries. "I doubt anybody outside of a developing country would have come up with DonateBandwidth."

Aptivate created another system, called Loband, that strips photos and formatting from Web pages to make them load faster for users in developing countries. "Loband helps with bandwidth but not latency," Khokar says, but "having content cached in country means the latency associated with an international hop is eliminated."

Copyright Technology Review 2008.

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I meant to post this a while back (like 3 weeks ago when the announcements first started coming out), but this is interesting and relevant for a lot of us playing around in the Ghana telecommunications arena:

Vodafone in Ghanaian mobile deal
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7487821.stm
Page last updated at 13:41 GMT, Thursday, 3 July 2008 14:41 UK
Mobile phone firm Vodafone is to expand its presence in Africa by buying a controlling stake in Ghana Telecom for £452m ($900m).

I’m not sure what this means. My first question (almost selfishly) was whether Vodafone would continue the program enabling doctors to talk to each other for free on OneTouch lines (courtesy of Brian Levine from NYU and Mr. John Annoh Quarshie from OneTouch). But the larger order questions are ones of management - how much upheaval will Vodafone bring to GT? Will it be more of the same years of mis-management (constant re-organizations, blame shifting, and strategic monopolistic practices aimed towards, well, understandably, maintaining their market control), or will Vodafone use GT’s strategic position wisely and maybe actually stimulate healthier telecommunications growth in Ghana?

Good or bad for Vodacom? Good or bad for Ghana? Well, I personally think it’s a mix. Ghana’s opposition party thinks it’s a bad deal and the parliament blocked approval until the next meeting in October - possibly trying to hold out for Ghana’s presidential elections in November. Their reasons? I don’t know what the real reasons are - maybe Eric O or someone else in Ghana can speak to that - but the article says they want to hold out for more money. I hate hearing that from politicians - but in Ghana who can trust the businessmen to actually strike fair deals? In the long run, though, I think the cash is less important than the change of management (and perhaps the shares), and I don’t know enough about Vodafone to know what tidings this holds for Ghana as a whole. I do think that this is really interesting from the perspective of the multi-national company diving into african mobile market fray. Buying out the entire national monopoly dsl/landline/mobile company seems a bit drastic, especially given GT’s history. But given their progress on DSL broadband provision in the past year, I can’t say this is a bad move. While I was there, they managed to expand to Takoradi, Cape Coast, and Tamale, covering three additional regional capitals within a span of just a few months, and simultaneously wiping out the ISP competition in those markets.

From a mobile communications standpoint, Vodafone’s acquisition of GT might be coming at a good time, closely following the heels of MTN’s recent acquisition of Areeba (formerly known as Spacefon). Jump on the Bandwagon. What the newspaper articles really fail to say, then, is that Vodafone is not just acquiring the mobile division of GT (aka OneTouch, the third largest mobile provider, and sometimes the most reliable, if there is coverage), but Vodafone’s acquisition (if approved by Parliament) would also cover the rest of GT as well. And this is strategic. GT controls the international long distance market, access to the SAT3 submarine fiber link, and most of the DSL broadband market, as well as 90% of the landline market. $900m for a controlling stake in a telecommunications company that serves 22 million people actually would seem pretty cheap, if I didn’t think that the company was in deep need of a management overhaul. Last time I checked, they were months behind on connecting to the Ghana Internet Exchange because they were doing yet-another company re-org, and couldn’t decide who was in charge of it. So I’m undecided on whether this is a fair deal or not for Ghana, but I do think that change might be a good thing!

Anyways.. news of interest, a couple of editorial remarks. We’ll see what happens in October!

So, at the end of the banquet on the first night of ICTD2007, Kentaro (the ictd superman) introduced the two bids for the next ICTD conference. The two candidates? Buenos Aires (aka tourist and salsa heaven) and Carnegie Mellon’s campus on Qatar.

I’m honestly really divided between the two. My vote? That we pick both, choosing one to be ICTD 2010 or 2011, two conferences from now.

