Swedish University Project

“Putting Knowledge to Better Use – Industry responsiveness to gender differences in ICT demand in Vietnam” has the aim to develop ICT services and products to meet the demand of female users. Identify key barriers to gender-specific technological development.

The project is recently launched.

“Women’s Digital Baskets in Rwanda” has the aim to maintain culture and traditions with the help of ICT while creating the opportunity for enterprise and development among women in Rwanda.

Project is recently launched.

This is a continuation of a previous project funded by SPIDER during 2005-2006. The purpose is to support development in four African countries by improving health research, teaching, and services. Objectives include building national and regional capacity in information retrieval and training, encouraging collaboration among persons involved with information retrieval, and capitalizing on Swedish investments in research training and research.

Few people use ATM or credit cards in developing countries such as Sri Lanka given that they do not have sufficient income levels and/or the fact that few ATMs are available in rural areas. The project will provide basic ATM services to people who have mobile phones, especially in rural areas. With the proposed solution people can withdraw money from a Mobile-ATM (M-ATM) without going to a traditional ATM machine. The M-ATM system uses cheap mobiles phones, functioning as payment terminals.

In the first part of this project (funded by SPIDER 2005-2006), a set of resources for processing Amharic (the working language of the Ethiopian government) was developed. The resources consist of text collections and tools for word-level analysis of Amharic. The primary goal of this continuation is to refine, extend and further develop the resources in order to make them useful to both the public and the research community.

This project, a continuation of a previous SPIDER-funded project, targets a large-scale implementation of an interactive TV and SMS "classroom" setting for ICT-enabled distance tuition at Bangladesh Open University.

The project will develop an agricultural market information system to improve local agricultural markets and empower small farmers in rural Bangladesh using low-cost existing SMS infrastructure to create a viable local organization for information collection and dissemination. Focus is on the collection and distribution of market information to beneficiaries rather than on the in-formation system as such, using appropriate technology given the local context.

The project will develop and implement a self-sustained, low-cost
online water quality monitoring system, to spread awareness of the
results and to make a feasibility study on how to empower and stimulate
local entrepreneurs to establish businesses based on the system. The
system will be based on wireless sensor network technology.

Following up on the inception SPIDER study "Next generation eGovernment", this project develops ICT based distance education in Bangladesh together with BRAC University in Dhaka. The project develops both human and technical resources in two interrelated parts:

• Using Mobile Technology to Create a Virtual Interactive Participatory Classroom

• Developing an ‘Educate the Educator' Program

The project delivers:

1. Tested methods for ICT-supported education

2. A tested technical system to support such education, a "virtual classroom" adapted to developing country technical environment

3. Curriculum for Education of Educators adapted to developing country context

4. Education for a group of teachers

5. Academic publication due to alignment with a PhD project in Örebro (separately financed)

This project is both a continuation and a new direction compared to the Uppsala University project in the first phase. The original proposal was to provide a high performance computing infrastructure within the university environment of a developing country and to justify the concept by developing a pilot computational project in Bioinformatics. As a result of the project, the SweLanka Grid concept was established with computational nodes in Colombo and Uppsala. The problems created by the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004 led to logistical problems that delayed the installation and implementation of the equipment. In the aftermath of the tsunami, priorities within Sri Lanka had changed somewhat and hence the simple numerical tsunami model was added to the pilot applications. It is proposed to continue work on the tsunami modeling and to extend the bioinformatics work on advanced data analysis for generic data using the GRID resources provided in Sri Lanka.