Doing good

It is often exciting when technology is applied for commercial purposes in novel ways, but it is truly satisfying when it is applied for the betterment of humanity.  I have been visiting India for the last week or so, and the use of technology to human upliftment is apparent everywhere.  And whenever IBM is a part of such technology usage, I feel especially proud.

One such moment came when I visited with the Director of INCOIS, a premier Oceanographic Studies Institute in Hyderabad, a city in Southern India, where I happened to have grown up in too. The Director, Dr. Nayak, walked me through his visions and implementations of Tsunami Early Warning. This is an application that sits on top of DB2, and uses computation and strategic decision making inputs to compute whether or not to issue warnings to Indian Coastal villages. The challenge is of course to make the right call -- too many false calls would lead to ennui, and one wrong call could lead to a disaster. He also walked me through the control room for this, and it is very clear that emerging countries such as India are really using technology for the betterment of the masses. I also got into some detailed discussions with him on the power of information coming together, the power of freeing up of information (he is wanting to link to many many other data sources, and to enable third parties to leverage information that the institute generates by publishing all of it). He could have been giving our information on demand message, except that he was doing it in a governmental, non-commercial contexts. Hats off to him and his colleagues! I will have much more to write on my various visits here, and I have been delinquent in blogging, but this trip will yield a treasure trove of blogs for all of you :)

Comments

[Gupta Dev]

It's disappointing how slowly India is infact rising especially when compared to China. A lot of India's GDP growth is due to an explosion in people. It's actual GDP per head growth is currently around 3 times that of the UKs. At this rate it will take 100 years for Indians to match the West's standard of living