One of my main concerns about the content in this year’s conference, is that it seems even more biased towards Indian projects than last year’s, when we had at least one paper from China, as well as keynote speaker Prof Zhiwei Xu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Out of the 18 papers and 20 posters:

• 22 presented results from work in India alone,
• 4 from India and other countries (”S. Asia”, India and S. Africa, India and Central America, Kenya/India/Bolivia),
• 2 from Pakistan,
• 1 from Nepal,
• 1 from Honduras,
• 5 from Africa (7, if you count the combos: Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Botswana, and 3 South Africa) , and
• 3 non-specific (the meta-ICTD panel)
• 0 from China

I think several regions are under-represented. This is not to say that there is a flaw in the review process - I’m sure part of it is just that Microsoft Research India is just producing a lot of high-quality research, and another part is just that there are a lot of ICTD projects in India, so a good bulk of the submissions are about reasearch in India. Indeed it’s a lot easier to set up WiLDNet links in Tamil Nadu than in, let’s say, Ghana. I might suggest, however, that maybe some communities just didn’t get the invitation? Or that they saw that the conference was in Bangalore and thought the invitation wasn’t for them. Or they saw the program committee and At the same time I’m not sure that there’s much more we as a community can do to draw in more perspectives from projects in other countries; there’s some diversity on the program committee, they provide scholarships for participants from developing countries, and we’ve always been (as far as I can tell) an open and inviting group of people. Okay, well, I guess I for one could start writing more papers on my work in Uganda and Ghana. (Which might mean that this is a generational issue, since many of us wet our toes in India.) But I think a healthy next step could be to hold the conference in one of these under-represented areas. And, unfortunately for my decision-making process, both of these fit the bill. At the same time - given that Rahul Tongia is already firmly on the program committee, along with M Bernardine Dias (who I don’t think I’ve met yet), perhaps it makes sense to use this opportunity to engage with the universities in Argentina. But then again, this conference is still in its fledgling years, so I can also see how one would want to go with a well-known quantity and give the less-well-known quantity a year or so to become a well-known quantity. I know a certain School that does the same thing with PhD applicants…

If I were forced to choose, I would vote for Qatar (I don’t think I actually have a vote). It’s closer to Africa, where I’m likely to be at the time of the next conference. And the Argentine bid’s (I’m really sorry I forgot your name) tourist video was a little over-the-top for me; I think it was so long and so flashy that by the time it ended I forgot whatever academic reasons there were for locating the next ICTD in Buenos Aires. Besides, I’m really not all that into salsa.

Cross-posted to: http://ictdchick.com/blog/2007/12/17/ictd20082009-argentina-or-qatar/

But unfortunately not Live! from Bangalore… ICTD2007 (in my opinion) was a smashing success! (With of course very little smashing, except for that errant glass hiding under a chair…). The conference was held at the Ashoka Hotel in Bangalore, India on Saturday and Sunday December 15-16, 2007. You can access the notes I took during the conference on my blog.

The keynote speakers were both incredibly engaging. Anirudh Krishna spoke on his research on how people move in and out of poverty. For me - two main points were:

1. Poverty is escapable: many people escape poverty every year, just as many fall into it. At a high level, this indicates that while working on ways to help people escape poverty is good, our efforts may be moot if we fail to also prevent others from becoming impoverished
2. The capacity to aspire: Krishna notes a glass ceiling for those in villages; although they may try to aspire higher, their condition (the socio-economic-political context) prevents them from aspiring beyond the level of schoolteacher. Perhaps we can work on ways to provide protection against descents into poverty by connecting talent with opportunity.

Interestingly, two papers spoke directly to the topic of aspiration. Renee and Kathi’s paper on gender and shared computing in Chile and India (Akshaya) looked at women’s aspirations; Joyojeet’s paper on his work with parents of schoolchildren in India talked about how computers factored into children’s aspirations as well as parent’s aspirations for their children.

Paul Polak started off the closing keynote with some of Krishna’s slides on the consistent divisions (asset/status-wise) between extreme poverty and poverty, and between those in poverty and those who are not. And then went on to talk about his last 25 years of work talking with and listening to $1/day farmers, trying to understand how they want to move out of poverty. His takeaway: we need to collaborate and co-design with them to find ways to help them make more money, noting that by starting with the problems they give priority to, one opens up the door to addressing their next priorities… Anyways - his talk was packed with interesting stats, observations, an three-step how-to’s, courtesy of the editor of his forthcoming (Feb 2008) book Out of Poverty.

Tap also did an awesome job with the poster session - probably the most interesting and engaging poster session I’ve attended; since each one was also accompanied by a peer-reviewed conference-length paper, all of the posters exhibited real work, real ideas and were well thought-out. The posters in the same room as the sessions, exactly where everyone was during the break, so they had great exposure to a great audience.. And the fast forward session, in which each author gave a 90 second intro to their work, was a brilliant way for all of us to get an overview so we could quickly target the posters we were interested in during the poster session.

