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Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

SHRINKING WORLD, EXPANDING NET

Some Speaker Bios

Annalee C. Babb

Annalee Babb is a former journalist and diplomat who is currently working as a Research Fellow at the Murrow Center for International Information and Communication while completing her Ph.D. dissertation at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. The title of her dissertation is "Small States, the Internet and Development: Pathways to Power in a Global Information Society." Annalee's areas of specialization are International Technology Policy and Management, Communications and Development, and Comparative and Developmental Political Analysis.

Annalee was a member of the Barbados Foreign Service for nine years, during that time also serving at the Embassy of Barbados, Washington, DC, as First Secretary with primary responsibility for bilateral relations with the United States. She also has worked with international venture capital firm SOFTBANK, in its European Business Development Division, as a journalist and editor in Barbados, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at Emerson College. In June 2002, Annalee presented a paper "e-Selling Caricom", at UNCTAD's Regional High-Level Workshop on Electronic Commerce and ICT for Central America and the Caribbean, in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles.

Libby Levison

I am concerned with finding appropriate uses of computer technologies for the developing world. Technologies designed for the developed world are often inappropriate for the developing world. One example of this are Internet search engines, which expect that the users have high connectivity and can easily access and sort through the thousands of URLs returned. This is not the case in many low-bandwidth, low-connectivity settings.

For the past two years I have worked with co-investigator Saman Amarasinghe and a team of students to build the TEK Search Engine, an email-based search engine designed for low-connectivity, low-bandwidth communities. TEK collects the user's search request and submits it by email to a server on the Internet backbone. The server then selects a set of pages, downloads them, and returns the actual pages to the user by email. This method saves the user in both time and cost.

In addition to interests in Appropriate Information Technologies, I am also interested in the uses of computers and public health. I worked for two years in Malawi, a small, sub-Saharan African country, as the Computer Advisor to the Ministry of Health, and have consulted for a Boston-based organization on computerizing their drug stock management. I am also currently completing a Masters in Public Health.

More information on the TEK project is available at: http://cag.lcs.mit.edu/tek

Recent Publications:

"Searching the World Wide Web in Low-Connectivity Communities". William Thies, Janelle Prevost, Tazeen Mahtab, Genevieve T. Cuevas, Saad Shakhshir, Alexandro Artola, Binh D. Vo, Yuliya Litvak, Sheldon Chan, Sid Henderson, Mark Halsey, Libby Levison, and Saman Amarasinghe. Proceedings of The 11th International World Wide Web Conference: Global Community Track, May, 2002.

"Providing Web Search Capability for Low Connectivity Communities". Libby Levison, William Thies, Saman Amarasinghe. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS): Social Implications of Information and Communication Technology. June 2002.

"The TEK Search Engine". Libby Levison, Bill Thies, Saman Amarasinghe. Proceedings of the Development by Design Workshop, July 2001.

Hani Shakeel

Hani Shakeel is a recent graduate of the MIT Technology and Policy Program. His graduate research on multi-literate communication technologies was conducted in the eDevelopment Group at the Media Laboratory. Hani currently works for the Monitor Company, a strategic consulting firm, in New York City.

Carlos A. Osorio

Carlos is working towards his PhD at the Technology and Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is also research assistant at the Program on Internet and Telecoms Convergence. He is associate professor (on leave) from the Business School at the Universidad Adolfo Ibanez in Chile, has been visiting research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, research associate at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. His research focuses on information technologies and economic development, privacy and security enhancing technologies for e-business, and the dynamics of copyrights and illegal copying of software in the development of software markets. Carlos holds a B. Sc. in Engineering and an Engineer's degree from the University of Chile and, as Fulbright Scholar, a Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard University.