- Generations of Indians have grown up recounting jokes
about how the only contribution their nation has made to the world is the
invention of zero. Innovation was something other people did.
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- That's no longer the case. At research labs across the
country, Indians are creating technologies specifically designed for the
nation's multilingual masses and its poor. In doing so, the country is
emerging as a research hub for technologies geared to the Third World.
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- While the name Hewlett-Packard reminds many Indians of
their temperamental office printers, in HP's research center in Bangalore
a team is working on something far nobler. Shekar Borgaonkar and his team
are building what they call Script Mail, a device that makes electronic
communication easier for people who speak languages that can't be typed
on a standard keyboard.
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- The device contains a pad with a small monitor attached
to it. A user has to position a piece of paper on the pad and write in
any language with an electronic pen. Script Mail recognizes the handwriting,
and the message is displayed on the monitor for corrections and stored.
Using an external modem, the scribble can be e-mailed.
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- The device entirely eliminates the keyboard, a fundamental
impediment in a country where there are 18 official languages and hundreds
of other languages and dialects.
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- "Script Mail can be really useful in the backward
regions of the country where there are no phone lines but only post offices,"
Borgaonkar said.
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- He envisions using Script Mail in small kiosks in villages.
Villagers could write on the pad in their mother tongues or, if they're
illiterate, a postal employee could do it for them. The employee could
store messages and then distribute them to other post offices.
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- "Unlike a telegram, Script Mail will let villagers
write as much as they want. I believe this would dramatically improve the
speed and quality of communication in backward areas," Borgaonkar
said.
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- Borgaonkar said that field trials of the device are under
way and that he expects the product to be available in India sometime next
year. He did not want to guess its price but noted that "obviously
it is going to be very cheap."
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- Meanwhile in Mumbai, a professor at the Indian Institute
of Technology, Kirti Trivedi, has built what he calls a "compact media
center" for schools without enough computer equipment to go around.
It puts a range of home entertainment systems and a PC in a single black
box about 1 cubic foot in volume. It has a 120-GB hard disk, a Pentium
4 processor, a modem, a hard disk, a DVD drive, four USB ports to connect
external devices and a television tuner. It is a television and a personal
computer rolled into one, but it does not have a monitor. Instead, the
black box contains a projector with SVGA resolution that can beam a 300-inch-high
image sharply on a wall.
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- The device, which comes with a wireless keyboard and
mouse, is being marketed as K-yan by Infrastructure Leasing & Financial
Services, a group made up of several Indian banks. Priced at about $3,200,
a single K-yan can tutor a large classroom of nearly 100 students in schools
that cannot afford multiple personal computers.
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- "The 180 pieces that have been sold in the last
few months have chiefly gone to educational institutions," Trivedi
said. "I look at K-yan as an educational tool that can introduce large
groups of poor children to basic computing because of the sheer size of
the image that can be beamed on a wall or a screen. There is scope for
interactivity, too. Though all children share a single screen, they can
interact with the image through wireless keyboards and mouse."
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- K-yan's mobility, according to Trivedi, has interested
the Indian army, too. Developers have also received inquiries from educational
groups in developing countries like Malaysia and Kazakhstan.
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- About 400 miles away, an institute in the South Indian
city of Hyderabad is building software to translate English intelligently
into Indian languages.
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- "Very few Indians can speak or read English, but
they may be interested in the ocean of English data that is available,"
said Rajeev Sangal, director of the International Institute of Information
Technology.
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- Sangal said the institute's Shakti software translates
English prose into several Indian languages. Nuances of English and other
target languages are fed into Shakti's elaborate algorithm. The institute
is also working on translating English into an African language.
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- "Language translation is very complex because languages
are complex," Sangal said. "And Western nations that usually
pioneer research have no real motivation to be involved in language translation
because they are chiefly monolingual countries. That's why India is crucial
here. Just about a billion people in this world speak English. The rest
may need Shakti."
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- In a few months, Sangal plans to release a kit that will
translate English prose into three Indian languages -- Hindi, Telugu and
Marathi. Work is under way on other Indian languages, though Sangal said
developers are not looking at Shakti as a commercial venture.
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- In rural areas, Media Lab Asia, initiated in India in
association with MIT, is reaching out to villages lacking telecommunications
infrastructure. Unlike other Media Labs in developed countries that create
exotic technologies, Media Lab Asia is working on improving life in remote
areas. In a village in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the nearest telephone
is 5 kilometers away, the lab is using Wi-Fi enabled computing devices
to carry voice from remote regions to other parts.
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- "A string of kiosks connected through Wi-Fi can
carry voice and data over long distances," said G.V. Ramaraju, a scientist
involved in the lab's research activities. "That way, vast swathes
of regions with no last-mile connectivity can be connected through wireless
technology."
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