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
One Laptop Per Child (MIT Media Labs - $100 PC)
Eduwise (Intel)
Simputer (Picopeta)
Distinctive features
Thin-clients (network computing),
open-source, low power displays
Widespread adoption?
Meanwhile…
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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