Scholars presenting at this conference are part of a fast growing new field of research on the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) to addressing the challenges of developing economies. There has been an explosion of public, private, and non-profit ICTD projects in the past decade; however, systematic and scientifically sound research is just beginning to emerge to address a range of questions, such as:
Are novel technologies needed to meet development needs — or can we adapt off-the-shelf technologies to the needs of populations in developing economy contexts, where user skills are diverse, users speak local languages, literacy is low, there is limited access to power and bandwidth, institutions are very different, and so forth?
What groups and institutions are involved in the design and development of these projects? Do different strategies for inclusion result in differing outcomes?
What are the appropriate methodologies and metrics for evaluating the impact of projects? What determines the success and sustainability (or failure) of projects?
Can we transfer lessons from one part of the world to the others, for example in provision of network infrastructure, health care, education, and so forth?
The conference organizers were committed to maintaining a scientifically rigorous and multi-disciplinary review process. We solicited papers reporting high-quality original research. Over 140 full papers were submitted, 16 papers were accepted through a double-blind review process for presentation at the conference, and 22 were accepted for presentation as posters. These papers and posters were written by researchers from fields including anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial, design, and schools of information.
The first conference will be held on May 25th and 26th 2006 at the School of Information at the Univrsity of California, Berkeley. We expect this to be the first of a series of conferences to occur every one or two years, and moving from country to country.
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Brij Kothari (Cornell) and his team have innovated, researched, and nationalized the use of "Same Language Subtitling" (SLS) on Bollywood film songs on TV, for mass literacy in India. He laid the foundation for the SLS project as an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) in its Centre for Educational Innovation, where he continues to teach as an Adjunct Professor.
Brij is an Ashoka Fellow and the President of PlanetRead, a non-profit involved in scaling SLS efforts in India and other countries with support from the Google Foundation. He is also the CEO of BookBox, Inc, a for-profit social venture producing children's animated stories in more than 20 languages. He co-founded PlanetRead.org and BookBox.com as a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford.
The SLS project has received awards from the Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose), Development Marketplace (World Bank, Washington D.C.), the Institute for Social Inventions (London), and Manthan (New Delhi).
Brij grew up in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry and went on to get a Masters in Physics at IIT Kanpur, Masters in Development Communication and Ph.D. in Education at Cornell University. His doctoral research was on the conservation of local knowledge in Andean Ecuador.
Prof. Ananya Roy is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Division of International & Area Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She also serves as Faculty Director of the Berkeley Programs for Study Abroad. Roy’s home department is the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley where she teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and international development. She currently serves as chair of the undergraduate Urban Studies major. In 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty.
Roy holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004). Her current research project is entitled Povertyscape: The New Global Order of Aid, Debt, and Development (Routledge, forthcoming 2007). The project has received several prestigious awards including the Hellman Faculty Award and the Prytanean Faculty Award, the latter being a research and leadership award given to one junior woman faculty member on the UC Berkeley campus each year. Most recently, the project received a research grant from the National Science Foundation.
Prof. Zhiwei Xu obtained his Ph.D. degree from University of Southern California in 1987. He is currently a professor and deputy director of Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research areas include grid computing, operating systems, and high-performance computer architecture. He serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Computers, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and Journal of Grid Computing.
Conference organizers
