RDVP Seminar: Prof. VK Samaranayake RDVP fellow from Sri Lanka (3/30/2005)

Prof. VK Samaranayake, or "Sam" to nearly everyone, joined the Reuters Digital Vision Program as a visiting fellow for about 3 weeks. He was supposed to join earlier in the year, but his plans were thrown into disarray by the tsunami that struck on the 26th of December.

Sam gave a background on Sri Lanka, a nation I knew basically nothing about. It has 19 million people, and has previously been a Portugese, Dutch, and British colony. There are about 1M fixed phone lines, with cell subscriptions easily outpacing the number (with about 1.8M, and growing much faster). There are about 2.3M televisions, but only 240K internet users. Email usage is below 1%, and only about 3.8% of the households have computers. The IT workforce in 2005 is about 25,000 people.

Sam himself has an impressive background. He has a Ph.D. in particle physics, and essentially started the study of computer science in Sri Lanka. He's the chairman of the new ICT Agency, a private corporation that's owned by the government (structured this way at the request of the World Bank(?)). The School of Computing has grown to 50 staff members, 1,000 students and 5,000 "external" students who study on their own, and complete exams toward a certificate.

Digital Diaspora Collaboration

Sam's project is focused on bringing research-level expertise to Sri Lanka, though he recognizes that given the salary they could expect ($450/mo for a Senior Professor) few will make the move to Sri Lanka. Therefore, he's focused on leveraging info tech to enable virtual collaboration. He mentioned that he's continued to present a weekly radio program via skype and cell phone while he's at Stanford, and thinks that similar techniques for tele-conference for lectures could enable the diaspora of Sri Lankans around the world to contribute by spending just a few hours a week, or remotely mentoring students. The e-Sri Lanka project (supported to the tune of $53M by the World Bank) is to increase penetration and usage of information technology.

The Tsunami

Sam mentioned a couple of the realities of being "on the ground" at the site of the disaster. He said the harbor is still clogged with in-kind gifts from around the world, many unused and unusable. Though he was appreciative of the outpouring of support that came from around the world following the tsunami, he wished that the support would be sustained. Only with ongoing injections of expertise and funding will Sri Lanka be able to reach higher levels of development. He mentioned that the focus on measurements was impractical: there were too many redundant efforts, and things were changing too quickly to be able to make any useful actions based off the analysis of the data. He mentioned one project Sahana, an open source effort for disaster management (tracking resources, missing persons, matching supplies and needs, etc).