Finally, we arrive in Villianur, one of MSSRF's i-Villages near Pondicherry. Soon after our arrival, the small hallway with three computers and a hub, is suddenly flooded by forty small Indian girls in blue and white uniforms, all with a braid on each side of her head, tied with matching blue bows. They are so excited to see new people - pull out a camera and their smiles light up the room. These are the people in whose lives we want to make a difference.

The Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) is a research group out of UC Berkeley's CS Department, led by Prof. Eric Brewer. It serves as the technical sub-project of Information and Communications Technology for Billions (ICT4B), a cross-disciplinary and inter-departmental effort funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The group also has several outside specialists, including Kevin Fall from Intel Research Berkeley.

Our group's trips to India during the summer of July 2004 gave each of us a chance to experience the impact of technology on rural areas firsthand, as well as to begin deployment of our work in the field. We visited several groups in India that are already deploying Internet connectivity in rural villages, as well the villages themselves. It was a great opportunity to assess the technological and social barriers they face in establishing connectivity, as well as the needs of the villages themselves - how communications technology can be applied to directly improve the lives of the people.

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.

This web site gives my overview of the results of our trip, including journals of the work we did each day, and notes from our meetings with various organizations. Feel free to send me a line if you have any questions!