Technology has made the competitive world flat and created opportunities for ambitious
countries to change their fortunes. Computing technology first addressed issues in data and
computing using specialized computers and then entered the information and communication
phase using personal computers. Now computing is poised to enter its phase in which it will deal
with insights and experiences. In this phase new applications are likely to emerge that will
extend benefits of computing from less than 1 Billion people to more than 3 Billion people. In
this phase visual computing, including computer vision, has to play a dominant role. In this paper,
we will discuss requirements of extending computing to masses in even remote areas of
developing countries and identify challenges for experiential computing in general and computer
vision in particular. We will identify challenges and opportunities for computer vision in
extending benefits of computing to emerging countries.

Ramesh Jain joined University of California, Irvine as the first Bren Professor in Bren School of
Information and Computer Sciences in 2005. He has been an active researcher in multimedia
information systems, image databases, machine vision, and intelligent systems. While professor
of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the
University of California, San Diego, he founded and directed artificial intelligence and visual
computing labs. He was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE MultiMedia magazine and
Machine Vision and Applications journal and serves on the editorial boards of several magazines
in multimedia, business and image and vision processing. He has co-authored more than 250
research papers in well-respected journals and conference proceedings. Among his co-authored
and co-edited books include Machine Vision, a textbook used at several universities. Ramesh has
been elected Fellow of ACM, IEEE, IAPR, AAAI, and SPIE.