1	The Case for Technology for Emerging Regions Prof. Eric A. Brewer UC Berkeley UW ICT Class, December 9, 2004
2	Today’s Focus Technology can impact everyone “Bottom of the Pyramid” Not just Internet access: Health, education, government, commerce Enable profitable businesses Must be sustainable Poor are a viable market Focus on income creation, supply chain efficiency Not charity, not financial aid Promotes stability, entrepreneurism and social mobility First World technology is a bad fit New research agenda
3	‘The Bottom of the Pyramid’
4	‘The Bottom of the Pyramid’
5	The Bottom: A Brief Description 3-4 billion people with per-capita equivalent purchasing power (PPP) less that US$2,000 per year Could swell to 6-8 billion over the next 25 years Most live in rural villages or urban slums and shanty towns—movement towards urbanization Education levels are low or no-existent (especially for women) Markets are hard to reach, disorganized, and very local in nature
6	The cost of being Poor
7	Even the Very Poor Spend Dharavi, one of the poorest villages in India: 85% have a TV 50% have a pressure cooker 21% have a telephone … but can’t afford a house Even the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh: devote 7 percent of income to communications services (GrameenPhone) These are valid markets…
8	Many experiments in progress… GrameenPhone, Bangladesh Akshaya, e-gov in Kerala, India ITC Kiosks for farmers (5000 kiosks) Telecenters, ICT training in Brazil We hope to: enable more of these Reduce the costs, increase the quality
9	Grameen Bank—Bangladesh Owned entirely by the poor Began in one village in 1976 97% of equity owned by the (women) borrowers, remainder by the government 2.6 million borrowers (95% women), over 1,000 branches in over 42,000 villages. 12,000 staff. Has loaned more than US$3.9B since inception Over US$3.5B repaid with interest (98.75% recovery rate); $290M loaned in the last 12 months. Has never accepted any charity—has always been run as a profitable social enterprise 46.5% of Grameen borrowers have crossed the poverty line
10	Grameen Telecom A Disruptive Societal-Scale Business Model ‘Village Phone’ is a unique idea that provides modern telecommunication services to the poor people of Bangladesh. So far over 56,000 loans of average US$200 have been given to buy mobile phones. Average Phone Lady income goes up by 3-10x! The goal is to provide telecommunication services to the 100 million rural inhabitants in the 68,000 villages in Bangladesh—the largest wireless pay phone project in the World.
11	Environmental Monitoring Water testing: Easy: presence of Arsenic Huge problem in Bangladesh Hard: obscure bacterial Test for fecal matter instead? Dam safety Many earthen dams: predict collapse? Real dams: detect failure for faster evacuation Chinese dam failure killed 80,000 – 230,000 (1975) World Bank: 0 of 25 of India’s dams are adequate Evacuation plan can help by 100x
12	Health: River Blindness IT used to help eradicate black fly that carries river blindness in West Africa Network of real-time hydrological sensors, satellites, and forecasting software determined best time to spray larvicide Protects 30 million people from infection Freed up 100,000 square miles of land – capable of feeding 17 million people
13	Other Health Examples Dengue Fever (virus) Affects 110M people, mostly in latin america … some cases in US, many in southeast Asia Dr. Boser has a detector, based on drop of blood Need to build a map of spread GPS, timestamps, GIS Plot Air and water quality
14	Government Transparency: Cost of obtaining a land title in Madhya Pradesh drops from $100 to 10 cents (reduced corruption) GIS for location of roads, schools, power plants to reduce politicization (Bangladesh) Internet-based disclosure Increased pressure for compliance with environmental regulations
15	TIER: Technology and Infrastructure for Developing Regions Great Partners NSF 5-year grant Intel, Microsoft, HP Labs India Grameen Bank, UNDP, Markle Working with social scientists at Berkeley Co-design, co-deploy with NGOs in India Small deployments every 6 months Must establish trust, relationships! Looking for second region over time
16	Early Research Agenda Rural network coverage Long-distance low-cost links Intermittent connectivity Literacy and UI issues Interactive education Non-English speech recognition Shared devices and infrastructure Power issues Low-power networking/computing Low-cost quality power
17	Long-distance wireless Goal: low cost 50km links ($300?) Exploit $5 802.11 chipsets (or 802.16) … but need new network stack (MAC+) Low power as well (e.g. solar) Longer term: low-cost antenna arrays Voice over IP over these links
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19	First links, Summer 2004 Goal 1: Internet connectivity for one of the villages Goal 2: link between MSSRF and Aravind Eye Hospital Result: Aravind ó Nallavadu ó Villianur
20	The Installations
21	Some Issues Line of sight towers expensive, need alternative Topology knowledge important Type of vegetation, 50-60 ft in Pondicherry Antenna alignment is hard Need spectrum analyzer GPS would help + binoculars, compass, map Antennas 18 dB gain did not work well for 7 kms Power problems frequent power failure, solar power voltage variations
22	Intermittent Networking Developing-region networks rarely connect end-to-end Power, weather, reliability issues Sometimes intentionally intermittent: Low-earth orbit satellites: connect only while they are overhead “Mules” – moving basestation collects data Basestation could be on a bus/motorcyle (DakNet) Extended coverage: User may periodically enter the coverage area (e.g. market/school) Internet doesn’t really handle this well… “Delay-tolerant Networking” Research Group (dtnrg.org) Papers in last two SIGCOMMs But clearly fine for e-mail and voice mail..
