http://infoworld.com/d/applications/semantic-web-set-critical-mass-870
Google is working with the MIT Africa Information Technology Initiative (AITI), an organization that sends MIT students to Kenya to teach a mobile programming course to university students during the (northern) summer. Over the past several months, Google has supported AITI to expand their existing program. And starting this week, AITI will deliver an intensive six-week course at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. Students from Strathmore University, University of Nairobi, and Jomo Kenyatta University will attend this program to learn how to develop mobile applications. Instructors from these universities have also been invited to participate as liaisons to observe the course and assist students.
Google supports the AITI program in a variety of ways. During the course, Google engineers will mentor students remotely through an online social network. Additionally, Google will contribute Android curriculum materials. We will also provide support for faculty who wish to teach course modules during the following year.
The AITI program seeks to build both technical and entrepreneurial skills. This summer's course topics will include Java, mobile technologies, J2ME, SMS, server-side technologies, and emergent mobile technologies. In addition to the technical curriculum, the course seeks to build entrepreneurial skills by incorporating guest lecturers with expertise in the Kenyan technology market, mobile challenges, a group mobile application project, and a business plan competition.
The program will also have a vibrant web community for our students and instructors. This community will allow the participants to post or answer questions, evaluate the class, search and post job openings, search for course materials, and so on. This online community will help to make this program sustainable beyond the six-week summer session.
http://google-africa.blogspot.com/2009/06/university-outreach-in-kenya.html
TAKING your medicine even for a week is a drag. Taking it every day for six months is a real nuisance. Yet that is what is asked of those being treated for tuberculosis. They need to pop their pills for half a year if they are to eliminate the bacteria that cause the infection and combat the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains. Worse, from the point of view of compliance, the actual symptoms of infection tend to go away after just two months of taking the medicine, so the incentive to carry on is negligible. But worse than that, the drugs themselves produce unpleasant symptoms, including nausea, diarrhoea, headaches and insomnia. Indeed, one common anti-TB drug, rifampicin, also has the unnerving side effect of turning people’s tears, sweat and urine a shade of reddish orange.
Every cloud, though, has a silver lining, for it was this strange, if harmless, side effect that gave a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) their crucial idea: stamp-sized patches, much like litmus paper, that change colour when exposed to the urine of people with traces of medicine in their systems. The crucial trick of XoutTB, as the system built around these patches is known, is that the change in colour reveals a code that a patient can text-message to a service which rewards him with free airtime minutes on his mobile phone. Patients thus have a daily incentive to take their terrible pills.
The XoutTB project began in the spring of 2007, with the launch of the Yunus Challenge, a now-annual contest at MIT to promote development in poor countries. Muhammad Yunus, after whom the challenge is named, is a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of microfinance—the idea that loans too small for traditional banks to handle are nevertheless crucial in enabling businesses to flourish in the poorer parts of the world.
The winner of that year’s challenge was Jose Gomez-Marquez, a medical engineer at MIT. His original idea, inspired by Dr Yunus’s work, was to involve local banks (in this case in Nicaragua) in a scheme that would give TB patients micro-loans in exchange for evidence that they had been taking their medication. That plan fell by the wayside because the banks did not want to get involved. But phone companies were willing to give it a try, and brought with them the bonus of an established infrastructure for distributing the rewards. The resulting trial, which involved 30 people with tuberculosis, was a success, and a second is about to be carried out in Pakistan, where a batch of 400 XoutTB patches is arriving this month.
Conditions in Karachi, the Pakistani city in which the trial is being conducted, could politely be described as “challenging”. According to Rachel Glennerster, a member of the XoutTB team who has worked as an economist at the IMF and the British Treasury, the local clinics are closed about 60% of the time and doctors or nurses are often absent during the 40% when the doors are nominally open. Such absences—and the associated lack of compliance-monitoring—are one of the things for which XoutTB is designed to compensate.
Pakistan, though, offers a second difficulty. Aamir Khan, the director of XoutTB’s operations in the country, has quickly discovered that one of the neediest groups of people there are 15- to 25-year-old women. Unfortunately, they are often under the thumbs of their parents or husbands and are not allowed mobile phones of their own. Dr Khan is therefore considering the idea of a different reward—high-energy food supplements to combat malnutrition. The system would not supply food, per se, but would instead top up credit at the patient’s grocer using an automatic link.
