Rhodes University’s Professor Alfredo Terzoli has received a prestigious award for groundbreaking work in mobile service-delivery platforms.
Rhodes University’s Professor Alfredo Terzoli has received a prestigious award for groundbreaking work in mobile service-delivery platforms.
The dti Technology Award was presented last night at a gala dinner hosted by the Department of Trade and Industry at the Mittah Seperepere Convention Centre in Kimberley. Terzoli's award was in the Human Resource Development category and the project which won the award is titled ‘Mobile Services for Ubiquitous Communication and Multimedia Delivery’, or Mobi-Ser.
Terzoli is head of the Telkom Centre of Excellence in Distributed Multimedia in the Department of Computer Science at Rhodes University This is a very active field in telecommunication at present that aims to bring more efficient, more affordable connectivity and multimedia to everyone,” Terzoli said.
“All the services currently available on your cellphone and many more can be hosted on Mobi-Ser’s service delivery platform which is what we have developed at Rhodes and which has adaptors that can adapt the service to whatever end point is desired.
“Twenty years ago you could phone Telkom from your landline and ask to be awakened at a certain time. It sounds like the simplest of services, but it was a significant breakthrough because it was the starting point of a long journey to what is now known as service delivery platforms, that have created the opportunity to develop and deploy more efficient, more affordable multimedia services to all of us today.”
Service delivery platforms such as Mobi-Ser will have the capacity to offer the widest possible variety of future services, ranging from live translations into any language to video telephoning to registrations of births, deaths, marriages and divorces (in collaboration with Home Affairs) to cashless societies, where all financial transactions can be done via the mobile phone.
“What we are doing with Mobi-Ser in the Centre of Excellence at Rhodes is to build our own interpretation of a service-delivery platform that can handle mobility more efficiently, at a lower cost and at the same time to be able to deploy it to every sector of society,” said Terzoli.
“It’s about back-end efficiency essentially and we are pushing the boundaries of who can be reached by ICT. For me and several of my postgraduate students it is particularly important to develop a platform that can serve all of society, including the most marginalised, rural communities, as part of our drive to advance ICT for Development.”
Mobi-Ser is built with non-proprietary, open source tools (as was most of the work at Google, for example), which is complementary to the research environment. “Open source is all about free, large-scale collaboration, which is a trademark of much research and development in the ICT sector,” says Terzoli.
As part of this ICT for Development drive in 2006 he initiated what is known as the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL) that has introduced ICT skills and technology to 17 schools (with pupils at some of the schools numbering as many as 400 to 600) and their associated communities in Dwesa on the Wild Coast.
There are 16 Telkom Centres of Excellence, each hosted by a tertiary institution. Together they constitute the largest Research, development and innovation initiative in ICT in South Africa.
