IIIT-H to launch $250 workstation

IIIT-H, along with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and a Korean manufacturer, Trigen, have taken up a mega project to bring out infotainment workstations. This project aims at making cost-effective infotainment workstations available at around $250 as against the current price of $3,000. The three organisations are jointly working on this project and expect to make low-cost PCs available in the market by 2007.

This new integrated information and communication work machine (PCtvt—TV, PVR, videophone, IP phone and PC) combines the advantages of a PC with a capacity for video streaming, television, IP phone and movies, all rolled into one. According to Dr Raj Reddy, head of the Robotics Laboratory, CMU, and chairman of board of IIIT-H, the price reduction in new age PCs probably poses a challenge to the television industry.

Students of IIIT-H and CMU are currently working on software that makes for a better human-machine interface. Often, the man-machine interface in the present form is quite disruptive, so focused research in the areas of speech recognition and cognition may be able to breach this barrier. To overcome the present system of interface—WIMPy (Windows, icons, mouse and process)—the exercise is on towards developing SILKy (speech, image, language and knowledge) interfaces. “These will be self-improving interfaces backed by intelligent agents and intuitive support systems; they will certainly impact both urban and rural markets. The effort is also on building a rural-user interface that will mean a low-cost PC by 2007. This will be a multi-function information appliance,” Reddy says.

To make the rural connectivity project successful in a country like India, there is a need to address four Cs: connectivity at high speed, computer access, computer literacy and content. Since a common man in a remote area uses video interface, higher speed of connectivity is needed more in rural areas than by a professional working for an MNC. The best way for countries to leverage the power of information would be to provide free connectivity. To bridge the Digital Divide, we need more convenient man-machine interfaces where several PC functionalities are accessed remotely.

Another interesting project taken up by IIIT-H is participating in developing an online global library. The digital library set up at IIIT-H has already digitised about 60,000 books and plans to digitise about 10 lakh books by 2005. This world-class digital library would possibly match that of Harvard University, according to IIIT-H.

As part of the contract from Universal Digital Library (UDL), eight centres in the country are working on digitising books on numerous topics. Trinaina Informatics is one company that bagged this contract and is doing work at IIIT-H. During the past four months, about 20,000 books (60 lakh pages) were scanned. “As per the contract, we have to scan about 200 books (4,000 pages) per shift, 2,500 pages per scanner in a shift, but we are able to scan 4,000 pages in a shift,” reveals V Jaganmohan Reddy, executive director, Trinaina.