ADEPT: Advancing the Development and Empowering those Poor in Technology

The richness of technology in our society has resulted in an unprecedented ability for us to understand, model and leverage our social networks. The goal of this project is to bring the same functionality and advantages to technology-poor societies and empower them with a twitter-like, facebook-like, even internet-like capability. Aptima, Inc. and Professor Alex"Sandy"Pentland from MIT propose to team and develop both a methodology and cell phone application to enable those with limited technology to leverage existing, massive and dynamic social networks. The project, entitled Advancing the Development and Empowering those Poor in Technology (ADEPT) will: 1. sense the evolving network through distributed agents 2. leverage the existing social network of individuals and cell phones to locate resources and form ad hoc teams in a distributed manner and 3. increase robustness of the network by introducing fault tolerant traffic and mechanism design to increase adoption. ADEPT will be beneficial, not only to the technology-poor themselves, but will also reduce the burden on both the military and civil organizations that are charged with helping build and exploit these networks around the world during Phases 4 (stabilizing) and 5 (enabling civil authority) in times of crisis and nation-building.