The $100 laptop: why it can and should be done

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a new non-profit association dedicated to research to develop a $100 laptop – a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. This talk will provide a current overview and status of the $100 laptop project. Its context, history, motivations, goals and challenges will provide a framework for better understanding the various management and engineering decisions up to the talk’s point in time along with a general high level description of the laptop’s technology. Although to its principals the $100 laptop is mainly an educational project, deploying millions of those will also have far reaching implications for the computing and communications industries. An attempt will be made to identify and discuss them.

Presenter(s)

Michail Bletsas was director of computing at the MIT Media Laboratory. He designed and deployed most of the Internet network infrastructure systems at the Media Lab. His research involves experimenting with wireless networks that are implemented using off- the-shelf, low-cost components to provide broadband Internet access to underserved areas. Before joining the Media Lab, he was a systems engineer at Aware, Inc., where he designed and wrote high-performance software libraries for Intel's distributed-memory parallel supercomputers, and was involved in the development of one of the first ADSL Internet-access test beds. He holds a diploma in electrical engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and an MS in computer engineering from Boston University.