Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) is one of emerging areas of Computer Science that could be a core focus of CS Research in China. This talk presents several examples of how technology, in particular Information Technology, can help people at the bottom of the pyramid. For many of them knowledge about classical computer science is not that important.  However, technology enabled solutions for education, healthcare, access to people and information, entertainment, surviving disasters, and finding jobs would be of great interest. In this talk we present several examples of how even illiterate people can use and benefit from technology and the necessary conditions to realize such benefits. Such uniquely China-related problems can inform CS Researchers in China about important unsolved problems in use-inspired-basic-research (so called Pasteur’s Quadrant) in computer science and lead to new directions in our field.

Bio of the Speaker

Dr. Raj Reddy is the Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford from 1966-69 and a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon faculty since 1969. He served as the founding Director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 to 1991 and the Dean of School of Computer Science from 1991 to 1999.

Dr. Reddy's research interests include the study of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. His current research interests include Million Book Digital Library Project and Learning by Doing.