Before I close, there’s a couple of presentations I want to highlight as ones that I thought were especially interesting and well-crafted. (Apologies to those who presented in the sessions I missed - I’m sure J Sherwani and Indrani’s presentations were excellent, and I’ve also heard good feedback about Aishwarya Ratan’s paper on Welfare, agency, and ICT4D.)

ICTD 2007 Session 1: Design Notes

Digital Green provides a sort of “Indian Farmer Idol”/YouTube to farmers employing new agricultural technology advocated by the Green Foundation (see paper for details) . I think it’s really interesting to note their results on how various deployment/video strategies affected the farmers’ adoption of practices, with low receptiveness to expert-facilitated video and hole-in-the-wall/tv-broadcast strategies, and 6-7x more adoption with videos including low/medium-skilled mediators working with local farmers. These results underline ideas and observations from Janaki’s paper on the role of trustworthiness in the Parry information kiosk: information access is not sufficent - “whether a community uses the information services offered by information kiosks depends, among other factors, on the perceived quality of the information offered by such services.”

ICTD 2007 Session 2: Extending the Boundaries of ICTD

This was a one-paper session. Janini’s presentation did a great job of explaining the transnational flows of e-waste, and the associated issues. It would definitely be remiss for us not to consider these issues as we pursue our ends of employing ICTs for development, and as markets (some consequent of ICTD movements) draw more and more toxic materials into developing countries.

ICTD 2007 Session 4: Alternatives to Real-time Internet

I’m really impressed by Revi Sterling. Out of all the papers presented, hers truly integrates theory and practice, enabling theory-backed (driven?) engagement in development using novel technologies.

ICTD2007 Session 7: Children and PCs

Of course in this session (as with Session 3 on Telecenters), I’m a little biased. I think I must have listened to Joyojeet’s research talks at least two or three times each now, but I’m still riveted every time. With all of the (often hype-driven) push towards information-kiosk-as-community-centers and computers-in-schools (with Internet or without), I think Joyojeet’s findings on the engagement of the local communities with these projects are critically important, but often not done because they are, well, hard to do.

Rabin’s paper on usage models of classroom computing gets started on some important critical thinking about how one can plan for computers in schools. Although they did pull out some numbers on public spending in other countries, I wonder how these models translate outside of India. I just visited some secondary school computer labs in Jinja, Uganda (urban, private schools, no internet access), and indeed, the multiple students per shared computer model is the norm, with one school putting 10 students at each of their computers. At the same time - multimouse/multipoint is certainly not mainstream - so their representation, while nice, isn’t representative. In Uganda’s secondary schools, computer education is largely about basic “theoretical” (what is RAM, CPU, etc) and practical (create a word/excel/access/powerpoint document, print, move files) computer skills. While they are taught with 10 students to a computer, they are tested with one person per computer (they have to test the students in shifts, since there aren’t enough computers). I think it’s possible that a multimouse approach might be useful for teaching/learning certain aspects, there are limits to where that approach can be employed in teaching computer skills. I think their main arguments still hold up - even the single-user-per-community-computer model is significantly more financially feasible than the single ownership model.

That’s all she wrote.

But hopefully she’ll also write a couple of submissions for the next ICTD conference!

UN Alliance Works to Bring Internet Access to All Africans
By Margaret Besheer
New York
19 September 2007
http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-09-19-voa72.cfm

A new U.N.-sponsored initiative is being launched to bridge the “digital divide” and connect African countries with each other and the rest of the world. VOA’s Margaret Besheer reports from U.N. headquarters in New York, where the world body, governments and the private sector are working to bring Africa’s 900 million inhabitants online.

The African continent is the fastest-growing cellular phone market of any region over the last five years, but has not been able to replicate that success with the Internet. Fewer than four out of every 100 Africans have access to the worldwide web.

Experts say upgrading Internet access, or what they call ICT for Information & Communication Technology, will enhance development and enable Africans to compete more effectively in the global marketplace.

Mohsen Khalil of the World Bank says the “Connect Africa” initiative, which aims to make Internet connectivity widely and cheaply accessible, will create an information revolution in Africa. “When you give access to a human being you unleash the power of human innovation and entrepreneurship. It is really so powerful all they need is access,” he said.

International Telecommunication Union President Hamadoun Touré says the “e” in “electronic” will also stand for “economy,” because improving Africa’s Internet connectivity will increase its wealth. “ICT [Information & Communication Technology] today is a catalyst, is an enabler, is a tool for all sectors of economy: be it education - “e-education,” be it government - “e-government,” be it business - “e-business,” or health - “e-health,” every sector will have the ‘e’ component in it,” he said.

