National

India-inspired low-cost PC may be a global first

By Anand Parthasarathy

HYDERABAD, MARCH 14. A joint initiative of the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) based here and the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in the U.S., with the support of the Andhra Pradesh Government, may see the emergence of a radically new type of Personal Computer, optimised to serve millions of rural people on the wrong side of the so-called "digital divide."

Conceived by Raj Reddy, Professor of Computer Science and founder-director of the internationally-known Robotics Institute at CMU, the low-cost PC is driven by a television-type remote, doubles as a television set, and can be used to view movies on a DVD player, make cheap telephones calls riding the Internet — and even serve as a video conferencing tool.

All this is in addition to normal PC functions many of which can be accessed by voice commands in a local language.

While a "Media PC" of this type is either still in a concept stage — or is exorbitantly priced — the PC-TVT as it is called — has been made in pilot quantities by Korea's largest PC maker, Trigem, and the first few pieces were unveiled last week at the annual Research and Development Showcase of IIIT. Rajeev Sangal, the Institute's Director, told The Hindu that student teams were already working on localising the PC for use by Andhra villagers — with Telugu-driven content.

"It is a misnomer to think we can palm off low-end PCs on our villagers," Dr. Reddy says: "The computational horsepower required by an illiterate user is much more than that of a Microsoft hotshot — because a villager cannot be bothered to learn a new language, or even how to operate a key board.

The system must be more versatile if it has to serve him. The "WIMPY" interface we are used to must be replaced by a tool making use of the Speech-Images-Language-

Knowledge."

Dr. Reddy also imposed on his PC specification, a limitation that it must primarily drive the entertainment needs of the average rural Indian family — and must not cost more than the price of a cup of tea every day to operate. The hard core applications will be accepted once the cultural barrier is broken.

The Korean-made product which boasts a 40 GB hard drive, a colour monitor, a customised "remote" with icons instead of the 1 to 9 number keys, a DVD drive, a telephone handset and a tiny video camera, runs on a budget Intel Celeron chip. While proto type costs are around $ 400 equivalent, the price is expected to come down to around $ 200-$ 250 with quantity production.

IIIT will work hand in hand with the State's IT department so that the first few hundred units funded by the CMU will reach Andhra villages in a pilot scheme before July 2004. Dr. Reddy, who is also the chairman of the IIIT's governing council, says the product when it rolls out in numbers

will be a world first at that price point and with that type of functionality and can be localised for use in all developing countries.

The R&D Showcase — the third organised by the IIIT, showcased a number of socially relevant applications developed by students in cutting edge technologies such as image processing, wireless networks, machine translation and robotics.

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