Principal Investigator Saman Amarasinghe
In many of the world’s communities, there is limited access to information. In places that have both computers and functioning phone lines, the Internet has the potential to provide access to a large amount of information electronically. However, there are economic obstacles to using the Internet in developing countries. Time spent on-line translates to high charges for telephone and ISP access, which can quickly grow unaffordable. Because network bandwidth is limited, users must pay for more time on-line to download a given page. And there is also intermittent connectivity – unreliable network infrastructures can sometimes prevent access to the Internet altogether. TEK – which stands for “Time Equals Knowledge” – is an email-based system designed to deliver Web content to users in low-bandwidth and low-connectivity environments. The system has three components. First, the TEK Server evaluates pages for relevant content, and performs client-specific selection, filtering, and compression of pages to improve the information density of the results. Second, and most importantly, an asynchronous communication protocol allows users to interface with the TEK Server using email instead of a full-fledged TCP connection. Third, the TEK Client provides a user-interface that is integrated with a Web browser, thereby emulating the look-and-feel of the Web even though e-mail is being used as the transport mechanism.
TEK will serve as a foundation for probing a number of new and challenging research questions that are unique to low-connectivity environments. While this research incorporates familiar fields such as information retrieval, data compression, multi-lingual interfaces and low-cost devices, it is distinct from most research conducted in the West in that it is driven to meet the costs and constraints of developing countries. These constraints are often different – if not directly contrary to – the constraints in developed countries: problems that have been “solved” in developed countries often require new and appropriate solutions in the developing world. Our research aims to develop Appropriate Information Technologies that are specifically tailored to the economic and social conditions of the developing world.