With sadness we announce the passing of Prof. V.K. Samaranayake. Dr. Sam, as he liked to call himself, was an illustrious figure in the world of ICT for developement in Sri Lanka. In the brief time he was at Stanford Dr. Sam was an inspiration to his fellow fellows. He was a vissionary, a teacher, and a mentor to an entire nation. Forceful and graceful. He will be missed.

Sri Lanka Daily News Item

The Digital Vision Program would like to send our condolences and all of our thoughts and prayers to his family and friends.

A special get together is planned to launch the felicitation volume of Prof. V. K. Samaranayake and to revive the IT Chapter of the Alumni association of the University of Colombo. The function will be held on the 4th of June 2007 from 4.30 - 7.00pm at the Prof. V.K. Samaranayake Auditorium of the UCSC*.

The commemorative volume is based on academic articles and memoirs by over 40 professional colleagues of Prof V. K. Samaranayake whom he considers Partners in Progress. These are further enhanced by the inclusion of the proceedings of the felicitation ceremony. The contents of this volume illustrate the breadth of the contribution made by Prof. Samaranayake towards the development of Education, Science and Information Technology and towards social action both nationally and internationally.

Mexican American Community Services Agency has released its 100 Most Influential Latinos in Silicon Valley list with the top 10 people in 10 different categories. Margarita has been listed in the Business category. You can vote for your top 10 here.

The US federal agency, Americorps*Vista, has awarded Global MapAid (GMA) a kick-start grant over three years, to fundraise, build and test a ‘Geographic Emergency Response Vehicle’ (Geo ERV) for use in mainly New Orleans and the southern coastline. The project will be accomplished in Partnership with the University of New Orleans. A manager is needed for the project, preferably a recent retiree, with long term sales and marketing experience. There are three other technical positions also available. 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 »

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 »

Sam has been selected to present at the following conference on behalf of 7to10days.org’s efforts to develop pandemic preparedness initiatives. The citizen pandemic flu education module, on which he has been collaborating with a team of Stanford students and staff, is now being sponsored by INSTEDD, an NGO formed at the initiative of Larry Brilliant with the support of Google.org and others. Read the rest of this entry »

Njideka Harry (DVF 2003 - ‘04) is the founder and executive director of Youth for Technology Foundation (YTF), an international non-profit organization.

December 2006, Cambrian House Inc., supports YTF through their fundraising campaign “Follow the White Laptop.” The campaign kicked off in September by delivering a new white MacBook to Guy Kawasaki the former Apple evangelist, in hopes of him signing it and sending it off to another “technology rock star.” In last month’s Web 2.0 summit, the laptop was signed by Caterina Fake (co-founder Ludicorp), Jeffrey Bezos (Founder, Amazon.com) and Steve Wozniak (co-founder, Apple). Read the rest of this entry »

Vinod Khosla’s Marshall Plan for rural India

The daily drumbeat of biofuel headlines has made Vinod Khosla — co-founder of Sun Microsystems, former Kleiner-Perkins venture capitalist, and ethanol evangelist/entrepreneur extraordinaire — a hard man to ignore of late. But Khosla’s massive bet on renewable energy as the answer to climate change and peak oil (and big profits) may not even be his most ambitious scheme to remake the world. In 2002, Khosla co-wrote a paper with development economist Atanu Dey sketching out a plan to boost economic growth in rural India. It’s hard to think bigger than a bid to upgrade the living standards of some 700 million people — as the paper notes, one out of 10 people on this planet is a rural Indian. (Thanks to the India Economy blog for the link.) Read the rest of this entry »

DigitalStream Conference Description
Conference March 22-24, 2007.
Each year, the DigitalStream Conference attracts more than 300 attendees from California, across the country and overseas to share their interest in the study of foreign languages and the best uses of technology in the language classroom.
The conference provides a unique forum of scheduled presentations, panel discussions, hands-on workshops and technology exhibitions where language teachers, technologists, administrators and vendors can share useful and cutting-edge information and learn from one another.

Read the rest of this entry »

Discovery International - the TV channel - has covered Erik’s blog from last year during the conflict in Lebanon as one of the highlights of this year. It will be broadcasted as part of their Rewind 2006 show. It has also been featured on their website as “Blogging in the Battlefield.” That can be found at http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/rewind2006/motor.shtml?vEpisodio=18.

Through his pioneering ‘Halls of Learning’, Marvin G. Hall, a trained teacher and information technology specialist, has embarked on a mission to bring robotics to all the children of Jamaica - not just the privileged.

In 2003, Hall left the comfort of the suburban classroom where he first introduced robotics, to dedicate himself to his vision of providing all children with the opportunity to ‘lego their minds’, and explore the innards of technology, even those who could never provide adequate monetary compensation for his efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

Brac brings internet to rural homes

bracNET, an affiliation of Brac, the world’s largest non-government organisation, has recently launched e-Hut to give internet access to people in rural areas of Bangladesh.

Through e-Hut the people living in the remote corners of the country will have access to the internet at an affordable price. While explaining the programme, bracNET officials said e-Hut is a one-stop shop of different types of digital services including internet browsing, basic computer training, photocopying, scanning, digital photo taking and lamination of documents and photos. Read the rest of this entry »

2005 fellow Dipak Basu’s NPO Anudip has seen its first graduating class of 20 from a LINKAGE training class at the Asha Welfare Society in Namkhana. The course is designed to teach information technology to those in rural India so they can get employment and gradually uplift the community. Read the rest of this entry »

The GIS model developed by Farai as a fellow is now being used by Population Services International in Zimbabwe. This model is now being used effectively to monitor and plan targeted HIV/ AIDS interventions in Zimbabwe. Amazing program outputs are being achieved through application of this model. Interventions are now being directed to the people who need them most. His abstract on this model was accepted for an oral presentation, at the International Conference to be held in Toronto, Canada. Read the rest of this entry »

India’s farmers switch faith to mobile phones

FOR centuries, Indian farmers have relied on ancient rituals, the study of wind direction and local gossip to ascertain the annual onset of the unpredictable monsoon rains. Deciding when to sow their crops and when to take their produce to market is based on experience and instinct. Read the rest of this entry »

Reuters ‘06 Fellow, Erik Sundelöf was interviewed on Thursday, July 27 on CNN’s American Morning regarding the cell phone news blogs and specifically “Lebanon-Israel Conflict Via Cell Phones,” the blog documenting the Lebanon-Israel conflict. Read the rest of this entry »

Erik Sundelöf, Class of 2006 was recently featured in the PBS Media Blog, Mark Glaser’s MediaShift. In a blog titled “Stanford Fellow Imagines Every Cell Phone as Citizen Media Outlet,” Glaser describes Erik’s project as well as including an edited transcript of a discussion between the two about the vision, logistics, and future of cell phones as a media outlet. Read the rest of this entry »