23	Tier and DTN DTN Pros: Cost: better use of resources, more tolerant of problems Reliability: delay hides transient problems Ease of deployment: can be more ad hoc, less coordination than a synchronous system Coverage: Intermittent coverage >> full time coverage Con: Not really interactive, or only interactive in some areas DTN: routing and storage for messages TierStore: Storage infrastructure on top of DTN Supports e-mail, v-mail, web proxy, data collection apps, broadcast Claim: Very low cost per user
24	Technical Results Proxy cache deployment collecting usage logs Speech Collection ~20 samples usability issues lost in translation need instructions in tamil
25	Literacy Idea: make better use of speech recognition Novel speech recognition: Easy to train, speaker independent Any language or dialect, but small vocabulary (order 100 words) Also speech output (canned) A non-IT person can train the speech for her dialect Early results: digit recognition in Tamil 40 samples in Tamil, most collected in India Have 2mm .13 micron chip design, 18mA active 10000x less than Pentium, 100x less than StrongARM
26	Other challenges Low-cost complex sensors Water and soil quality Disease detection Electricity theft Packaging (think toys) Low-cost towers Power systems, replace lead-acid batteries? UI toolkit Open source software
27	General Architecture
28	General Architecture
29	General Architecture
30	General Architecture
31	Data Centers Best place to store persistent data (device is second best) Can justify backup power, networking, physical security Cheapest source of storage/computer per user 100-1000x less than a personal device (!) Factors: shared resources, admin cost, raw costs (power, disks, CPUs) Berkeley will be the data center for our early work… Proxies: shared local computation and caching Linux PC or Xscale box
32	Devices Co-Design Devices/Infrastructure => 20-40x lower cost Enables more functionality Storage, processing, human analysis Longer battery life Novel low-cost OLED-based flexible displays 10-50x cheaper, more robust Printed using an inkjet process Develop standard integrated chips => $1-7 per device Looking at 1mW per device (including radio!) Using FPGA prototyping engine Packaging?
33	Akshaya Project Kerala E-gov project Provide e-gov kiosk for every 1000 households Deployed in one district so far (Mallapuram) Largest wireless network in the world? (400 sites) Partially subsidized: Subsidized training in “e-literacy” One person per household Entreprenuers must make it go after that Looks sustainable, but too early to tell Working with the technical contractor to study and improve the technology
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37	Current India Plans Winter 2005: Deploy new network stack, DTN support MS Swaminathan: Pondicherry villages Test data collection application/infrastructure Work with Akshaya for new deployment (Kerala) Aravind Eye Hospital: Rural health centers Computer evaluation of retina images Sum 2005: Deploy links to 10+ villages Bangladesh, Uganda, Ghana, Brazil?
38	Summary Tier.cs.berkeley.edu Technology for emerging regions Valid research topic, can have huge impact Needs “systems” help Needs novel technology (not just hand-me-down) Deployments must be sustainable Can’t depend on ongoing financial aid Franchise model seems key to scalability Multi-disciplinary research…
39	Backup
40	Services for BoP Top three: Education (20% of Digital Dividend projects) Credit (micro-loans) Wireless phones
41	Being poor is expensive… Drinking Water 4-100x the cost compared to middle class Lima, Peru: 20x base cost, plus transportation Food: 20-30% more (even in poor areas of US) Credit: 10-15% interest/day is common (>1000% APR) GrameenBank is 50% APR Cell phone: $1.50/minute prepaid (about 10x) in Brazil
42	More on Dharavi Represents urban poor 1300 cities with >1M people Urban ICT could reach 2B people by 2015 Dense: 44,000 people per square mile Berkeley: 9700 Pittsburgh: 6000 6 churches, 27 temples, 11 mosques About $450M in manufacturing revenue Lots of small inefficient businesses already…
43	TARAhaat Portal Portal for rural India Franchised village Internet centers Revenue from commissions and member fees Biggest success: for-profit educational services ICT: telephone, VSAT, diesel generators Local content developed by franchisee Mostly 2 languages, moving toward 18 Social goals met, financial unclear…
44	GrameenPhone (2) Rural phones: $93 per phone per month > Twice as much as urban phones (not shared) Some phones > $1000/month But only 2% of total phones (but 8% of revenue) Monopoly phone company is a real problem Anti-competitive, outdated laws Limiting factor for the number of villages reached 4200 out of 65,000 so far Room for better technology (for the rural users)
45	Commerce: Market Efficiencies Badiane and Shively (1998) on Ghana: “…the estimated time to fully transmit a price shock to each of two outlying markets is about four months.” China: accurate price information (via phone) can increase farmer revenue by 60% and improve regional productivity.
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