The erasable board in her
Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute office tells the tale. In a loopy, high-tech scrawl there are inquiries, possibilities, projects – India to Africa, Qatar to Southeast Asia, six months to the horizon. “We get wonderful, amazing e-mails from all over the world,” Bernardine Dias smiles. “
TechBridgeWorld brings people together interested in working on these projects, in sharing resources and infrastructure.”
A Sri Lankan with a love for singing and science, dancing, reading, and cooking, Mary Bernardine Dias yearned to study physics. A scholarship
brought her overseas to Hamilton College, 1994. Upstate New York? “I came from the tropics,” she says. “I was freezing.”
On campus, Dias encountered her first computer – and fell in love. Enrolling in a compsci course, minoring in women’s studies, four years later, ’98, Dias brought her B.S. in physics and computer science to a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. program in robotics. By early ’04, she was Doctor Dias, ready to take on the world. “They believed enough in me and in my vision to give me a job right out of grad school,” she marvels. “I’m very thankful everyday about how blessed I am.”
Seeking RelevanceHaving seen professional do-gooders come to emerging countries like Sri Lanka, stay in five-star hotels, and propose so-called solutions that don't last, she looked “to build sustainable advanced technology that has relevance in the developing world,” she says. (Her other CMU practice areas include getting human-robot teams to work together and developing space robots that can search for life and explore other planets. To that end, she spent three weeks in the Canadian Arctic, working with Hyperion, a solar-powered robot. The food was great, she reports, as was chatting up the Discovery and CNN camera crews, but despite summer, and the midnight sun, that, too, was cold, she reports.)
The ink barely dry on her doctorate, Dias founded TechBridgeWorld to
bring advanced technologies to emerging countries – a notion not as easy as it might seem. “We never do start with large-scale deployments,” she says. “Instead we start with prototypes,” involving specific needs in specific communities. That means partners, and partnerships can years to create – getting all the concerned parties in the same room (sometimes virtually), getting them to agree on the problem, the solution, the implementation, and so on. “Technology must be culturally sensitive,” Dias says. “It’s a long process.
“We don’t tell people what they should be doing,” she adds. “Instead, we work with our strong partners in each community, those who have trust and reputation. Then we create only sustainable solutions, training people to maintain what we’ve begun.”
As one example, to help the world’s 160 million blind people, only three percent of whom are literate, the TechBridgeWorld techies invented the Adaptive Braille Writing Tutor, a Braille board that talks back, saying each letter that’s been written by stylus. Computerized and kid-friendly, Dias’ wizards have even equipped them with the teachers’ own voices. Already field-tested in India’s Mathru School, and entertaining requests from schools around the world, they’ll bring the Tutors back to India and Zambia this summer.
Similarly, in Accra, Ghana, Project Kané sought to combat illiteracy. Using the LISTEN Reading Tutor, which employs speech recognition and artificial intelligence to guide reading and respond to reading problems, the TechBridgeWorld team helped evaluate the potential role of computing technology in improving English literacy.
Spanning the GlobeIt hardly ends there. An intrepid traveler, Dias and her team have explored projects in Chile, Micronesia, Cambodia, the Marshall Islands,
Palau, and Sri Lanka, among others. “I have my home here, in Friendship, which I love,” she says, “but I’m never limited.”
Indeed, a word like limit simply doesn’t seem to apply to her. As a fer’instance, she is skilled at Kandyan dancing – a kind of Sri Lankan up-country folk dance. Having studied at home for eight years, “it was a great way to show my culture when I came to the United States,” she says. Having danced at Hamilton and Carnegie Mellon, now she trains children in its subtleties and gentle movements. “It’s very similar to Tai Chi,” Dias explains, adding that “I love to go from science to art. It stretches my creativity. It tones my muscles” – mental as well as physical."
As do both Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh. At the former, she says, “the people are friendly and approachable. I love the interdisciplinary approach to things – I can go from economics to Chekhov to robotics. And Pittsburgh is just right – not too small, not too big. I love the neighborhoods – I love the fact that cultures here are integrated. And I really love the arts – the ballet, the symphony.”
Speaking of connections, it’s time for Dr. Dias to excuse herself. It may be winter in Pittsburgh, but it’s summer in her heart, and she’s jetting off to her other gig, Carnegie Mellon’s branch campus in sunny, sandy Qatar, where the balmy skies are more to her liking, and the TechBridgeWorld possibilities seem boundless. “The future is very exciting,” she says. “I’m a serial entrepreneur -- in the social sense. I have a very positive attitude. For me, the sky’s the limit.”
Abby Mendelson’s latest book, Ghost Dancer, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.
www.techbridgeworld.org
www.cmu.edu
Captions:
Bernadine Dias in the lab at CMU
Dias in conversation (as at bottom)
Adaptive Braille writing tutor
All photographs copyright Brian Cohen