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Research Goals of Media Lab Asia’s IIT
Bombay / Maharashtra Hub
Surmounting the Language Barrier:
Most of the internet information today is in English language,
which makes them unavailable to the rural masses untutored in the
language. The real antidote to the problem ought to be this: Most
of the advanced information relating to the agricultural sector
should be in local languages. And should be accessible for the
farmers to read, assimilate and use. There is also the need for cross-language
information transfer where climatic and agricultural conditions
are similar (like Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Orissa). This will allow
avoiding duplication of research and information collection
efforts. So, as part of Media Lab Asia activities, we are
developing a system called "AGRO-EXPLORER" with multilingual
information access facility. This will resemble a search engine,
but instead of searching on plain text it will do the search on
the meaning representation, that will be expressed in a
novel knowledge representation and interlingual form called
Universal Networking Language (UNL) expressions. These are
unambiguous representations which store the meaning in binary
predicate form. So when a search for information on, say,
biological fertilizer is attempted, information that was
originally available in languages other than the one in which the
keywords are specified will also be used to return the response.
Thus, with AGRO-EXPLORER, activities will become more knowledge-driven and cross-language information access will make large
volume of techniques and experiences available to a multilingual
farmer community of a country like India.
Towards Accessible Preventive Healthcare.
Despite many technological advancements
that the country can
boast of today, certain apparently
simpler imperatives seem to have eluded us yet. For example, we
are still far from the goal
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of providing treated, safe drinking water to a large
fraction of our population. In the times to come, preserving the purity of our natural water
systems - aquifers and rivers - and improving quality of water
supplied to the public will become a crucial responsibility of the
government. With this in view a part of the Media Lab Asia
initiative has been geared towards developing low-cost sensors
(see article in the section Healthfile)
that will allow rapid and reliable water quality assessment,
especially in economically less-developed zones.
Easy to use Devices and Interfaces.
Another goal of MLA
is to demonstrate the impact of the research that is being
conducted under it. Many MLA projects will need to create
deployable demonstration prototype products. Also, all products
need to have well-designed interfaces. The need is even more so,
if the products need to be used by non-technical users. To achieve
the overall goals of Media Lab Asia at large, the IITB/Maharashtra
Hub has set up a research organ named Facility for the Design
and Evaluation of Devices and Interfaces (FDEDI). Its
research activities will focus on strategies and design solutions
and will carry out design evaluation projects to verify and deploy
these strategies. Our initial efforts will be in the arenas of
AgroExplorer, and interfaces for sensors.
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These will involve
carrying out user studies by contextual inquiry, creation of
work-models and designing interfaces and products to support the
work. FDEDI will use the insight gained through its research
activities and through design for other projects to leverage the
interface design for all projects. We expect that projects that
are in their early stages of deployment will gain substantially
from this. |
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