2003-2004 Fellows

Several hardware, software, and wireless options to provide Internet access which is cost-effective, locally sustainable, and maintainable. A solution will be explored and tested in an isolated village in the Dominican Republic.

Creative Commons 101 is an educational portal that allows teachers to extract modules from a set of Creative Commons learning materials in order to build their own multimedia curricula for use in the classroom. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization at Stanford Law School that has developed a set of licenses free for public use that allow authors to retain some rights to prevent exploitation of their work for commercial use while giving some rights away.

Materials include video clips of experts speaking on the subject of copyright and Creative Commons, comprehensive case studies investigating the use of license contracts in the field of copyright as well as background lecture notes. Teachers can register on the site to be part of a database of universities taking part in Creative Commons 101. They can also read about how they could collaborate with other teachers around the world in student projects or with Creative Commons Africa. The team at Creative Commons Africa will be able to upload topics of questions that require critical thinking so that students can use their projects to feed into the real-world problem-solving.

Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is currently being employed on television song programming in India to encourage literacy skill improvement among the early literate. An Internet jukebox of songs and lyrics in Indian languages would complement and link with this effort.

STAR is "The System for Tracking Animal Resources", an identification system for livestock in East Africa to track animals, control disease, prevent theft, and facilitate trade and marketing. The system uniquely identifies an animal and its associated history (ownership, health, location) and tracks it through various phases of its life using RFID (radio frequency Identification). The other components of the system are RFID readers (handheld, handheld PDAs for data collection, a global positioning system (GPS) unit and a communications device to enable the sending of scanned, updated information from the handheld device back to a centralized database via a cellular phone (GSM) network wherever there is coverage.

A network — driven by wireless technology and human knowledge agents — to allow for exchange of data, best practices and innovation between caregivers working to rapidly scale up treatment for HIV-AIDS in districts, regions and countries across the globe.

Of the 180 million children who enter primary school in India, only 5.6 million make it through college. To prevent this exclusion bridges must be constructed at government schools were the country's most deprived and deserving students go to. DigitalTriangle will use Information and Communications Technology to build a platform that will be the bridge. The platform will enable teachers and educators in such environments maximize their potential and reach out effectively to many more students. The platform will be built using Open Source code and will comprise of a collaboration space, a repository of content, a collection of courses, a collection of resources and links, and section for content. Using the platform, educators would be able to collaborate online and use technology to effectively create lesson plans, establish rubrics, deliver instruction, and carry out assessments.

Through an online remittance manager similar to the existing mamamikes.com, Kenyans living abroad would be able to negotiate and purchase health care plans for their families at home. Every month, doctors would receive an updated list of beneficiaries and the purchaser would receive a detailed invoice.

Information & Communication Technology can be leveraged to increase the immunization coverage in developing countries, as the traditional solutions are saturated. "Smart" cards will track the date of each immunization in a child's life in India. Health Assistants will monitor the weekly coverage through Handhheld Devices, which will include the generation of weekly targets. Parents would be kept abreast of children's immunization schedules. A web-enabled central database would track drug inventory and identify any gaps in coverage.

e-Hutt proposes to develop technological and business solutions to integrate small ICT centers in the rural areas of Bangladesh through a Private Virtual Network or INTRANET. e-Hutt envisions to develop these small ICT centers into agents for a dynamic domestic Economy, through utilizing market information, e-government, directory services and other informative content deemed relevant for local demand.

This project explores the feasibility of adapting the standard undergraduate engineering curriculum's mandatory senior design projects class to address needs in the developing world. Real-world problems would be sourced for faculty, an interactive resource center would be developed, and a community publishing space for prototype solutions would be established.

The project focuses on the underemployed and unemployed in rural communities. The solution would use a visual interface and voice input/output to help the near-literate end user. This solution would be delivered in Community Technology Centers through a localized community information portal, but would also use technology to ensure its accessibility remotely. Use of game theory to design a labor auction market is being considered. The model would be prototyped in India.

This project will create a technology platform to facilitate the access of Internet-based applications and information across existing high- and low-speed communication infrastructures and multiple computing devices — phones, handhelds, and desktop/laptop computers.

Microfinance offers a compelling model for promoting poverty reduction in developing countries. This project is focused on developing technologies to improve operational efficiency and scalability of microfinance institutions in Vietnam. Technologies under evaluation include: low-cost PDAs, optical mark reading and optical character recognition (OMR/OCR) for form/survey processing, web application frameworks for accounting and portfolio management, wireless synchronization protocols for data collection.

The program is focused on fostering social responsibility amongst Nigerian youth by using appropriate technology to deliver services to their communities and address concrete and current realities. Youth at the Owerri Digital Village will perform the role of rural information workers receiving and delivering information electronically to families in the villages. The youth information workers will give a "voice" to the marginalized in communities where there is no access the Internet and related technologies.

The Corporate Fellows Network (CFN) would serve as the test bed for the Kozmetsky Global Community (KGC), an organization that seeks to create shared prosperity through collaborative communities. The project would establish a baseline of knowledge for the CFN, and would identify candidate corporations and technologies for the KGC.

Apply low-cost information communication technology and culturally appropriate content to reduce patient abandonment of Tuberculosis and AIDS treatment programs.

Building on the successful "Rural Health Care Education Project" led by 2003 Digital Vision Fellow Tracey Wilen, we will drive publicity and fundraising to support additional Spanish-language healthcare education modules targeting rural and immigrant populations and pilot a user-friendly portal for easier access to that content. More importantly, we will work with Tech de Monterrey to craft a sustainable business model for this program; developing thin tools to drive cost out of delivery and support, leveraging this program within and beyond Mexico.

AlertNet serves the international relief community with timely news and reports from front-line and fields. This project will enhance AlertNet with additional features including news categorization, geo-referencing, and cross-lingual search, all of which aims to run as automatically as possible.

Implement eLogistics, a system that would allow the World Food Programme to track food aid shipments and deliveries in the developing countries using PDA and radio technology.