If XoutTB does work, the team has ambitions to extend it. Other drugs, too, can be a nuisance to remember. The anti-retrovirals used to combat AIDS, for example, have to be taken for the rest of a patient’s life. And taking medicines for non-infectious conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure is also a chore. Find the right “litmus test”, though, and what is now being done with TB drugs could succeed with any of these as well. Taking your medicine could, at last, become a truly rewarding experience.
http://www.economist.com/science/tm/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13481326
The research was led at Harvard by graduate student Nanfang Yu and Federico Capasso, a professor of applied physics and a senior research fellow in electrical engineering, and at Hamamatsu by Hirofumi Kan, general manager of the company's laser group.
Polarization is one of the key features defining a laser beam. "Controlling [polarization] represents an important new step toward beam engineering of lasers with unprecedented flexibility, tailored for specific applications," explains Capasso. "The novelty of our approach is that instead of being conducted externally, which requires bulky and expensive optical components, manipulation of the beam polarization is achieved by directly integrating the polarizer on the laser facet." Capasso notes that the compact solution is applicable to semiconductor lasers and other solid-state lasers, all the way from communication wavelengths to the mid-infrared and terahertz spectrum.
Light sources with a desirable polarization state are useful for a wide variety of applications. For example, satellite communications use two orthogonal polarizations to double a channel's capacity. Lasers featuring a variety of polarization states also have relevance for quantum cryptography.
To achieve their results, the researchers sculpted a metallic structure, dubbed a "plasmonic polarizer," directly on the facet of a quantum cascade (QC) laser. The QC laser emitted light at a wavelength of ten microns (in the invisible part of the spectrum known as the mid-infrared, where the atmosphere is transparent). The team was able to control the state of polarization by generating both linearly polarized light in an arbitrary direction and circularly polarized light.
The research teams' other members are postdoctoral researcher Qijie Wang and research associates Christian Pflügl and Laurent Diehl (all from Harvard) and researchers Tadataka Edamura, Sninichi Furuta and Masamichi Yamanishi (all from Hamamatsu Photonics).
The research was partially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The project also received the support of two Harvard-based centers, the NSF-funded Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) and the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), which is a member of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN).
Harvard says it has filed for a broad patent on the invention.
Every jump in technology brings about challenges. Just think back to the Verizon World Phone, a CDMA/GSM device touted as working on both European and domestic networks. Except the device was fraught with problems, and it took years to get it right. Even now, users say the phone remains glitch-prone.
But in the interim, it seems the industry has learned a few lessons. Even as it speeds toward 4G and faces a similarly steep mountain of interoperability issues, manufacturers are taking a more cautious approach as they strive to create technological marvels capable of seamless roaming between three generations of wireless technologies.
“It’s going to be just as hard, but the industry learned a painful lesson when they went from 2G to 3G, and they’re trying to correct their past mistakes. They’re doing more interoperability testing, [which is] going a long way to make sure products work when they’re introduced,” says Michael Thelander, CEO and founder of Signals Research Group.
Instead of an immediate move to high-profile handsets, the initial focus will be on larger form factor dongles. For its part, Verizon is following that trend before moving into higher-complexity, smaller form factor devices embedded in digital single lens reflex cameras and game systems.
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/itemdetail.cfm?item_id=4871
A team of European researchers believe they could be. Whereas most recent initiatives aimed at making more efficient use of the radio spectrum have looked at spectrum management from the network end, the team behind the ORACLE (Opportunistic Radio Communications in unLicensed Environments) project focused instead on making handsets actively manage how and when they use the network.
ORACLE’s pioneering approach promises to minimise bandwidth saturation in both licensed bands of the radio spectrum, such as that used to carry mobile phone signals, and unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) bands – the kind used by WiFi networks and RFID chips.
“With demand booming for new services, both in terms of the number of connections and also quality, we need to find better ways of utilising the radio spectrum available to us… otherwise we will reach a point of saturation,” notes Dominique Noguet, the head of the Digital Architecture Design and Prototyping lab at Minatec CEA-LETI in France and coordinator of the ORACLE project. “We are dealing with a finite resource, but one that can be reused in novel ways,” he adds.
