Qatar Today Editorials - Breaking barriers and bridging divides
Dr Reddy says,“There is no positive systemic impact on education after 40 years of predictions. Technology cannot fix societal problems – break-up, safety, hunger, multi-lingual, resistance to change. Educational software is still too hard to produce; Bandwidth, memory, and computational constraints; Curriculum redesign is difficult; and there is too much topdown decision-making.”
DR RAJ Reddy, is the Professor at the Mozah Bint Nasser University of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the founding director of the US’s first robotics laboratory – The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and is considered a national leader in transforming computer science from a disparate group of academic disciplines into an integrated field, built upon his seminal work in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and other computing innovations. Dr Reddy received a BE degree from the Guindy Engineering College of the University of Madras, India in 1958 and a MTech degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 1960. He received a Ph D degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1966. He was recently awarded the 2006 Vannevar Bush Award, which honours unique contributions to public service.
He has strong opinions on everything to do with information technology. He makes a strong case for IT that is affordable and accessible to the illiterate and economically backward. The Mozah bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr Raj Reddy was a keynote speaker at a symposium on Innovations in Education: Technology, Empowerment and Education. In an exclusive interview to Qatar Today, he spoke about the projects close to his heart, and on narrowing divides created by the IT era.
Tech-Knows and Tech-Know-Nots: The growing divide?
On bridging the growing digital divide, Dr Reddy says,“It is widening because technologies and solutions are not tailored to be used in villages or rural areas, or by different language groups. There is no attention being paid to their needs.” The Arab world at present is facing a problem of retaining its intellectuals and developing its own research. Are the Arab people and the Arabic language able to cope with the strides technology is making? “If there are not adequate resources in local languages, what can be done about it? One is, businesses that see a market will automatically do that. They will start developing for that market. Governments can fund Arabic websites too, to encourage people. Those things that are not for Breaking barriers and bridging divides profit, become orphans,” he says. “In the US and other countries, there is a community discovery process. If you are interested in some obscure dance, you will try and find people with similar interests. It is not profit-motivated, but community oriented. And you build on that. Something like that is needed here.”
The Million Book Project
One of Dr Reddy’s recent endeavours is The Million Book Project. “We are scanning tens of thousands of books. Mainly in India, China, Egypt... Making them freely available to read.” The project, led by Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and University Libraries, aims to digitise a million books by 2007. Working with the government and research partners in India and China, the project is scanning books in many languages, using OCR to enable full text searching, and providing free-to-read access to the books on the web. On linking up with similar projects like that initiated by Google, he points out: “What Google or MSN are doing is for profit. We are not doing it for profit. What we are looking at is giving them access to our content in return for research funding.” “There are five million out of copyright books and we want to get them all online. The library is useful for a population that can read and write, and the main advantage is easy access to content. It also reaches out to those who can’t afford to buy books. So the digital library meets the needs of those who have a dearth of time.”
A passion to educate
While providing content to the literate is very much on his agenda, what he is more vocally passionate about is making technology illiterate- friendly. He repeatedly stresses this point in all his lectures, including the keynote speech at the symposium. “The less educated you are, the more bandwidth you need. If you are illiterate you should be able to record a voice message and send it. The voice file is a hundred times larger than the email text an educated person would use. So you need more bandwidth to process this. Bottom line is you need more bandwidth at low or no cost. You need to make it affordable to the rural population.” “There are over four billion people who subsist on less than $2,000 per year income. Many in rural areas and without power. Most have never used a phone and subsist on $1 per day income. “It is a grand challenge finding a way to provide these people universal access to Education, Healthcare, and Social Justice. Utilising the power of information and communication technologies ensures universal availability, accessibility, and affordability of these services. There should be free flow of information and democratisation of knowledge. We have to develop capacity building programs to make 100 percent of the population “eLiterate”. And also develop programs to overcome language barriers – create multi-lingual interfaces, spoken language interfaces and multi-lingual translation systems.”
