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The Class That Launched It All
By David Pescovitz
Omar Bakr, first year Berkeley doctoral computer science student,
expected to spend his summer at home in Berkeley, his nose buried
in his textbooks preparing for prelims. But at the urging of his
adviser, Engineering Dean Richard Newton, Bakr enrolled last fall
in a groundbreaking new course, CS 294-12: An Information and
Communications Technology Framework for Developing Regions, jointly
taught with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) via an advanced videoconferencing
system. With an illuminating line-up of guest lecturers from diverse
disciplines, CS 294-12 was designed to be the launch pad for the
College of Engineering’s technology peace corps.
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Participants
in CS 294-12 are (from left) Dean Newton, Eric Brewer, doctoral
computer science student Omar Bakr, and Tom Kalil.
BART NAGEL PHOTO |
"This class was created to inspire students," says
Newton, who jointly led the class with computer science professor
Eric Brewer, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and
Technology Tom Kalil, and faculty from CMU. "We found out
quickly that students are very attracted to research that improves
the quality of people’s lives."
Bakr is the perfect proof of Newton’s claim. After a semester
of inspiring lectures and insight into how information technology
(IT) might be a tool with unique applications in the developing
world, he was ready to take his class work into the field. Acceptance
into the first Berkeley-UNIDO Fellows Program led to Bakr spending
a month this summer in Ghana. There he and a small team of his
classmates tested enhanced Internet access in Accra at the University
of Ghana. Bakr hopes the skills he learns through the program
will serve him well someday when he returns to his native Saudi
Arabia.
"When I return to the Middle East, I'd like to bring back
research methods that are relevant to that part of the world,"
Bakr says.
The students' backgrounds were as diverse as the teachers', representing
multiple departments within the College, Haas School of Business,
and the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS). For
EECS graduating senior Morgan Ames, the invigorating debates ignited
by the numerous disciplines reminded her that efforts like ICT4B
abhor a vacuum. Ames became aware of CS 294-12 through her ad
hoc reading group, Technology and Sustainable Economic Development,
a necessarily cross-disciplinary area she hopes to explore as
a graduate student in SIMS.
As the educational component of the broader ICT4B effort within
the College, the seminar was a gateway for students and faculty
into the key research and deployment issues surrounding novel
information and communication technology for the developing world.
"The ICT4B efforts are one of the reasons I decided to stay
at Berkeley for graduate school," Ames says. "There's
more momentum here than at any other university I visited."
Early on, the faculty realized that, like ICT4B itself, the course
would only succeed if it was a tour de force of multidisciplinary
discourse. To that end, guest lecturers from a wide variety of
backgrounds provided the students, and faculty, with insight into
the interaction among technology, policy, and business as they
relate to sustainable development.
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Students
Morgan Ames and Matthew Kam
BART NAGEL PHOTO |
One week, Gita Gopal, associate director of Hewlett-Packard
Labs India in Bangalore provided an overview of the company’s
initiatives in that part of the world, while another class featured
Nagy Hanna, Senior Advisor on e-Development for the World Bank,
discussing efforts to enhance the interaction between citizens
and government in Sri Lanka. Toward the end of the semester, Professor
Michael I. Shamos of CMU’s Institute for Software Research
International lectured on the massive differences between intellectual-property
systems in the U.S. and abroad.
Of course, the lead instructors are luminaries in their own right.
Along with helping launch many successful high-tech ventures,
Newton is passionate about information technology as a way to
solve grand-scale societal problems. He spearheaded the formation
of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest
of Society (CITRIS), one of four California Institutes for Science
and Innovation. Kalil came to Berkeley from the Clinton White
House, where he served as deputy assistant to the president for
technology and economic policy. Along with his groundbreaking
research on Internet-based systems, Brewer is known as co-founder
with a Berkeley graduate student of Inktomi Corporation, acquired
last year by Yahoo.
In fact, it was the instructors' connections to both academia
and industry that inspired the course and the collaboration with
CMU. The seed was planted two years ago by Newton and CMU computer
science professor Raj Reddy, an internationally known pioneer
in artificial intelligence, at a meeting of the Microsoft technical
advisory board. Reddy had been exploring new devices for developing
nations, while Newton and the Berkeley team focused on infrastructure.
The course emerged from those early discussions, with CMU faculty
M. Bernardine Dias of the School of Computer Science’s Robotics
Institute and Rahul Tongia of the Engineering and Public Policy
Department also signing on to jointly teach the class with the
Berkeley trio.
"The most heartening thing about the course was the students'
determination to understand issues that are difficult, unstructured,
and with no right or wrong answers," says Tongia, whose interdisciplinary
research focuses on technology, infrastructure, and public policy
in developing countries. "In fact, we as instructors learned
a tremendous amount from the students and their presentations."
Now the real work begins.
"The class gave everyone involved a broad overview of the
technological challenges and cultural differences you might face
in developing regions," Brewer says. "It wasn’t
deep enough to enable us to solve the problems, but it did help
us determine what the next steps may be."
David Pescovitz writes Lab Notes, the
College of Engineering’s online research digest and contributes
to Popular Science, Small Times, and Business 2.0.
His writing on science and technology has been featured in Wired,
Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, and the New York
Times.
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