Congratulations to Moment Lab Ph.D. student Morgan Vigil on her reception of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Microsoft Research Graduate Women Scholarship, 2013! 

Congratulations to Dr. David Johnson on the successful defense of his Ph.D. Dissertation, titled "Re-architecting Internet Access and Wireless Networks for Rural Developing Regions."  Dr. DJ will now lead the Cognitive Radios for Emerging Regions group in the Meraka Institute of CSIR, in Cape Town.  The Moment Lab looks forward to continuing collaborations with David in the years to come!

The article describes our work in Africa, collaboration with prof. Amr El Abbadi and prof. Lisa Park's group along with some cool photos we took on our field trips:

http://convergence.ucsb.edu/article/bridging-digital-divide

We annouced on the local radio station that we were going to talk about research done on traffic patterns in Linknet inMacha and the new VillageNet project at the outdoor projection wall near the restaurant. We also used the Machaworks Facebook site to advertise the meeting.

About 15 local people arrived for the talk and a few western visitors. It was a very unique experience to enjoy the brilliant milky way and talk about the uniqueness of Macha's Internet community. We showed the Facebook social graph with locality of interest that provided strong motivation for the VillageShare and VillageCell projects.

A quick demo was given of VillageShare and an open invitation was made for local people to participate in providing a local Tonga name for VillageShare as well as provide some graphic design material. There is a local user in Macha who has strong graphic design skills and who can help with the final design.

After two weeks of fighting with technology going wrong in the bush, we finally have 2 VillageCell GSM base stations up in Macha, Zambia. Phone calls are now being made within a 5km radius between multiple base stations, using an existing Wi-Fi-based backhaul.

There were many lessons learnt:

Our VillageNet work for developing better and more widespread Internet technology in Macha, Zambia has been highlighted in the Spring 2012 issue of UC Santa Barbara's Today Magazine.  Check out pages 8 and 9!

In recognition of her work with her own graduate students, as well as for the work she does on behalf of all the graduate students in the Computer Science department, Prof. Belding won UCSB's Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award 2012!  This includes her work as a Graduate Program Advisor as well as her oversight of the Computer Science graduate program.  Congratulations!

Our senior Ph.D. student, Veljko Pejovic, will graduate this summer and leave us to become a postdoc at the University of Birmingham in the UK.  Congratulations Veljko, we will miss you!

These photos were taken for the UC Santa Barbara Today magazine. They were writing an article on our VillageNet project.