Krithi Ramamritham IIT Bombay

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Krithi Ramamritham IIT
Bombay
ICT for empowering Emerging Regions
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The Big Question
How do we give the rural population the same
access to Information that you and I take for
granted?
"How to face the challenges in serving
under-served segments of the population
through science technology based solutions
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Knowledge Revolution

• Limited to less than 15 population of the world.
• Most research and products are for people in
• highly developed countries.
• Touches less than 2 of population
• in developing countries.

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ICT for Socio-Economic Development-- has come of
age

• Research in Indian academia/industry labs
• IITs - Madras, KGP, Kanpur,.
• IIITs Hyderabad, Bangalore,
• MSRI, Intel, Nokia, Motorola, TCS,.
• Publication avenues
• ICTD, WWW DR track, CHI, (VLDB),
• journals
• Lots of challenging issues.

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Village kiosk services
Internet service provider Cable TV provider Basic
telephony (VoIP) E-governance Land records Price
info (mandi bhav) Digital photography
Astrology (jyotish kendra)
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
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Internet a repository of knowledge?

• Perhaps, but divides exist
• The Connectivity Divide
• No connectivity
• Low bandwidth connectivity
• Intermittent connectivity

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Communication Technologies

• DialUP
• VSATs
• Wired
• Wireless 802.11
• Cable Modem
• DSL
• Cell Phones
• WiMaX

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corDECT

• corDect is a wireless access system developed by
  IIT,Madras , Midas Communication Technologies,
  and Analog Communications , USA.
• It provides voice telephony services and 35/70
  kbps internet services with a wireless interface
  that supports a 10km line of sight connectivity.

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DakNet

• ad hoc network that uses wireless technology and
  existing communications and transportation
  infrastructure to distribute digital
  connectivity.

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Internet a repository of knowledge?

• Perhaps, but divides exist
• The Connectivity Divide
• No connectivity
• Low bandwidth connectivity
• Intermittent connectivity
• The Content Divide
• No relevant content
• Not accessible/useful
• to the semi/illiterate population

Language divide Interface divide Usability
divide
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Meaning-based Search
Indic Text Input
Tangible Interfaces
Digital Library
Iconic interfaces
Community fora
Multi lingual Information Storage and Retrieval
Interfaces for all
Water quality sensors
Polysensors
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Caching
Ethnographic Studies
Prefetching
Synchronization
e-Pedagogy
Multimedia Content
Light Databases
Computer Based Training
Mobile Devices
Access in Resource Constrained Environment
Education
Training
Evaluation
Infrastructure
Services
Capacity Building
Partnerships
Field Deployments
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How does Web Content come into being?

• Individuals / institutions / governments
• place content on the Web
• Web pages
• Blogs
• Collaborative content creation
• Wiki
• Discussion (QA) fora

• Relevant?
• Topical?
• Localized?
• Personalized?

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AQUA Ecosystem
Initially, Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Baramati (an
agri-extension center)
Initially, kiosks operated by Vigyan Ashram,
Pabal village
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Village kiosk services
Field Observations and Studies are fed back
into AQUA research development
AQUA --gt aAQUA
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Images from aAQUA
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Users of aAQUA

• questions from half the districts in India
• questions on farming, animal husbandry,
  employment (BPO), vocational education,

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Challenges

• How can we scale, if each question needs to be
  answered by an expert?
• How can we make aAQUA usable for naïve users?
• How can we ensure availability in spite of
  resource constraints (e.g., connectivity
  problems)?

