During this trip, the TIER group investigates the role of computers and information technology in healthcare, and attempts a deployment of 802.11-based links as long distance wireless backhaul, connecting several universities in a high bandwidth local area network to enable sharing of their libraries.

My group's (Alfred Round, JC Pratt, and me) class project for Joyojeet's ICT for Development class is to investigate deployment strategies for school and education based computer lab deployments in Tijuana. As part of our research, Alfred and I went down to Tijuana to meet with several people from Spectrum Ministries and the schools and orphanages that they work with in Tijuana. It was a great opportunity to see some existing deployments, as well as to hear about some of their struggles in working in that area.

This project also doubles as a needs assessment for a potential TIER deployment this summer.

This site documents my perspective and experiences during the second of the TIER deployments, shortly following the Indian Ocean earthquake of December 26, 2004. In addition to providing maintenance and upgrades for the previous deployment in Pondicherry, we have installed links in Theni/Madurai, and Mallapuram (Kerala).

For our first deployment trip, TIER visited several groups in India that are already deploying Internet connectivity in rural villages, as well the villages themselves. As part of this initial investigation and deployment, we deployed wireless links connecting Aravind Eye Hospital with MSSRF's i-villages, collected Tamil speech samples for our speech recognition user interface, and set up a web proxy cache.