On the same planet where there are 1.4 billion Internet users, a far less fortunate 1.4 billion people survive below the World Bank's extreme poverty line. Computing technology has transformed the lives of the wealthiest people on the planet, but it remains out of reach and irrelevant for the poorest. How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? Can you keep five rural schoolchildren from fighting over one PC? What value is technology to a farmer earning a dollar a day?

Questions like this will be raised in a sample of research work from the Technology for Emerging Markets group (http://research.microsoft.com/research/tem) at Microsoft Research India, in Bangalore. We are a multidisciplinary research group consisting of anthropologists, economists, designers, and computer scientists who together seek new applications of computing technology for the world's least privileged communities in domains such as agriculture, education, healthcare, and microfinance. The constraints are severe, with poor education, terrible infrastructure, and a shortage of funds making even the best-designed systems challenging to implement. Nevertheless, we believe this is a challenge worth undertaking, and one that can make a difference as long as we retain equal measures of skepticism about the brash claims of technology and optimism about its true potential.