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How to improve

• Scalability
• After several seasons, questions repeat
• gt archive previous QA
• gt search archive for answer
• Data integration consolidation
• Multilingual semantics-driven search
• insurers cheating farmers vs.
• farmers cheating insurers
• Usability
• Availability

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Consolidating Content e-Library
Photos of crop pests and diseases lead to
solutions -- without going to experts
collection of edited aAQUA QA in English, Hindi
and Marathi
recommendations from Agri-Universities and KVKs
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Multi Lingual Search over archive
search
Query in Hindi
English Document
Marathi Document
English Document
Result in Hindi
E-library
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
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How to improve

• Scalability
• Exploit repetition of questions
• gt consolidate, archive previous QA
• gt Support Multilingual semantics-based
  search of archive
• Usability
• Better interfaces, better I/O devices
• gt iconic, easy to visualize, easy to use
• Availability

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Enhancing Usability

• Keyboard easy input in Devanagari
• Use of local language
• Organizing content by category and keywords
• Multimedia support, image zoom

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Bhav Puchiye Ask for the price
Most such interfaces are text-based
Interface for Bhav Puchiye
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Bhav Puchiye
DEMO
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User Interest needs to be sustained

• If a farmer comes to a kiosk to ask a question
  and is told
• network is down, come back later
• HE WILL NEVER COME BACK

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How to improve

• Scalability
• Usability
• Availability
• Exploit the read-mostly situation
• Exploit the delay-tolerance aspect of QAs
• gt Make off-line access the default
• Exploit spread of Cell phones

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Dealing with connectivity constraints

• Lighter pages delivered
• Mirror sites that synchronize
• Web Caching and query caching
• Prefetching
• through prediction of future needs and update
  times

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Improving Availability Offline Access

• Standalone application employing
• store-and-forward protocols
• Offline Search and Posting, Authentication.
• Complete aAQUA can be navigated and searched in
  disconnected mode.
• Offline post also possible.
• Fast searching and browsing experience
• Delta of updates transferred between client and
  server
• Heterogeneous database synchronization

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Offline aAQUA
"Best Poster" at WWW 2007 International
Conference on the World Wide Web, Banff,
Canada.
Query optimization for handhelds with varying
memory sizes
aAQUA on internet
Indexing engine
Store threads
Build index
Post messages and fetch new or updated threads
Client Application
Read threads
Search
Light Web Server (lighttpd)
Read Write
Update database for new threads
Browser
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Poll on aAQUA -- on use of mobile phones
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SMS Question Answer
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Popular SMS based apps

• Weather (push or pull)
• Sports/Entertainment services
• Transportation services
• News
• Innovative personal services
• e.g., Market Price information
• for agricultural goods
• Personal services e.g., Using SMS to inform
  customers in a quasi-real time when the money is
  transferred to their families, booking movie
  tickets etc.
• GIS based content delivery services
• Weather / temperature sensing capabilities
• (some high-end phones do have temp sensors)

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aAQUA
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Enabling technologies

1. Internet crawling, searching, browsing, indexing
   of multilingual data on the Internet.
2. Data exploration on Heterogenous Data Sources.
3. Improving the performance of information
   extraction/caching/dissemination algorithms for
   resource constrained environments.
4. Support for building Databases on handhelds
   (e.g., Simputer, a low cost hand held developed
   in India).

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Status and Plans

• Questions from half the districts of India
• KVK Baramati primary expert group
• Scale-up
• ICAR via NAIP
• Agri Universities
• Pant Nagar
• Dharwad
• KVKs
• Maharashtra ArgiNet
• Spin-off
• Agrocom operating the
• Akashdoot weather station network

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Preventive Agri-MedicineClimate sensors for
crop disease forecasts
wind speed wind direction air temperature relative
humidity solar radiation evaporation rate leaf
wetness
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Summary

• aAQUA takes Agri-extension services to people
  wherever they are
• New ways of providing expert help to redress
• farmer problems in a timely fashion
• Users formulate questions in a natural manner
• Internet Mobile phones prices, aAQUA posts
  feeds push pull
• Incorporating innovations from research
• Query processing and caching
• Seamless offline access
• Cross-lingual archive and retrieval
• Human-computer Interactions
• Heterogeneous Data Integration
• semantics driven multilingual search

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ICT for Socio-Economic Development-- has come of
age

• Research in Indian academia/industry labs
• IITs - Madras, KGP, Kanpur,.
• IIITs Hyderabad, Bangalore,
• MSRI, Intel, Nokia, Motorola, TCS,.
• Publication avenues
• ICTD, WWW DR track, CHI, (VLDB),
• journals
• Lots of challenging issues.