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Cheap computer for the Third World can bridge digital divide

Raj Reddy, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, at the campus in Mountain View, California, last Thursday. Reddy is developing a wireless computer that can be run by a simple TV remote control. PHOTO: THE NEW YORK TIMES

Raj Reddy was fed up debating the problem of the digital divide between the rich and the poor and decided to do something about it.

Reddy, a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, plans to unveil at the end of this year his new project, called the PCtvt, a US$250 wirelessly networked personal computer intended for the 4 billion people around the world who live on less than US$2,000 a year.

He says his device can find a market in developing countries, particularly those with large populations of people who cannot read, because it can be controlled by a simple TV remote control and can function as a television, telephone and videophone.

Reddy is hoping his project -- with backing from Microsoft and TriGem, the Korean computer maker, and in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of Information Technology and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley -- can prove that it is possible to bring information technology to impoverished communities without depending on philanthropy.

Because his low-cost computer doubles as a TV and DVD player, Reddy believes that he will be able to use it as a vehicle to take computing and communications to populations that until now have been excluded from the digital world.

What separates Reddy's approach from other efforts is his belief that even the world's poorest communities can become a profitable market for computers.

"I kept asking myself, `What would the device have to do for someone on the other side of the digital divide to be desirable?'" Reddy said.

The answer, he decided, was a simple device that would offer entertainment, making it something that even the world's poorest citizens might be willing to pay roughly 5 percent of their annual income to own.

"Entertainment is the killer app, and that will smuggle something that is a lot more sophisticated into the home," said Tom Kalil, special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at Berkeley.

Earlier this year Reddy persuaded TriGem, South Korea's third-largest PC maker, to supply prototypes of a fully equipped computer and Microsoft to support the project with an inexpensive, stripped down version of its Windows operating system.

This November Reddy hopes to begin installing the first 100 prototypes of the PCtvt in India and possibly several other countries. The project will work in partnership with University of California researchers who are attempting to develop high-speed wireless digital networks for rural communities.

The philosophy behind the PCtvt grew from ideas explored in the early 1980s by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the founder of the World Center for Computing and Human Resources, which is based in Paris. The center was built on the idea that developing countries could use biological and microelectronic technologies to leapfrog the industrial stage of economic development.

Reddy was among dozens of leading international researchers working on design projects at the center, including Alan Kay, Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert. Kay was the creator of the Xerox Alto, an early PC. Negroponte had designed a pioneering videodisc system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Papert was the inventor of the LOGO programming language.

The French center established a pilot project in Senegal that experimented with adapting the LOGO language for a Third World population. But that project failed years later because of politics and because the computers involved were too expensive.

"We needed three decades," Reddy said, for those technologies to help developing nations. He noted that in the early 1980s, computing was more focused on data processing, while today the focus is communications.

Coincidentally, he said, is that designing a system largely for people who cannot read will require more wireless network bandwidth than is currently required for most modern computer networks, since communication will rely more heavily on audio and video transmissions than on text messages.

With a small team of students and faculty here at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast campus, Reddy has built a simple control screen that allows the PCtvt to be used for audio and video conferencing, electronic mail and viewing local newspapers on the Web through a TV remote control.

The designers have intentionally limited the computer's functions because they are struggling to simplify what the users see and experience.

One challenge Reddy faced was in persuading Microsoft to offer a version of its Windows software for the project for far less than its commercial price. But Reddy said he eventually won the support of Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer and a senior strategist at Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Reddy's team is also working with social scientists to determine the effect that access to this technology has on communities.

"If we can do these experiments" and show that people living in poverty are a market for computers, Reddy said, "we will have proved something."
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