HP Labs India

India Emerges as Innovation Hub

Manu Joseph
http://www.wired.com/
October 11th 2004

Generations of Indians have grown up recounting jokes about how the only contribution their nation has made to the world is the invention of zero. Innovation was something other people did.

That's no longer the case. At research labs across the country, Indians are creating technologies specifically designed for the nation's multilingual masses and its poor. In doing so, the country is emerging as a research hub for technologies geared to the Third World.

While the name Hewlett-Packard reminds many Indians of their temperamental office printers, in HP's research center in Bangalore a team is working on something far nobler. Shekar Borgaonkar and his team are building what they call Script Mail, a device that makes electronic communication easier for people who speak languages that can't be typed on a standard keyboard.

The device contains a pad with a small monitor attached to it. A user has to position a piece of paper on the pad and write in any language with an electronic pen. Script Mail recognizes the handwriting, and the message is displayed on the monitor for corrections and stored. Using an external modem, the scribble can be e-mailed.

The device entirely eliminates the keyboard, a fundamental impediment in a country where there are 18 official languages and hundreds of other languages and dialects.

"Script Mail can be really useful in the backward regions of the country where there are no phone lines but only post offices," Borgaonkar said.

He envisions using Script Mail in small kiosks in villages. Villagers could write on the pad in their mother tongues or, if they're illiterate, a postal employee could do it for them. The employee could store messages and then distribute them to other post offices.

"Unlike a telegram, Script Mail will let villagers write as much as they want. I believe this would dramatically improve the speed and quality of communication in backward areas," Borgaonkar said.

Borgaonkar said that field trials of the device are under way and that he expects the product to be available in India sometime next year. He did not want to guess its price but noted that "obviously it is going to be very cheap."

Meanwhile in Mumbai, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kirti Trivedi, has built what he calls a "compact media center" for schools without enough computer equipment to go around. It puts a range of home entertainment systems and a PC in a single black box about 1 cubic foot in volume. It has a 120-GB hard disk, a Pentium 4 processor, a modem, a hard disk, a DVD drive, four USB ports to connect external devices and a television tuner. It is a television and a personal computer rolled into one, but it does not have a monitor. Instead, the black box contains a projector with SVGA resolution that can beam a 300-inch-high image sharply on a wall.

The device, which comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse, is being marketed as K-yan by Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services, a group made up of several Indian banks. Priced at about $3,200, a single K-yan can tutor a large classroom of nearly 100 students in schools that cannot afford multiple personal computers.

"The 180 pieces that have been sold in the last few months have chiefly gone to educational institutions," Trivedi said. "I look at K-yan as an educational tool that can introduce large groups of poor children to basic computing because of the sheer size of the image that can be beamed on a wall or a screen. There is scope for interactivity, too. Though all children share a single screen, they can interact with the image through wireless keyboards and mouse."

K-yan's mobility, according to Trivedi, has interested the Indian army, too. Developers have also received inquiries from educational groups in developing countries like Malaysia and Kazakhstan.

About 400 miles away, an institute in the South Indian city of Hyderabad is building software to translate English intelligently into Indian languages.

"Very few Indians can speak or read English, but they may be interested in the ocean of English data that is available," said Rajeev Sangal, director of the International Institute of Information Technology.

Sangal said the institute's Shakti software translates English prose into several Indian languages. Nuances of English and other target languages are fed into Shakti's elaborate algorithm. The institute is also working on translating English into an African language.

"Language translation is very complex because languages are complex," Sangal said. "And Western nations that usually pioneer research have no real motivation to be involved in language translation because they are chiefly monolingual countries. That's why India is crucial here. Just about a billion people in this world speak English. The rest may need Shakti."

In a few months, Sangal plans to release a kit that will translate English prose into three Indian languages -- Hindi, Telugu and Marathi. Work is under way on other Indian languages, though Sangal said developers are not looking at Shakti as a commercial venture.

In rural areas, Media Lab Asia, initiated in India in association with MIT, is reaching out to villages lacking telecommunications infrastructure. Unlike other Media Labs in developed countries that create exotic technologies, Media Lab Asia is working on improving life in remote areas. In a village in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the nearest telephone is 5 kilometers away, the lab is using Wi-Fi enabled computing devices to carry voice from remote regions to other parts.

"A string of kiosks connected through Wi-Fi can carry voice and data over long distances," said G.V. Ramaraju, a scientist involved in the lab's research activities. "That way, vast swathes of regions with no last-mile connectivity can be connected through wireless technology."

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