The Christensen Fund (http://www.christensenfund.org/) has awarded Story Bases a major two-year grant under their global bio-cultural diversity initiative. This enables the company to start on plans for working with communities in Mali and Peru. Through their sponsorship it is now through the most difficult stage - of launching a new organisation.

They are building a team to grow the incubation activity around Stanford University under newly-appointed coordinator in California, Prasad Utturkar (softwareskills@gmail.com), but seeking further volunteer assistance especially in software - do contact us if you know anyone interested in helping. Read the rest of this entry »

Date: 3/13/2007

Melanie Edwards
Melanie Edwards has worked for 15 years in international business and development. Previous to her experience with global digital divide initiatives, she worked in management for J.P. Morgan and International Data Group (IDG). She launched the Global Technology Corps, a “digital Peace Corps” now operating within the U.S. Department of State. Melanie then co-created the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS). MobileMedia evolved out of her work at Stanford as a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow. Currently, she is a lecturer on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University. Melanie received her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and M.A. from The Fletcher School of International Relations, Tufts University.

Brij Kothari
Dr. Brij Kothari (Cornell University) 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 in 1996, as an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) in its Centre for Educational Innovation.

Brij co-founded PlanetRead.org and BookBox.com as a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University (2003-04) and currently serves as the President and CEO, respectively. PlanetRead is a non-profit involved in scaling up SLS efforts in India and Africa with support from the Google Foundation and World Bank. BookBox, Inc, a for-profit social venture producing children’s animated stories in more than 25 languages.

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.

Trailer for Marvin Hall’s Project Now Available as a Podcast
Marvin Hall’s Halls of Learning Podcast is now available in the Apple iTunes Store. It can be found here.

NUST Institute of IT (NIIT) along with Stanford University is currently collaborating on Reuters Digital Vision Program (DVP).

One of the major underway DVP projects is Jaroka: Tele-healthcare proposed by Atif Mumtaz (06, 07). Jaroka is a web-based tele-health care portal that enables clinicians operating in disaster affected communities to get rapid diagnosis, expert advice, and opinions from specialists around the world. NIIT has established a dedicated team comprising of its faculty members and young students to play its role in this project. This project is succeeding under the supervision of Dr. Arshad Ali (Director General NIIT). Read the rest of this entry »

Date: 3/8/2007 and 3/9/2007

Speaker bio:
Neil Jacobstein is Chairman and CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, a 25-year-old software company. Jacobstein has been a technical consultant on software research and development projects for: NSF, DARPA, NASA, NIH, EPA, DOE, NRO, the U.S. Army and Air Force, NIST, GM, Ford, P&G, Boeing, Applied Materials, and many others. Jacobstein co-chaired the American Association for Artificial Intelligence’s 16th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence conference in 2004, and chaired the 17th IAAI Conference in 2005. He gave an invited talk at the 2006 IAAI conference on: “Electrifying Knowledge Work: 362 Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence 1989-2006”.

Jacobstein has been Chairman of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (IMM) since 1992. IMM is a nonprofit 501c3 molecular nanotechnology research group focused on the long-term feasibility, embedded safeguards, and future applications of molecular manufacturing. For the past decade, Jacobstein has been speaking at nanotechnology conferences on the need to address the systemic opportunities and consequences of molecular manufacturing. He has briefed the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, congressional science staffs, the Churchill Club, the Foresight Institute, the CleanTech Venture Forum, the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Conference on Nanotechnology, and a nanotechnology panel sponsored by The Economist and the CATO Institute. He addressed a U.S. National Academy of Sciences Workshop on the feasibility of Molecular Manufacturing in 2005. Jacobstein is the principal co-author of the Foresight Guidelines for the responsible development of molecular nanotechnology.

In 1999, Jacobstein was selected as an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow. He received his BS in Environmental Sciences, Summa cum Laude from the University of Wisconsin, and an MS in Human Ecology from the University of Texas, in conjunction with NASA’s Environmental Physiology Simulation Program. Neil was a Graduate Research Intern in the Learning Research Group at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and a consultant in PARC’s Software Concepts Group. He spent four years doing DOE and EPA sponsored environmental and renewable energy research as a Research Associate with the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems.

Jacobstein has served on the Technology Advisory Board for the U.S. Army’s Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command, and on the Technology Board of Advisors for the Nanotechnology Opportunity Report published by CMP Cientifica. He is a co-inventor of U.S. Patent # 6,029,175 “Automatic Retrieval of Changed Files by a Network Software Agent”. He has given seven Aspen Institute Socrates Seminars on topics such as “Future Scenarios”. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Date: 3/1/2007

Speaker bio
A venture capitalist, Margarita Quihuis’s engineering career has ranged from developing high-end aerospace systems to gender-focused design to leading a pioneering women’s technology incubator and most recently as a Reuters Fellow. In 2004, she was recognized by Women’s eNews as one of their ‘21 Leaders for the 21st Century’ for her efforts in increasing access to capital for women entrepreneurs.