From TIER

TIER is a research group at the University of California at Berkeley, investigating the design and deployment of new technologies for emerging regions.

For recent updates on our field work and projects, please read the TIER blog and the TIER photo gallery.

You can also subscribe to our mailing list to receive announcements about our weekly team meetings and updates about our projects and related work.

The aim of the TIER project is to address the challenges in bringing the Information Technology revolution to the masses of the developing regions of the world. Historically, most projects that aim to do this rely on technology that was developed for the affluent world, but these imported technologies fail to address key challenges in cost, deployment, power consumption, and support for semi- and illiterate users.

TIER focuses on developing a hardware/software infrastructure explicitly designed for the physical, political and economic realities of developing areas. It will build on existing research at Berkeley and elsewhere, but also face a number of new technical and organizational challenges. This project addresses these challenges with novel technology, while validating the impact of through real-world deployments. Finally this project also aims to provide set of guidelines and techniques that can be then used by corporations or the government to enable solutions that are currently intractable.

Currently, our key projects are in educational tools, healthcare, wireless (WiLDNet), distributed storage (TierStore) and speech technologies.

This is a multi-disciplinary project that includes both technologists and social scientists and real deployments to ensure that the work seeks real-world solutions. Primary funding comes from the National Science Foundation, with additional support from Intel, HP, Microsoft, UNDP, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, Grameen Bank and the Markle Foundation.