HP Labs India

EMS Solution Week at Kuppam i-community, March 8-15, 2003

HP Labs India demonstrated a number of prototype technologies and solutions at the Solution Week organized by EMS at the Kuppam Mandal Office between March 8-15, 2003. The labs staff worked on setting up the demos the preceding week.

The Solution Week was thrown open by the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Chandrababu Naidu at a brief press event on the afternoon of the 8th at which Anand Tawker, S. Ramani, Debra Dunn and Dick Lampman were the other speakers. Shri Naidu then proceeded to visit each of the demos accompanied by the others.

The solution week continued through the rest of the week and attracted a number of visitors from the community. Various staff members and projects students from the lab volunteered to man these demos during the course of the week.

For each of the demos, special posters were created that explained the concept of the demo in simple terms and the local language (“Telugu”). The demos were also given more appropriate names (not the ones given below). For example, the scriptmail project was called “Chitralekha” and the handwriting demo on TabletPC was called “Computer Palaka” (meaning “slate computer”).

The demos from the lab were as follows:

Adult Literacy Testing

		The demo featured a prototype solution for testing literacy in the local language (Telugu) using a multimodal interface that incorporated touch screen input and voice output). The State Resource Centre (SRC), Hyderabad that specializes in Adult and Continuing Education, created the content for this demo. The solution prints a certificate to be given out to the user at the end of the test.

On March 7 (before the inauguration) the first set of 7 learners were allowed to take the test. A certificate and a photograph were handed out to each participant identifying the level they had achieved in the test. Shri Naidu officially launched this solution by the act of giving out the first few certificates during the press event.

In addition to this, a supplementary primer covering a variety of important aspects of life and providing sample questions was launched during the event. SRC was involved in the creation of this primer too.

Scriptmail

The demo featured the Scriptmail prototype. Visitors could essentially send handwritten messages to any email address from the devices on display.

Online Handwriting Recognition

The demo featured the online handwriting recognition technology developed at the lab in the guise of a TabletPC application designed to test numeracy and simple mathematics. The demo featured a series of simple math problems whose numeric answers had to be written into boxes provided on the TabletPC screen. A railway reservation form filling application was also demonstrated along with the numeracy test.

Solar-Powered Village Photoshop

The demo showed the use of locally manufactured solar panels and UPS to power a digital camera and compact photo printer.

WiFi connectivity

The demo showed the use of WiFi connectivity in the form of a NetMeeting session between a computer placed in the stall, and one in the mobile community center (bus). This was to demonstrate how one can connect the Mandal office and villages through this technology.

Visitors

Visitors to the event included villagers who did not know reading and writing, school children who were more comfortable with English, college students who were computer literate, teachers and local government staff who used the local language extensively, and social workers of the area and district information officers. On an average 20 villagers per day attended the solutions week, apart from 50 school children, 100 engineering students, 50 polytechnic students and 50 odd students from an Arts College.