We started working in this area from 2006. The high-level vision was to come up with breakthrough technologies to bridge the digital divide. To achieve this, we
carried out surveys to understand the baseline characteristics of people on the other side of the digital divide. Surveys led to insights, insights led to thoughts,
ideas and vision. Our project dubbed Pyr.mea.IT - Permeating IT towards the Base of the Pyramid is an exploratory project attempting to create new
technologies and solutions for delivering IT services to billions of people for whom "Internet" is merely a dictionary term.
Our primary vision is that of a World Wide Telecom Web (WWTW) - a voice-driven eco-system parallel to that of the WWW. WWTW is a network of interconnected voice-sites (instead of
web sites). I was responsible in design, architecture and implementation of the first prototype of our vision as well as the core transactional protocol that interconnects two
transactional voice-sites. The protocol is dubbed Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP). You can browse through the HSTP paper at Hypertext 2007 here.
More recently, the project is known as Spoken Web.
Youtube video
Link to project web page.
Folksomaps - Community-driven Intelligent Maps for Developing Regions
Currently, I participate in working on a challenging problem of developing intelligent communit-driven maps for developing regions.
Map systems have tremendous challenges in developing regions, primarily due to unplanned development, unorganized addresses and absence of
naming conventions on roads. People in developing regions often resort to asking around passersby to get directions or ask about a sweet shop/petrol station
in the area. Our aim is to build an intelligent (voice-driven), community-constructed and sustainable map system for consumption of people in
developing regions. We use semantic web concepts and web 2.0 principles in our back-end, yet trying to provide a simple user interface to its users.
Representative Publication
A. Kumar, D. Chakraborty, H. Chauhan, S. Agarwal, N. Rajput, FOLKSOMAPS - Towards Community Driven Intelligent Maps for Developing Regions, in Proc.
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), April, 2009.
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