Recipient Institution:
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

KReSIT, IIT Campus, Powai,
Mumbai-400 076
India

Tel/Fax: 91-22-2576-7900

Project Leader:
Prof. Krithi Ramamritham
krithi@iitb.ac.in

URL:
http://www.iitb.ac.in/

Amount and Duration: US$ 25,579 / 16 months

Commencement Date:
1 October 2003

Abstract of Project
An important issue in disseminating information to users in the developing world is that they operate in a resource constrained environment. Power outages, equipment failure, low bandwidth and unreliable network connections are some of the reasons that it is difficult to maintain Quality of Service over these networks. For networks to be robust:

• Weakest communication link should not be the determinant in the access to information.
• Total dependency of users on network infrastructure must be reduced (as much as possible)

We plan to address these issues by developing the necessary solution and deploying them in rural parts of Maharashtra and then publishing our solutions for the benefit of other organizations and ICT interventions.

Development Problem to be addressed
Disseminating information to users in a resource constrained environment typical of users in rural areas in the developing world.

Technologies to be used and developed
Wireless technologies, Multi-lingual databases, Multi-lingual interfaces, Meaning based searches, Interfaces for the illiterate, Caching, transcoding and customizing internet content.

Expected research results
Techniques for enabling and enhancing the services provided to clients in resource poor environments- providing an economy in the requirements of computing resources, space and memory with savings of time and money for the rural user. For example, we will develop algorithms and tools to prefetch, from one of many sources on the internet, a localized subset of information tailored to meet the needs of users in a given place.