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