The PCtvt
He stresses, four million at the bottom of the Pyramid don’t need Word, Excel and Power Point. But they need access to affordable Entertainment, Education, Telemedicine and Communication. “To an illiterate person in a village, the need for a PC is not obvious. A TV and/or a telephone represent a better value proposition – a 5-in-1 multi-function information appliance: PC, TV, PVR, IP Phone and Video Phone?” His solution is the PCtvt - PC, TV, TiVo, Video Phone, IP Phone. “Entertainment, communication and education must be made affordable and accessible to those four billion people living below the poverty line. An Illiterate person needs a more powerful PC than a PhD! If not e-mail, use voice-mail; Replace Text Help by Video Help. And you need radically simple design. “You don’t need a PC. You need an information appliance. Right now, I am getting it at $100, but when volumes increase I will get it at $30. It is just a matter of time. So I will get a device which can be used as a mobile phone if there is wi-fi. You can use it as an email device, as a radio or TV device. You don’t need a PC with all its other functionalities. Basically you need low cost connectivity, bandwidth that is more than 10mbs, preferably 100mbs.”
Destructive technologies
Dr Reddy is positive that costs will reduce. “We already have facilities like Skype, that is providing no or low cost voice telephony.” Voice telephony is not permitted in Qatar, and on that he says, “I don’t think you should stop free or low cost facilities like this. But that is the problem with technology – destructive technology.” He explains, “What happens is the old models have put in a lot of money and set up their systems. And then something new comes in and destroys everything they have built. “That is ‘destructive technology’ – that is the problem with technology that is moving too fast. Their business models are no longer able to cope, and for no fault of theirs their businesses go bankrupt, because it is based on assumptions that are no longer true.”
Changing free market forces
On the one hand we talk about the speed at which technology develops and on the other there seems to be a lack of choice, where monopolies rule and new players don’t get support? “There is a barrier to entry. You can allow new players, but they don’t have the wherewithal to come up to say, Microsoft standards. Let us say someone comes and gives us a software of MS standards. But MS produces a 100 million units, they have huge markets and their costs will be much lower than the new guy’s. So how do they compete? “That is the new information economics. The people who succeed, there is no way to break their monopoly, until such time you come up with a completely brand new solution. “If you went from PC to cell phone as a platform, then all of a sudden many of the things that MS provides become irrelevant. That is disruptive technology for MS – they will continue to sell software for PCs, but they won’t grow. They have tried to get into cell phones – but the key thing is that there are already other players like Nokia, who are entrenched, and MS is a new player. So they are not going to keep quiet when MS tries to take away their business. “The free market forces in this area is interesting to follow. The larger you are, the more disruptive you can be,” he says.
On open-source technology, like Linux, trying to compete with monopolies, he says, “They are trying to compete with MS. Yes, a lot of people are using open source. But until people make it routinely available, you can’t compete with monopolies. “If you are like me and don’t want to compete with complexities of open source, I will just go for licensed software.”
Fair game?
While bridging the economic divide is matter of commitment, how do we go about dealing with the gender divide? Women’s reluctance to jump into technology. “It is already a problem. We have realised in the US that the number of students applying for computer science is 10:90. Even if you want to admit them, there just aren’t enough of them showing interest. So in Carnegie Mellon we took a proactive step and changed our rules of admission, to make it possible for somebody who doesn’t want to be a ‘nerd’ to succeed in CS. “So we have de-emphasised programming per se and emphasised concepts of computer science. We have been a lot more successful that way – and the number of women applying and joining CS in CMU is 30-40 percent per year.
“You don’t have to be a superprogrammer, working on intricate interfaces. Concepts are important too. It is not a nerd-culture, but a problem-solving culture.”
Did Dr Reddy, who launched his career in computer science 50 years ago, imagine that technology would develop at the present rate? “Some things we projected. That computers would speak and recognise speech. What we did not project is the cost reduction, the emergence of the world wide web, and the widespread availability of systems. People are using more computer power today than then. That’s what makes all this very interesting. Some things you could imagine, and some things you could not.” However, he stressed in his keynote speech – Empowerment of Masses through Education and Capacity Building – that computing has still not fulfilled its promise. “There is no positive systemic impact on education after 40 years of predictions. Technology cannot fix societal problems – break-up, safety, hunger, multi-lingual, resistance to change. Educational software is still too hard to produce; Bandwidth, memory, and computational constraints; Curriculum redesign is difficult; and there is too much topdown decision-making.”
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