Because it is used for many kinds of communications, from TV broadcasting and mobile phone signals to wireless internet access and military applications – each of which could interfere with the other – the radio spectrum is probably the most tightly regulated natural resource in the world. Mobile operators, who pay billions of euros for licenses, are therefore continually looking for ways to squeeze more out of the limited bandwidth available to them. However, while more efficient network management by operators has gone some way toward addressing the issue, there are limits to the gains in capacity that can be made by following that approach, Noguet says.
“Recent initiatives have focused on operators sharing information about network use with each other so that high traffic on one network can utilise unused bandwidth on another. But I doubt operators will be very willing to share that information as it could help their competitors,” he notes.
Instead, the team behind the ORACLE project have put mobile handsets to the task of finding available bandwidth and using it in the best way possible. In some cases, the approach takes operators and traditional mobile networks (centred on static base stations that relay signals) out of the equation.
The core technology relies on highly sensitive sensors in the handset that monitor radio spectrum usage by other devices and base stations in their immediate vicinity, combined with software that opportunistically decides when and what bandwidth to use when it becomes available. The approach is known as Opportunistic Radio (OR) and it could lead to a dramatic rethink of the way networks are managed, Noguet predicts.
“The techniques go far beyond the capabilities of modern mobile terminals, but they hold the potential to overcome part of the bandwidth problems operators are facing,” he explains.
http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&ID=90473
While it is unlikely, and most people would say undesirable, that computers can ever take the place of teachers, they are becoming an indispensable support tool in many subjects and this may soon also be the case with music.
As with most computer-aided teaching, the key to developing a musical tuition system is developing superior software able to hear and react to music being played and make judgements as to whether it is being played correctly.
This is what a consortium with partners from six European countries has been trying to do for the past three years in the EU-funded Vemus project – and if initial results are anything to go by they have succeeded.
http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&ID=90465
With the sale of their HSPA+ Huawei modem, Telekom Austria has managed to achieve the first commercial version of the service outside Asia, giving the operator significant esteem.
With Austria leading the European market in mobile broadband, it seems appropriate that the country should be first with an HSPA+ network – but several other European operators are not far behind in taking the plunge.
Telekom Austria has struggled with falling fixed-line subscribers and an increase in competition, but the huge growth expected in its mobile broadband market could well be the light at the end of the tunnel for the incumbent.
Telekom Austria has announced that its mobile unit, mobilkom austria, has become the first operator in Europe to launch HSPA+ services—offering a potential mobile data download speeds of 21Mbps. Powered by HSPA Evolution, Ericsson's high-speed broadband-access technology, the operator will roll out the network in parts of Vienna, with further hotspots following throughout the country during 2009.
HSPA+ boosts network capacity and enables peak data rates of up to 21Mbps, with mobilkom austria hoping to reach transmission speeds of up to 28.8Mbps later in the year. The technology will allow a greater number of customers to enjoy higher mobile broadband speeds, especially in congested urban areas. Mobilkom austria is offering its first HSDA+ modem, the Huawei E270+, on its A1 online shop for EUR 49 (US$67).
The First to Go Commercial in Europe: The first operator to launch a commercial version of the HSPA+ standard was Australia's Telstra, which enabled 21Mbps mobile broadband using Ericsson's Evolution technology. In Europe, Hutchison's 3 Scandinavia has achieved up-to-21Mbps speeds on its HSPA network, but has yet to deploy full HSPA+. Vipnet, Telekom Austria's Croatian mobile subsidiary, has successfully tested HSPA+ and will upgrade its 3G network to support the technology in major cities by "early Spring" this year, while Vodafone has trialled the technology in Spain, and Telecom Italia and Telefonica's German O2 unit are planning network launches this year. Elsewhere, in January 2009, Singapore operator Starhub commenced the upgrade of its mobile broadband network to HSPA+, while U.A.E. operator Etisalat has successfully conducted trials of HSPA+ and is on track to launch services by the second half of 2009. With the sale of the Huawei modem, Telekom Austria has managed to achieve the first commercial version of the service outside Asia, giving the operator significant esteem.
