[Colloq] Distinguished Speaker - Wednesday, April 11 - Eric Brewer

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium
Distinguished Speaker Series
Presents:
Eric Brewer
University of California, Berkeley

Wednesday, April 11, 2007
12:00pm
20 West Village F

Title:
"Technology for Developing Regions"
Bio:
ERIC BREWER focuses on all aspects of Internet-based systems, including 
technology, strategy, and government. As a researcher, he has led 
projects on scalable servers, search engines, network infrastructure, 
sensor networks, and security. His current focus is (high) technology 
for developing regions, with projects in India, Ghana, Rwanda and 
Cambodia among others, and including communications, health, education, 
and e-government.
In 1996, he co-founded Inktomi Corporation with a Berkeley grad student 
based on their research prototype, and helped lead it onto the Nasdaq 
100 before it was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003. In 2000, he founded 
the Federal Search Foundation, a 501-3(c) organization focused on 
improving consumer access to government information. Working with 
President Clinton, Dr. Brewer helped to create FirstGov.gov, the 
official portal of the Federal government, which launched in September 
2000.
He received an MS and Ph.D. in EECS from the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology, and a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley. He was named a "Global 
Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum, by the Industry 
Standard as the "most influential person on the architecture of the 
Internet", by InfoWorld as one of their top ten innovators, and by 
Forbes as one of their 12 "e-mavericks", for which he appeared on the 
cover.

"Technology for Developing Regions" Abstract
Moore's Law and the wave of technologies it enabled have led to 
tremendous improvements in productivity and the quality of life in the 
industrialized world. Yet, technology has had almost no effect on the 
four billion people that make less US$2/day. In this talk I argue that 
the decreasing costs of computing and wireless networking make this the 
right time to spread the benefits of technology, and that the biggest 
missing piece is a lack of focus on the problems that matter, including 
health, education, and government. After covering some example 
applications that have shown very high impact, I take an early look at 
the research agenda for developing regions. Finally, I examine some of 
the pragmatic issues required to make progress on these very challenging 
problems. My goal is to convince high-tech researchers that technology 
for developing regions is an important and viable research topic.

Host: Ravi Sundaram