Transcript Document

Globalization
Challenges to Database Community
Rajeev Rastogi
Executive Director
Bell Labs Research India
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Bell Labs Research India
 Launched in October 2004
Motivation:
 Access to global talent
 Access to global markets
- India, China: a third of world’s population
- New products to penetrate markets
 Cost savings
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Focus: Computing &
Communication Software
 Low-Cost Networking
 Network Monitoring
 Data Analysis
 Distributed Computing
 3G Wireless Applications
Impact, Challenges
 Impact
– High-end R&D jobs, better pay
• Reverse brain drain: many returning to avail opportunities back home
– Spreading research culture, should boost PhD enrollments
• Internet enables research to be done from anywhere!
– New research challenges driven by needs of developing countries
 Challenges
– Recruiting
• Very few quality PhDs graduate each year from Indian universities
– Defining an independent research agenda
– Staying connected to US (email, netmeeting do help!)
– Coping with poor infrastructure: roads, traffic, power,….
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Does Globalization really require us to solve
new (research) problems?
My addresses in India
US address format
Work
Bell Labs Research India,
Lucent Technologies India Pvt Ltd.,
Salarpuria Ascent 3rd Floor,
No. 77, Jyoti Nivas College Road,
Koramangala Industrial Layout,
Ward No. 68,
Bangalore - 560 095,
Karnataka,
India
Home
202 Vaswani Exotica,
#3 Papanna Street,
Off St. Marks Road,
Bangalore: 560001,
Karnataka,
India
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Street name
City
State
Zip
Country
My personal challenge: Getting these to fit into this
So what else is different about India?
740 million people live in rural villages
 Low incomes: monthly per-capita income - $17.50
 Low literacy: 60%
 Unreliable power: frequent outages
 Low teledensity: 1.5 phones per 100 people
 Low PC penetration
 Very few Internet users
 22 official languages
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These lead to new research challenges….
 Low-cost computing devices
 Data access using cell phones
 Low-cost networks
 Data access over unreliable wireless meshes
 User interfaces for illiterate people
 Multi-lingual information storage, retrieval, and search
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Research Challenge 1: Low-Cost Computing
Devices
Current low-cost PC efforts
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One Laptop Per Child (MIT Media Labs - $100 PC)
Eduwise (Intel)
Simputer (Picopeta)
Distinctive features
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Thin-clients (network computing),
open-source, low power displays
Widespread adoption?
Meanwhile…
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100m mobile subscribers in India growing at 5m a month!
500m mobile subscribers in China growing at 6m a month!
By 2010, 3.7b worldwide (1.5b 2.5G and above) cell phone subscribers!
Cell phone costs coming down dramatically (< $50)
Could cell phones be the-low cost computing devices of the future?
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* Source: Pyramid Research
Research Challenge 2: Data Access using
Cell Phones
Cell phones have many constraints
 Low bandwidth (few 10s or 100s of Kbps)
 On 2G phones, communication using SMS messages (max size: 160)
 Limited memory, battery
Possible solutions to conserve
bandwidth:
 Broadcasts [Imielinski etal, Acharya etal]
Broadcast
Query: Find dealer offering max price
for wheat in neighboring villages
Villages
Radio tower
– Broadcast max price dealer in each
village
– Compute max among neighbors on cell
phone
 Concise answers (e.g. Skylines)
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Research Challenge 3: Low-Cost Networks
Wireline & cellular technologies too expensive for Internet connectivity
 Possible solution: 802.11
mesh networks [TIER, DGP]
– Low-cost due to competitive
mass production
– Directional antennas for longdistance communication
Interference
 Major challenge: Interference,
need clever ways to
– Assign frequency channels
– Schedule link transmissions
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Research Challenge 4: Data Access over
Unreliable Wireless Meshes
Nodes are power-constrained, may be down due to unreliable power
Data center
to conserve power
Data cache
– Cache items based on access
patterns
– Batch queries, route results
along steiner tree
Data center
Data cache
Queries
Kiosk
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 Minimize communication
 Route around power outages
to maximize throughput
– DTNs [Fall 03]
Research Challenge 5: User Interfaces for
Illiterate People
 Text-based interfaces do not work
 Need to explore other interfaces
– Speech
– Visual (images, video)
 Benefits
– Language independent, global
 Challenges
– Voice based system needs to learn
many accents and dialects
– Visual interfaces have limited
vocabulary (compared to text)
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Research Challenge 6: Multi-lingual
Storage, Retrieval, and Search
 Native English speaking population
on internet only 35%
 Databases already support multilingual data using unicode
 Challenge:
– Support search in many languages
over content in many languages
 Possible solution
– Translate search keywords to
various languages and then search
 Challenge
– Need search capability for nonEnglish languages
– Translations (dictionary, phonetic)
need to preserve meaning/intent
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