|
| Search the 2009 archive |
Choose a year |
|
|
|
June |
TechBridgeWorld Founder and Director M. Bernardine Dias co-authored
"How Computer Science Serves the Developing World" with
Eric Brewer, a Computer Science professor at
UC Berkeley. The paper is featured in the June 2009, Vol. 52,
No. 6 issue of Communications of the ACM, a leading print and
online publication for computing and information technology fields. For an abstract of the paper,
click here.
The iSTEP 2009 team is now halfway into the internship and busy working on all three projects!
Follow the iSTEP team's progress via their blog,
Twitter, and
Facebook sites.
For more information on the team and their projects, please visit the
iSTEP 2009 website.
How does Technology have a Global Heart? Find out by reading the stories in the
TechBridgeWorld blog, which is now online!
Read what people have to say who have experienced firsthand how technology can positively impact
developing communities around the globe.
TechBridgeWorld Founder and Director M. Bernardine Dias and Project Manager
Sarah Belousov traveled to California May 12-14 to attend the
National Council on Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)
Meeting at Google in Mountainview. Bernardine gave a presentation about TechBridgeWorld to
approximately 200 attendees and highlighted the Braille Tutor
as an example project. Bernardine and Sarah also enjoyed meeting with alumni from the San Francisco
area during the trip. If you'd like to meet with members of the TechBridgeWorld team who may be
traveling to your town in the next year, e-mail info@techbridgeworld.org.
Amal El-Ghazaly, Pengfei Li, Saurabh Sanghvi, and
Wennie Tabib, presented their research with TechBridgeWorld on May 6, 2009, at the
14th annual Meeting of the Minds at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Congratulations to Saurabh
who won the IBM Innovation for Good award and a Lockheed Martin ECE award
for his work on the E-Village project.
We thank all of the students for their contributions to TechBridgeWorld!
|
May |
TechBridgeWorld is excited that the iSTEP2009 team is off to a great start! You can follow
the team's progress on their blog,
Facebook
and Twitter
sites. Five of the team members are in Dar es Salaam, two in Pittsburgh, and one in Doha.
We are grateful to Eric Beda and the many others who helped the iSTEP2009 team!
Thank you to Ameer Abdulsalam, Noura El-Moughny, Imran Fanaswala,
and Wael Ghazzawi who ran the Braille Tutor demo at the ICTD2009 Conference
hosted at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar from April 17 - 19, 2009. Our team
demonstrated the Braille Tutor's multi-language capabilities and educational games. The demo was a great success!
TechBridgeWorld student representative Ayorkor Mills-Tettey's paper was one of 19 paper submissions selected for oral presentation at the ICTD2009 Conference held April 17-19 at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Her paper, Improving Child Literacy in Africa: Experiments with an Automated Reading Tutor, also received an Honorable Mention Student Paper Award, and is associated with TechBridgeWorld's Project Kané. Congratulations, Ayorkor!
Congratulations to Jahanzeb Sherwani who successfully
defended his thesis, Speech Interfaces for Information Access by Low Literate Users,
on Friday, May 1st! Advised by faculty member Roni Rosenfeld and his thesis committee,
Jahanzeb’s thesis investigated the use of spoken language interfaces by low literate users in the developing
world, specifically health information access by community health workers in Pakistan. For more information
about this project, please visit the HealthLine website.
Jahanzeb is also an advisor for the iSTEP students,
particularly with the Mobile Phone Application for Social Workers project.
|
April |
Thank you to everyone who made the ICTD2009 Conference a great
success! Over 300 guests from around the world came to
Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar to participate in ICTD2009's oral and
poster presentations, workshops, demos, and panels. An additional 200 guests came
to attend keynote speakers Bill Gates and Carlos Braga
's speeches, which were also simulcasted in the university
classrooms. The speeches were also webcasted on the
ICTD2009 Website. Information about the outcomes of the event will
be posted soon on the conference website.
|
March |
Beatrice Dias, a doctoral candidate in Engineering and Public Policy,
and Saurabh Sanghvi, a junior in Electrical and Computer Engineering,
are currently leading efforts on TechBridgeWorld's development of our
Education e-Village
online community, sponsored by Yahoo! Research.
