This Tuesday at Change, Kurtis Heimerl from UC Berkeley will talk about his work on the Village Basestation. Cellular Telephony is one of the most impactful technologies ever, with five billion subscribers in just twenty five years. However, billions of people remain without this fundamental service. The Village Basestation (VBTS) is a GSM cellular tower designed for low-density rural areas that traditional multinational telecommunication firms are unwilling to serve for economic reasons. VBTS reduces the cost of a cellular installation, enabling locally-owned cellular systems that can operate in areas with limited power or network infrastructure, being capable of running on solar and being backhauled with wifi. VBTS also provides a set of scripts supporting infrastructure-hosted apps tailored to and supporting the local community and their goals. In this talk, we will provide an in-depth discussion of the core technology changes enabling VBTS. Specifically, how VBTS can operate at less than 65% of the total power draw of a traditional "low-power" BTS, and the user interface implications of our changes. We will also discuss our plans to deploy this technology in rural Papua, Indonesia in the Fall of 2012. Kurtis Heimerl is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley working under Eric Brewer in EECS and Tapan Parikh in the iSchool. His work focuses primarily on cellular systems and their intersection with international development. He is also a community manager and developer at Range Networks, supporting the OpenBTS open-source cellular system. He is interested in Education, having worked on the Metamouse group learning program, and Crowdsourcing, winning Best Paper at CHI for work on Kiosk-based crowdsoucing systems. What: Kurtis Heimerl: The Village Basestation When: Tuesday, October 2nd at 12 noon Where: The Allen Center, room CSE 203