Extending the Power of the Internet to the Rural Developing World

While the Internet has revolutionized information delivery 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 build new infrastructures that offer the capabilities
of the Internet within the unique constraints and opportunities of the
developing world.

My talk will focus on 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 runs as a proxy,
automatically exchanging 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 Bihar.