educational initiatives by the techBridge World group at Cmu explore the efficacy of technology tools like an automated english reading tutor. a more recent partnership with researchers from ashesi university College in Ghana resulted in the country’s first undergraduate robotics course.

PhotograPhs courtesy of techbriDge WorLD at carnegie meLLon uniVersity

and laptop computers in their traditional forms; and from mobile phones, PDAs, and wireless networks to long-established technologies such as radio and television. The software components also span a wide range, from artificial intelligence and new algorithms, interfaces, and applications to the most prosaic programmed commodities.

Although the goals of international-development efforts vary, depending on the nature of each endeavor, the overarching goal of all such projects is the alleviation of the suffering caused by poverty and improvement of quality of life for the world’s poor. The United Nations’ eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) infused new energy into the world’s development efforts and helped to focus them on concrete objectives—eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, improving maternal health, prevailing in the battle against HIV/AIDS and malaria, reducing child

mortality, and achieving universal primary education, environmental sustainability, and a global partnership for development—to be met by the year 2015. Other development goals, not emphasized in the MDGs, include access to adequate shelter, information, avenues for income generation, and financial credit. The ongoing rural-to-urban shift of so much of the world’s population has introduced a new set of problems as well, including increased vulnerability to disasters and the corresponding challenges for effective disaster responses. These are among the many international-development challenges that ICTD researchers and practitioners hope to address. They expect to reinvent the form, function, and applications of ICTs in new and creative ways so that such challenges may best be met.

From a CS point of view, ICTD can be seen as the next wave in ubiquitous

computing. Historically, computers started as huge machines that filled rooms and were only relevant and accessible to a specialized minority. The next big wave was the home PC, which is now relevant and accessible to over one billion people worldwide. ICTD is perhaps the next revolution in computing—transforming the computer and the applications of computing so that this technology can finally become relevant and accessible to the other five billion people of the world.

Given its position at the intersection of technology and development, ICTD brings together a wide variety of actors in many different roles. Among the newest are computer scientists, and their role is potentially a big one, both for their beneficiaries and themselves. It can change the image of the computer science discipline, the nature of the PC, and the future of the field.

A crucial requirement for success