Project Abstract

While the Internet has revolutionized information exchange for many of us, in developing regions it remains an economic, technological, and sociological challenge to access and publish information online. Our research aims to extend the capabilities of the Internet within the unique constraints and opportunities of the developing world.

The first part of my talk will describe the TEK system, which provides a full Internet experience using only an email account. In many rural areas, email is the only viable technology and TEK (which stands for "Time Equals Knowledge") provides the first portal to the Internet.

Using TEK, users interact with a normal Web browser; our system automatically exchanges emails with a server at MIT to retrieve the information needed. We maintain server-side state about each client's page cache, enabling a new class of compression algorithms that represent text and images in terms of previously downloaded content.

For several years, we have worked with local organizations in India, the Solomon Islands, and elsewhere to deploy TEK to rural villages. While TEK improves the delivery of content, we are also researching new infrastructures to foster grassroots content creation. I will describe our current directions in this area, including an Audio Wiki that is accessible from a phone and contains purely spoken content, as well as a lightweight medical data collection system that we are deploying in a tuberculosis treatment program in rural India.

Speaker Bio

Bill Thies is a final-year graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In addition to information and communication technologies for development, his research focuses on programming languages and compilers. He has developed the StreamIt language for high-performance streaming applications, as well as BioStream, a language for biological lab-on-a-chip devices. Bill received a B.S. in computer science, a B.S. in mathematics, and a M.Eng in computer science, all from MIT.