The average monthly cost for broadband service in Africa is three times higher than in Asia. The initiative’s creators say marketplace competition and private sector investment will lower the cost of Internet connectivity. They are also trying to model their strategies in Africa after successful ones in China, India and other countries.

Organized under the U.N.’s Global Alliance for ICT and Development, the “Connect Africa” initiative kicks off next month at a summit in Kigali, Rwanda.

http://uniteforsight.org/conference/2008/abstracts.php

Unite for Sight is a health conference held every April.  It’s an interesting gathering of people from a large number of backgrounds doing international health and development, and although it has a focus on eyecare, it incorporates numerous tracks and presentations on other aspects of International Health as well. Last year, Sonesh did a presentation on Aravind’s WiLD network.

The next conference is April 12-13, 2007, to be held at Yale University.  If you are interested in submitting an abstract, you need to sign up and send in your abstract by July 15th at the url above.

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Well, we just finished our first week at the school! It’s been a really busy week for us as we and the students got acquainted with each other, but it was really exciting for the team as well as the students. Some of the team were already acquainted with the school due to the February field study, but for many of us, this was our first time. Here are some of the highlights from my perspective.

The kids were really excited to see us! When we arrived the kids were waiting for us at their main gate. You can see from the photo above that one of the girls even started climbing over the gate! They were so adorable! As we approached, the students had their hand outreached ready for a shake and a ‘Hello, Uncle”. I have to admit, however, that when I first saw this, the thought of my hand, in all its american hyperhygenic glory, making contact with their’s was less than appetizing. Don’t even get me started on how I felt when I realized they also wanted to plant a nice wet kiss on my hand as well… Anyways, all these worries are now at ease as I grew more comfortable with the kids and settled into their world (that, and I’m now packing hand sanitizer).

One of the jobs I’ve taken up here is to be the group photographer, which is awesome because I get to capture everything that’s going on! And boy do the kids love it! They will do anything for a photograph. Above is a picture of one of our favorite students sweeping away, hoping that it grabs my attention (he obviously knew how to play his cards).

(more…)

Hi everyone, my name is Maksim and I am a former undergraduate member of Matt Kam’s MILLEE project. I was in the group from January to December 2006, and I’ll share in this entry an account of a few of my experiences in the group as well as a few general ideas that I learned through my involvement. Not only is MILLEE moving forward in addressing a very relevant social problem, but it also gives undergraduate students many opportunities to contribute and learn in an ambitious Human-Computer Interaction research group. I hope to highlight this great attention to undergraduate students.

I originally joined the group at the beginning of the Spring 2006 semester by answering a bulletin that called for undergraduate participants in the group. I had begun looking for a research group right before the start of the semester, and decided that the MILLEE group was a great opportunity.

Like many multidisciplinary research projects, MILLEE has an interesting and practical technological side (working with Windows Mobile smartphones). However, what I felt differentiated MILLEE from many other groups is that it has a very strong social aspect to the project as well - designing a framework for English learning among low-income students in India.

As it turned out eventually, the social aspect was the side that I was exposed to more than the technological side. The biggest concept that I immediately realized about performing HCI research in the MILLEE group is that it involves a lot of work and preparation! In fact, the technological knowledge/programming side is critical but makes up less than half of the research process.

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Hi Everyone! Thanks for joining us! Matt Kam and I (Dave Nguyen) are heading to Mysore, India to do some field work with primary school children. This work is to support the MILLEE project which is trying to develop mobile technology to support literacy to children in developing regions. The MILLEE project is a project at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). Our group is composed of grad students from the Technology and Infrastructure of Emerging Regions (TIER) group and the Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD). Filling out the rest of our team of 12, we also have several students from India and the London School of Economics joining us. We’re hoping that this blog provides a good venue for everyone to keep up with the work we’re doing as well as provide us with a nice diary of observations. If anyone has ANY comments or questions on the work we’re doing and the observations we have made, we would love to hear from you!

MILLEE Team.

ps. This posting+more originally posted at http://bidtierindia.blogspot.com

For those of you interested in what TIER is up to this summer, you can check out some of our member’s individual blogs.

Mine is: http://www.ictdchick.com/blog

MILLEE is: http://bidtierindia.blogspot.com/

I’m sure there’s a few more - anyone that has one should post a comment on this blog and/or send out a line over the mailing list!

Melissa