Alternate Track: Technology for Developing Regions

New in 2006, the Developing Regions (DR) track is an alternate track in the style of the Industrial Track. Papers can be submitted directly to this track, and we may also accept papers submitted to other tracks.

The goal of this track is to promote research that benefits those in developing regions, broadly construed; in essence to make the World Wide Web a little wider. We encourage work from all countries, as long as the target beneficiaries are in resource constrained regions of the world.

We welcome papers that:

Cover deployments in developing regions of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs)
Show how the needs of DRs differ from those of the industrialized world.
Show novel applications of ICTs for DRs:
- Health care
- Commerce/Agriculture
- E-Government
- Education
- Disaster Relief/Management
- Communications (including voice, e-mail, WWW, etc.)
Cover HCI issues for DRs
Cover power issues for DRs
Cover either personal or shared systems or shared infrastructure.

Papers risk being deemed out of scope if they only speculate on the connection to developing regions. Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

Wired or wireless networking
Low-cost computers
Affordable access devices
Delay tolerant or intermittent networking
Rural connectivity
Power systems
Sensor networks
HCI for semi-literate users
Task-specific devices (such as low-cost ATMs, field-worker PDAs, etc.)
Shared data systems
Local content generation or localization to a DR

Submissions should describe original, previously unpublished, high quality, innovative work, making significant and preferably not only theoretical, contributions to the available technologies for developing regions.