An Accenture executive with more than 25 years of expertise in mobile wireless networking and applications will deliver a talk at UALR on how to use digital technologies to alleviate the rural-urban divide in emerging economies.

The talk, “Transforming a Billion Lives via Digital Technologies (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud): Affordable Excellence @Scale,” will be held at 3 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17, in the auditorium of the George Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology building.

Dr. Sanjoy Paul, who serves as managing director and country head of Accenture Technology Labs in India, will discuss field trials and sustainable steps to address the challenges his team has researched.

His talk is free and open to the public.

Paul notes that emerging economies of the world, including India, suffer from the problem of a rural-urban divide in which more than 70 percent of the resources available are directed toward only 30 percent of the population in urban areas, while the remaining rural areas barely survive with poor infrastructure and services.

The lack of resources, combined with archaic social norms, such as gender discrimination, leads to developing economy problems, according to Paul. The problem is further exacerbated by limitations in providing knowledge that can transform the lives of millions of rural people.

“While these issues seem distinctly different and the challenges on the ground seem insurmountable, the good news is, clever use of digital technologies spanning social, mobile, analytics, and the cloud can help alleviate these problems to a significant extent,” Paul said.

He cites the key point is that the technologies used in building the solutions are not necessarily new, but the way they are used, combined with the context of solving the problems, is innovative.

“The other insight is that it is significantly more difficult and challenging to uncover exactly what needs to be done and where exactly the digital technology will yield the greatest results, rather than actually building the solutions themselves,” he said.
The presentation will elaborate on both of these points with examples, according to Paul.

More about the speaker
Paul has significant expertise in mobile wireless networking and applications for various verticals such as healthcare, retail, energy, and transportation, as well as cloud computing and applications for emerging economies, software engineering tools and frameworks, future internet architecture and design, and security technologies including multi-modal biometrics.

He is the co-recipient of the 2013 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award from the R&D Council of New Jersey, the co-recipient of the 1997 William R. Bennett award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society for the best original paper in IEEE/Association for Computing Machinery Transactions on Networking. He is the co-recipient of Infosys Excellence Award for Innovations and Thought Leadership for the invention of iSmart Power Strip.

Paul and his colleague also received the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Reviews’ Grand Challenges for India 2010 award for Innovation in Smart Energy.

Prior to joining Accenture, Paul was the associate vice president and general manager at Infosys Technologies where he led research and innovation in communications, media and entertainment. He is a former research professor at Rutgers University, founder of RelevantAd Technologies, director of wireless networking research at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and chief technology officer of two startup companies in New York.

He has served as an editor of several technology publications and as technical program committee member of several international tech conferences. Paul has authored two books, published more than 100 papers in International Journals, refereed Conference Proceedings, and authored more than 100 US patents (43 granted, 60-plus pending).

Paul has a bachelor of technology degree from IIT Kharagpur, an M.S and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a master of business administration degree from the Wharton Business School at University of Pennsylvania. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the Institute of Environmental Technology.