Takeshi Kondo, "Augmented Reality Application Outside of the Entertainment World"

Augmented Reality (AR), created in the 1960s, has recently attracted attention due to the progress of Information Technology. AR is supplementary text/visual data superimposed over the surrounding real world. For example, in a football game on television, the yard lines and logos displayed on the screen use AR technology. AR technology has been applied to the entertainment world, such as in computer games, in film, and in advertisement. However, there are few examples of the application outside of the entertainment field. In his research presentation, Kondo proposes some possible AR applications outside of the entertainment industries.

Makoto Murata, "Developing New Facilities Strategy and Added Value in "Smart Grid"

Smart Grid is a new concept of power supply and management, and it receives a great deal of public attention. Electricity is the fastest-growing component of total global energy demand. In this environment, there are increasing needs for minimizing costs and environmental impacts while maximizing electric system reliability. Smart grid is thought to be a key solution for them. The deployment of smart grid affects facilities strategy. Murata analyzes facilities strategy for smart grid deployment from the viewpoints of regulations and area characteristics.

 
Eiichi Yamamoto, "Management of Intellectual Assets such as Patents, in the United States and Japan"

In a knowledge economy where there is global competition, intellectual assets become a key factor in a company's performance. The United States government recognized the significance of intellectual assets as a company's value earlier than Japan and has promoted a pro-patent policy since the early 1980s. The policy has encouraged U.S. companies to take advantage of the profitability of patents, much more than Japanese companies have done. In this presentation, Yamamoto analyzes the differences in the management of intellectual assets, such as patents, between the United States and Japan, and tries to explain the reasons for those differences.

In this talk, we describe enormous opportunities for innovation in delivering information technology based services. We start by describing inefficiencies, estimated to be about $15 Trillion, in how the world operates today (e.g. in industries like transportation and healthcare), some of which can be eliminated by infusing more instrumentation and intelligence into these systems. We then describe some unique challenges faced in emerging economies like India, for example, much larger scales of operations (for anything involving people), lower price points, and the need to handle noisy data. We provide several examples of innovations in dealing with these challenges. One of them is Spoken Web, our attempt to create a new world wide web, accessible over the (mobile) phone network, for the masses in countries like India. The Spoken Web platform facilitates easy creation of user-generated content that populates "voice sites", allows contextual traversal of voice sites interconnected via hyperlinks based on the HyperSpeech Transfer Protocol, and provides simple search and navigation capabilities over this audio content.  We present our experience from pilots conducted in villages that shows the potential for dissemination of information and services to the masses using Spoken Web and interesting possibilities regarding social networking in these communities. Finally, we describe several opportunities for improving efficiency, quality and value from delivering various kinds of services globally, and the computer science and multi-disciplinary problems that arise in that context.

Manish Gupta is the Director of IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist for IBM India/South Asia. He leads a team conducting research on technologies underlying innovation in Services, Software and Systems, and is leading the IBM Research activities across the world in the Mobile Web area. Previously, he has held senior leadership positions at IBM Research - India, IBM India Systems and Technology Lab, and the T. J. Watson Research Center, where he led research on software for the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. IBM was awarded the 2008 National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the invention of the Blue Gene supercomputer by US President Barack Obama in October 2009. Manish received a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 1987 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. He has co-authored over 70 papers, with more than 3000 citations in Google Scholar, in the areas of high performance compilers, parallel computing, and Java Virtual Machine optimizations, and has filed eighteen patents. Manish has received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence at IBM, and has been invited to give keynotes at several international conferences and workshops. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

Do new information technologies advance democratization?  Among the diverse countries with large Muslim communities, how do such technologies provide capacities and constraints on institutional change?  What are the ingredients of the modern recipe for democratic transition or democratic entrenchment?  Around the developing world, political leaders face a dilemma: the very information and communication technologies that boost economic fortunes also undermine power structures. Globally, one in ten internet users is a Muslim living in a populous Muslim community. In these countries, young people are developing their political identities-including a transnational Muslim identity-online. In countries where political parties are illegal, the internet is the only infrastructure for democratic discourse. And in countries with large Muslim communities, mobile phones and the internet are helping civil society build systems of political communication independent of the state and beyond easy manipulation by cultural or religious elites.  With evidence from fieldwork in Azerbaijan, Egypt, Tajikistan and Tanzania, and using the latest fuzzy-set statistical models, I demonstrate  that communications technologies have played a crucial role in advancing democracy in Muslim countries. Certainly, no democratic transition has occurred solely because of the internet. But, as I argue, no democratic transition can occur today without the internet. In the last 15 years, technology diffusion trends have contributed to clear political outcomes, and digital media have become a key ingredient in the modern recipe for democratization.

Philip N. Howard is associate professor of communication, information and international studies at the University of Washington.  His books include New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (Cambridge, 2005) and The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Oxford, 2011).  Currently, he directs the NSF-funded Project on Information Technology and Political Islam.

Abstract
Consider three different worlds of poor network connectivity:

• Scenario 1: A user in Africa uses a cheap mobile device with voice and SMS as the only data connectivity channel (140 bytes per message and each SMS costs money).
• Scenario 2: A university in India has good connectivity which is shared simultaneously by 400 users. (Per user share = 2 Kbps)
• Scenario 3: A school in Kenya has a computer but no Internet.

In this talk, I will describe a range of techniques we have developed to enhance information access in these three scenarios of poor connectivity. In Scenario 1, we have built an entire SMS-based protocol stack for mobile applications being used in India, Mexico and Ghana as well as a live SMS search engine in Kenya. We are also rolling out a data-over-GSM voice stack to support data connectivity over cellular voice.

In Scenario 2, I will describe why some of the fundamentals of network protocols break down in these regimes and why we need a completely new Web architecture for these types of networks. We have deployed early versions of our system in a few schools and universities in India, Kenya.

In Scenario 3, I will describe how we can use vertical search engines to deliver a vertical slice of the Web in a hard-disk and provide an offline searchable and browse-able Internet. This system has been used in schools in India and Kenya as an educational tool for students and teachers.

This is joint work with several others with Jay Chen being a primary leader for many of these projects.

Lakshminarayanan Subramanian is an Assistant Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.

His research interests are in the areas of networks, distributed systems and computing for development. He co-leads the Networks and Wide-Area Systems(NeWS) group (which investigates software solutions for distributed systems, wireline and wireless networking, operating system, security and privacy, technologies and applications for the developing world) and the CATER Lab at NYU ( which focuses on developing and deploying low-cost, innovative technology solutions to some of the problems in developing regions in terms of communication, healthcare and microfinance).

Recently, he has co-established a new Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED) at NYU Abu Dhabi which brings together students from several disciplines (CS, economics, healthcare, education, policy). He is the recipient of several awards including the  NSF CAREER Award (2009), IBM Faculty Award (2009, 2010) and C.V. Ramamoorthy Award. He has been at the forefront of several technological innovations for development that have been used in several countries around the world.