Date: Tuesday 5/1/2007
Time: 3:30-5:30pm
Location: Cordura 100

Following news of its recent use in the Nigerian Presidential elections (see below), FrontlineSMS has been featured on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) website as “ICT Success Story” of the month for April. The WSIS “ICT Stories” portal is designed to highlight some of the ongoing and successful ICT development projects taking place around the world.

John Kuner, Saori Fotenos, Neerja Raman, Cathy Healy, Netika Raval and Adam Tolnay all spoke at 2007 Digital Stream conference, themed “Emerging Technologies in Teaching Languages and Cultures.” Their talks were very well attended. In addition, John’s paper is available for download here.

Following news that FrontlineSMS is to be used to monitor the forthcoming Nigerian elections (see previous news item), Ken Banks has been invited to talk about the technology, and the story behind it, on the next edition of “Digital Planet”, the weekly BBC World Service programme that reports on technology stories from around the globe. The programme will be available via Podcast at the end of April. The news was also reported in the Technology section of the BBC Online website. You can listen to the podcast at Ken’s website here or at the BBC here.

John Kuner, from Project VIEW, has created a videoblog entry each day of the week as part of Videoblogging Week 2007. The subjects range from Second Life to sushi, and there’s even a music video. You can check it out at his blog.

Over the past few weeks Ken Banks has been helping a Nigerian NGO work with mobiles to set up an election monitoring system for the Presidential Elections. They are using his FrontlineSMS system.

This is the accompanying press release:
The Network of Mobile Election Monitors of Nigeria(NMEM) is set to activate its teaming numbers of volunteers spread through out the country to monitor and evaluate the effectives of the upcoming presidential pools on the 21st April 2007 in Nigeria. Read the rest of this entry »

Date: Wednesday 4/18/2007
Time: 2-3pm
Location: DV Lounge

Speaker bio:
Mitchell is the general troubleshooter, spokesperson and policy arbitrator for mozilla.org. She works extensively with companies and projects using Mozilla. This involves explaining mozilla.org processes, listening to the needs of contributors, and seeking to integrate open source development techniques with the world of commercial software development.
Mitchell also spends a lot of time driving consensus as to how mozilla.org ought to manage the project, which suggests she may have a masochistic streak. She dreams of making the Mozilla project easier to understand.
Before joining mozilla.org staff, Mitchell was the attorney at Netscape responsible for all legal issues related to product development and intellectual property protection. During that time she wrote the Netscape and Mozilla Public Licenses.

bio taken from mozilla.org

Date: Thursday 4/12/2007
Time: 3:30-5:30pm
Location: Cordura 100

Speaker bio:

Aaron Ross is currently an EIR at Alloy Ventures. Prior to that he was at salesforce.com, where he built a new $20 million tele-prospecting sales team from scratch and spent a year in the corporate development (acquisitions and investments) team, helping acquire and launch the AppExchange Mobile and Salesforce for Google AdWords products. Aaron founded LeaseExchange (now eLease.com), an online equipment leasing marketplace. As an entrepreneur, he has been in Time, Businessweek and The Red Herring. Prior to LeaseExchange, Aaron worked at a the Intel/SAP joint venture Pandesic, did M&A at the investment bank Robertson Stephens, and graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Environmental Civil Engineering. Aaron is an Ironman triathlete, graduate of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School and volunteer mentor at the SBA / SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives). Advisory boards include Clickability, AfterCollege, Personiva.

Date: Thursday 4/5/2007
Time: 3:30-5pm
Location: Cordura 100

Speaker bio:
Laszlo Z. KARVALICS (45) Budapest, Hungary. Founding director, BME-UNESCO Information Society Research Institute, associate professor, Head, Department of Information and Knowledge Management, Budapest University of Technology. Fulbright Research Scholar, George Washington University, Center of International Science and Technology Policy (CISTP). Teaching and research on social impacts of information technology, comparative analysis of national information strategies, information history and education in the information age. Invited expert in several EU-projects and events. National representative, UNESCO Information for All Program (IFAP), being invited to the Network of Eminent Advisors (NEA) of Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP). Key person of the Hungarian Information Society strategy making. Founding editor of the Hungarian language Information Society quarterly. Has written books, studies and plenty of small articles for the dissemination of the “Information Society thinking” and Internet-culture. His best-selling books are (in Hungarian): Introduction to Information History (Gondolat, 2004) Information, Society, History (Typotex, 2003) Searching of the Information Society (Aula, Budapest, 2001) Toothpick on the Net (Prím, Budapest, 2000) Information Society (from technology to the human aspects) (Muszaki, 1995). MA in History, Literature and Linguistics PhD and Hab. in History, ELTE, Budapest.

Event Recap:
Laszlo Z. Karvalics (Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University) presented a talk entitled “Knowledge Producing Megamachines and Social Entrepreneurship” at the Digital Vision Program on April 5th, 2007.

The essential elements of Dr. Karvalics’ ideas are that many branches of science are facing a shortage in brain processing power. The only scalable way the shortfall can be augmented, Dr. Karvalics argued, is by delegating appropriate parts of the scientific research tasks to the system of public education; ie. to harness the knowledge generating capacity of high school students worldwide by engaging them in REAL scientific problems. For this to happen new types of social/educational/research forms, i.e. hybrid groups of millions of teachers, researchers and students, need to be created. Social enterpreneurs can play important roles in this transition as ice-breakers in generating pilot projects, as champions of extending local best practices to a global level, as active players in the new distributed knowledge generating environments, as evangelists of the transition, and as co-designers of the this large scale social innovation.

Ken Banks’s podcast for his interview at Tech Tuesday in San Fran on 13th March is
now out. It is available via:

http://netsquared.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=195601

Ken Banks has been invited to speak at the W3C workshop in Banff. More information about the workshop can be found here. The talk there will be about keeping users in mind when developing mobile applications for developing countries, so is very much an anthropological approach. This is the same presentation as he gave in Bangalore last December (if you want to remind yourself about that then it’s on the www.kiwanja.net/news.htm page).

Ken Banks has just returned from a three-day Amnesty International workshop held in New Delhi, India. The short workshop was designed to train and educate a number of young Control Arms campaigners from the region. Thousands of people are killed, injured, raped and forced to flee from their homes as a result of the unregulated global arms trade. The Control Arms campaign is calling for an international, legally-binding Arms Trade Treaty to ease the suffering caused by irresponsible weapons transfers. Read the rest of this entry »

Farsi Teach Net (FTN) project has started to communicate more closely with academic institutions in North America . On March 23rd 2007 Hedieh Najafi and Mitra Fathollahpour shared the upcoming pilot study of FTN at the Graduate Student Research Conference at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ( Canada ) where it was received with overwhelming enthusiasm and recognized as a ground breaking step to promote social justice. Attendees in the session, mostly PhD Candidates, provided valuable feedback on the design of the pilot study. FTN also made its way to the Canadian Society for Studies of Education 2007 where it will be presented in a poster session.

Nita Goyal ‘06 recently launched the SocialWay website with environmental and social goals that targets sharing and reuse.

SocialWay is a global website that makes it easy for people to share items and thereby gets more usage from things. This simple idea addresses socio-economic and environmental issues; (a) environmental - since increased reuse reduces carbon emissions and saves natural resources, and (b) socio-economic - since an individual gets access to community resources thus multiplying everyone’s available pool. This is of particular significance in developing countries, for instance, where good libraries are hard to come by even for the middle class.

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.