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Projects

Rural Wireless

  • WiLDNet: WiLDNet refers to Wifi-based Long Distance Networks, a new technology we developed that can deliver over 7-10 Mbps over 100 kms for less than $1000. WiLDNet has been deployed in 7 developing countries and currently is used to provide telemedicine services in South India for 50000 patients/year.
  • ROMA: This project aims to build a high performance indoor multi-hop wireless network where every wireless node is equipped with multiple radios that operate in different channels.
  • WiRE architecture: The Wifi-based Rural Extensions (WiRE) project aims to extend the WiLDNet project to build a comprehensive low-cost wireless architecture for rural network connectivity. The WiRE architecture uses a combination of point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and omni-directional networks.

Next Generation Mobile Services

  • UjU: is a mobile application platform that simplies the design of new SMS-based mobile applications.
  • SmartTrack: A highly reliable, widely available, secure and distributed mobile information system. SmartTrack is built on top of Efficient Lightweight Mobile Records (ELMR) that provides a practical and lightweight database access protocol for efficiently accessing, searching and updating database records remotely from mobile devices. SmartTrack enables a wide range of applications using SMSAppStore.
  • Hermes: A physical layer modulation/demodulation protocol that enables data communication over unknown acoustic voice channels. Hermes provides 1.5 Kbps data connectivity over a narrowband 3 Khz GSM voice channel.
  • SMSFind: An SMS-based web search engine. It addresses the problem of how to answer a search query in 140 bytes of search response.
  • Atmosphere: A system that enables ATMs to operate in villages in the face of intermittent connectivity. RuralATM provides offline authentication as well as lazy consistency in the face of minimal risk.

Web for developing regions

  • RuralCafe: A system that provides enhanced web search capabilities over low-bandwidth and intermittent networks. This system is tailored to improve web search in Internet cafes in villages with minimal network connectivity.
  • Contextual Information Portals: A system that generates a vertical slice of the Web on any topic and presents an offline-browesable and searchable information portal on that topic.
  • Event Logger for Firefox (ELF): A Firefox extension that logs various browsing statistics and reports them back to a central server for analysis. It is an easily deployable client-side logging tool for researchers to understand search and browsing behavior. 

Trust and Identity Management 

  • PaperSpeckle: A new low-cost watermarking solution that we have developed to show that any piece of paper can be uniquely watermarked using a pen and $50 microscope.
  • Epothecary: A system which uses built-in functionality in midlevel mobile telephones including cameras, SMS, and optionally GPS to construct a robust system for tracking and verifying the pedigrees of pharmaceutical products at every point in the distribution chain
  • Signet: A system which uses the computational power of commodity mobile telephones and security enabled Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards to create a secure and auditable record for atomic in-person transactions in the developing world. Signet performs this function at very low operating cost and without requiring continuous connectivity to a trusted third party.

Sustainable Power Solutions 

  • SimbaLink: Designing decentralized and sustainable solar-based rural electrification systems. SimbaLink significantly reduces the cost of maintenance of rural solar home systems.

Climate and Agriculture 

  • Climatic Information Portals: An Information portal that uses data mining techniques to mine for information available on the Web to automatically build a location-specific climatic and agricultural portal. This can act as an early warning system to detect climate-triggered catastrophes.
  • Human-enabled Environmental Sensing: Leveraging humans with mobile devices to sense key environmental and agricultural parameters (soil quality, water availability) to enable microscopic sensing and generate appropriate feedback for agricultural farmers to increase productivity.