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IEEE students team up to bridge
the digital divide
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The
Digital Divide volunteers include Berkeley EECS students (left
to right) Vincent Liu, Kun Gao, Rach Liu, Kedar Shah, and
Jason Bayer.
ANGELA PRIVIN PHOTO |
Civil engineering students aren’t the only ones building
bridges. Members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) are building digital bridges that they hope will
help financially strapped communities and schools overcome the
digital divide—the rift of opportunity between those who
have and those who don’t have access to technology.
Recognizing that they are on the fortunate side of the digital
divide has spurred some IEEE members to help others by creating
Bridging the Digital Divide, a community service project spearheaded
by Berkeley Engineering alumnus Christopher Flores (M.S.’81
IEOR, Ph.D.’83 EECS) and implemented in conjunction with
the East Bay professional chapter of IEEE.
“As students of technology we feel we have the obligation
to help provide technology to those who can benefit,” says
Digital Divide organizer and EECS sophomore Kedar Shah. “It
is nice to know that even as students we can make a difference.”
While federal law mandates that all public schools have computers
for Internet access, technical problems can shut those systems
down. Sometimes schools don’t have the resources or manpower
to solve the problem. Case in point: Kappa Continuation High School
in Richmond, where a technical problem with Internet ports was
neglected until the Digital Divide team stepped in.
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Among
the student volunteers at Kappa High School were (left to
right) sophomores Rach Liu, Kedar Shah, Vincent Liu, senior
Devang Parekh, and sophomores Philip Godoy and Vikram Savani,
all Berkeley EECS majors.
DAVID LIN PHOTO |
The team—including EECS senior Devang Parekh and EECS sophomores
Philip Godoy, David Lin, Rach Liu, Vincent Liu, Vikram Savani,
and Kedar Shah—volunteered to repair the Kappa network.
Although none of them had ever done this type of work before,
in only four hours they single-handedly restored high-speed Internet
access by fixing the connection to broken ports.
“The scope of what we had to do seemed daunting at first,
but it was rewarding when we got it done,” says Rach Liu.
Digital Divide members don’t just fix technical problems,
but they also pitch their services to local institutions. They
presented a networking seminar on campus for students in March
and are planning to conduct their main IEEE-funded project for
a community organization later this semester. To maximize their
impact, the group is also considering teaching introductory programming
classes to underserved middle and high school students.
“Another part of the digital divide is not having a role
model,” says Jason Bayer. “Fixing infrastructure is
one thing, but interacting with students is another. We want to
help motivate them to become engineers.”
While the motivation to bridge the digital divide may be philanthropic,
participating students say that they gain personally from the
experience.
“Even though we've taken a lot of computer classes, we don't
often get much practical experience solving real world technical
problems like this,” says Vincent Liu. To learn more or
to get involved, go to http://ieee.eecs.berkeley.edu.
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