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From CATER
CATER Lab is a multi-disciplinary research group focusing on Information and Communication Technology(ICT) for developing regions at New York University comprising of researchers from:
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
NYU School of Medicine
NYU Wagner School of Public Policy
NYU Department of Economics.
NEWS
| April 10, 2009 | CATER Workshop'09 |
| May 2009 | SmartTrack and ELMER soon to be deployed in Ghana |
| Dec 2008 | Diabetic Retinopathy deployed at Arvind Eye Hospitals, Tamilnadu, India |
| June 2008 | Rural Cafe deployed at Amrita University, India |
| June 2008 | User study for SmartTrack conducted in Ghana |
| Jan 2009 | The case for SmartTrack, accepted to ICTD 2009. |
| ATMosphere: A System for ATM Microdeposit Services in Rural Contexts, accepted to ICTD 2009. | |
| RuralCafe, accepted to ICTD 2009 Demo session. | |
| Web Browsing Behavior under Poor Connectivity accepted to CHI 2009 Work in Progress session. | |
| Feb 2009 | RuralCafe: Web Search in the Rural Developing World accepted to World Wide Web Conference 2009 |
| ELMER: Efficient Lightweight Mobile Health Records accepted to SIGMOD Demo session |
Essential services in developing regions suffer major setbacks due to lack of low-cost technological solutions to address the problems. Most of the technologies meant for developed nations are either expensive or unsuitable in rural environment. CATER focuses on developing and deploying low-cost, innovative technological solutions to some of the problems in the developing regions in terms of communication, healthcare, and microfinance.
Current Research
Our current research activities focuses on four areas:
Communication
- 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.
Web in 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.
Healthcare
- Automated Diabetic Retinopathy: We have developed an automated system that can analyze retinal images using statistical learning techniques to detect different forms of diabetic retinopathy, a disorder in the eye that can cause blindness.
- SmartTrack & ELMER: The project aims to create a highly reliable, widely available, secure and ultra low-cost smartphone based distributed drug information system that can be used for tracking the flow and consumption of ARV drugs in HAART programs.
Financial services
- 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.
- 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.