Austria Leads the Market in Mobile Broadband: Hannes Ametsreiter, Telekom Austria Group’s new CEO, who will take the helm on 1 April following the announcement this week of the departure of Boris Nemsic, stated: "Our 4.5 million subscribers can rely on the best, fastest and safest network of the country. With the launch of HSPA+ we are demonstrating our innovation leadership in the European market, offering our customers higher Internet browsing speeds and significantly improving their mobile broadband experience." Austria has the highest mobile broadband penetration in Europe, with every third household in having at least one mobile broadband user and every fifth household expressing the intention to buy a mobile broadband service. Mobilkom austria's mobile broadband network coverage currently amounts to 99% of the Austrian population. With Austria leading the European market in mobile broadband, it seems appropriate that the country should be first with an HSPA+ network—but several other European operators are not far behind in taking the plunge.
A Boost for the Struggling Incumbent: Mobilkom austria has tripled its mobile broadband subscribers in the past few years, with its customer base growing from 120,000 to 400,000 between 2006 and 2008. The operator now plans to cover 90% of the Austrian population with the UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA network, and to introduce the HSUPA 5.7 technology, in addition to HSPA+, in highly congested areas as of next month. Telekom Austria CEO-in-waiting Ametsreiter stated: "The high quality and speed of our network along, the attractive prices of our product bundles and the constant improvement of customer usability and convenience as well as of bandwidth-capacity are the main reasons behind this massive increase in mobile broadband subscribers and usage intensity." The incumbent operator has recently seen losses in its fixed-line market were offset by growth in its mobile businesses, where it saw subscriber base growth of 15.2% to 17.8 million customers globally, with a strong showing from its new Belarus operator, Velcom. The company has also recently been hit by huge charges relating to efforts to reduce its workforce and the sell-off of emerging European assets. Telekom Austria now faces further uncertainty, with rumours of a sell-off of the government stake in the incumbent, but the huge growth expected in its mobile broadband market could well be the light at the end of the tunnel.
The solution is aimed at helping Indian operators to expand into the country's massive rural markets where electricity supply is unreliable in many areas.
The deployment of green-energy solutions is on the rise across the global markets, as operators seek to achieve cost-savings and marketing gains.
The Ericsson Tower Tube radio base station houses all equipment within a self-contained site of about 5-metre diameter at the base. The towers do not require feeders and cooling systems, resulting in up to 40% lower consumption of power, which is the biggest operating cost. The solution also makes site acquisitions easier as compared to conventional sites as it requires less area for set up. This will reduce operating expenditures for operators and also bring down the total cost of construction, which ranges between 1.7 million rupees (US$33,484) to 3.5 million rupees per tower, depending on whether a tower is roof-based or ground-based. "This energy-optimised radio base station concept reflects our ability to understand and respond to customer requirements by reducing the total cost of ownership in order to expedite the roll out of mobile communications in India," Ericsson India and Sri Lanka VP (Marketing) P Balaji said in a statement in Mumbai.
Solution to Help Rural Network Expansion: India is adding over 10 million wireless subscribers every month and operators have aggressive targets for setting up towers. The new solution will particularly help in bringing mobile services into the country's massive rural areas, which exhibit the greatest growth potential. At the end of September 2008, mobile penetration in the rural areas, which constitute about 70% of the total population, stood at 11%, while the mobile penetration rate in the urban areas was close to 65%. Although during last year the industry has witnessed a growing trend of more and more operators focusing on the semi urban and rural markets, service expansion still remains a challenge in many rural and remote areas. TRAI has identified several key hurdles for service expansion in the rural areas, including a lengthy land acquisition process for setting up base stations; unavailability of a reliable power supply; high network maintenance costs; and the low purchasing power of individuals in rural areas. The wind-powered Ericsson Tower Tube solution will help address some of these inhibitors.
Deployment of Energy-Efficient Solutions Globally: Across the globe, operators in both developed and developing markets are increasingly demanding low-cost, energy efficient network solutions to cut costs, and achieve marketing gains from promoting their green credentials. In response, equipment vendors have been tapping into green energy sources and energy-efficient system designs, particularly for use in developing countries and more remote regions that may lack power infrastructure. Telekom Austria in February this year launched its first wind-powered mobile base station, with plans in place to convert up to 10% of its network infrastructure to wind turbine-powered units.