Both Saurabh and Beatrice have been involved in past TechBridgeWorld efforts, and
we are excited to have them on this E-Village team!
Be sure to check out the TechBridgeWorld Overview video on
Carnegie Mellon's YouTube channel! The video, which
outlines major TechBridgeWorld projects and shows interviews
with TechBridgeWorld faculty, staff, and students, is under
the "Favorites" section of the website, and has already
received over 300 views.
TechBridgeWorld is excited to announce the eight students who have been selected as
iSTEP Summer 2009 interns:
Rotimi Abimbola, Hatem Alismail, Emily Clise, Beatrice Dias, Bradley Hall,
Shakir Hussain, Daniel Nuffer, and Anthony Velázquez.
This summer, these students will work with our partner, the
University Computing Centre Ltd at the University
of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. They will also participate in a mini course (15-302 A4)
in the second half of the semester to learn practical skills necessary to conduct
ICTD-related field research. Congratulations!
Welcome to Lavanya Shaji, a graduate student at
Heinz College,
TechBridgeWorld's new marketing intern. Lavanya will assist us in
enhancing our overall marketing strategy. She will be advised by
TechBridgeWorld Advisory Board Member Ed Barr.
Welcome, Lavanya, and thank you, Ed!
|
February |
At the E-Week: National Engineers Week
Technology Showcase on February 16, TechBridgeWorld won the Impact Award for our showcase on
Educational Technology Projects in Developing Communities, featuring the Braille Tutor
and Project Kané. TechBridgeworld staff Ermine Teves
and TechBridgeWorld students Saurabh Sanghvi and Ayorkor Mills-Tettey attended.
TechBridgeWorld staff Freddie Dias and Ermine Teves presented the
Braille Tutor project to the
National Federation of the Blind (NFB) at the NFB
headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland on February 7. The NFB's Research and Development Committee was
impressed and enthusiastic, and TechBridgeWorld thanks the NFB for this opportunity.
This summer, a team of Carnegie Mellon students will participate in the inaugural year of our iSTEP program, TechBridgeWorld's new internship
opportunity. This program is possible through a collaboration with the
Division of Student Affairs at Carnegie Mellon Qatar and the department of
Engineering and Public Policy. The students will work with our partner in Tanzania, the
University Computing Centre (UCC). The UCC focuses on information and communication
technology services for the University of Dar es Salaam, throughout
Tanzania, and elsewhere in the world.
|
January |
Registration is now open for the 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2009) which will take place April 17-19 at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar! Please visit the conference website to register and learn more about this exciting event!
Wennie Tabib, Amal El-Ghazaly, and Peng Li worked with TechBridgeWorld and IFYRE this year on research projects in assistive education technology for the deaf and visually impaired. Peng and Amal enhanced our braille tutor to help beginners learn to write Chinese, Arabic, and French braille. Wennie is working on educational tools for the deaf.
Carlos A. Primo Braga will deliver a keynote address, in addition to Bill Gates, at the ICTD 2009 conference, hosted by TechBridgeWorld at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar April 17-19. Dr. Braga is the Director of Economic Policy and Debt in the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network (PREM) at The World Bank.
We are excited to announce our new promotional video featuring an overview of TechBridgeWorld and highlighting some of our projects. Special thanks to Matt Richards for producing this video and to all who were involved in the making of the video. Watch our video on our website or rate and comment on it on YouTube!
TechBridgeWorld is featured in an article by former Carnegie Mellon student Shashank Nigam in A Developed World's newsletter this month. The article expounds on our mission, exemplifies our impact, shares what keeps us motivated, and also touches on Founder and Director M. Bernardine Dias’ personal journey, which inspired the development of TechBridgeWorld. Shashank took TechBridgeWorld’s Technology and Global Development course in Fall 2006. His participation in the course encouraged him to explore social entrepreneurship seriously, which eventually led to the creation of A Developed World, for which Shashank is a co-founder. A Developed World is an action-oriented social publication that uncovers the stories behind the work of social entrepreneurs and visionary leaders who are changing lives around the world.
|
|
|
