Hi all, We are pleased to announce the first part of the Simputer Workshop to be held at KRESIT auditorium on Saturday, 17th August 2002, 10am-1pm. The second part will be held sometime at the end of the month.

The event is organized by ITA and the speaker is Prof. Swami Manohar (IISc/B'lore), acting Head of Picopeta Simputers and one of the architects of the Simputer.

All are invited to attend. For more details, contact ita@it.iitb.ac.in You may visit the KReSIT webpage http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/ for instructions to reach the KReSIT Auditorium, on the IITB Campus.

The details are as follows:

------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date and Time : Saturday, 17th August 2002, 10am - 1.00pm Venue : KRESIT Auditorium.

------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOPIC: Simputer: Bridging the Great Digital Divide

The Simputer is a home-brewed powerful, low-cost, palm-top that runs for hours on penlight batteries. Intended as India's home-grown answer to the "digital divide," it does long-distance medical diagnostics, basic literacy training, micro-banking, commodity trading, and other applications aimed at the poorest and remotest villagers. Its input and output systems are designed for illiterates: a multilingual voice synthesizer and lots of simple graphics. It uses Linux-based software to keep costs down.

The Simputer meets its demands through a browser for the Information Markup Language (IML). IML has been created to provide a uniform experience to users and to allow rapid development of solutions on any platform.

The Simputer, costing about Rs.9k, through its Smart Card feature allows personal information management at an individual level for an unlimited number of users. The impact of this feature coupled with the rich connectivity of the Simputer allows it to be used in diverse applications: in micro banking, large data collection, agricultural information and as a school laboratory and so on.

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The Speaker:

Swami Manohar (IISc/B'lore), acting Head of Picopeta Simputers is one of the architects of the Simputer. He helped define the Information Markup Language (IML)along with Prof. V.Vinay. He will spend a half day talking about the Simputer (software) architecture, tell us about how the Simputer is being deployed and discuss possible projects that can be initiated for further development.