Mary Lou Jepsen: One LapTop Per Child

Mary Lou Jepsen is the Chief Technology Officer of the One Laptop per Child project. The project began through the MIT Media Lab and now runs as a non profit organization. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was designed to be targeted to children in developing countries. It had to be versatile and be available at a very low cost. Dr. Jepsen holds a PhD in Optics, BS in Electrical Engineering and BA req. in Studio Art, Brown University. She also holds an MS from the MIT Media Lab. She was an assistant professor of Computer Science at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. She will become a professor at the MIT Media Lab in September 2007 where she will found and lead a research effort in nomadic displays.

Dr. Jepsen was one of the keynote speakers at the mLearn conference held October 2006 in Banff, Alberta.

Photo Credit: Blaise MacMullin

Aurora: So what led you to do this initiative?

Mary Lou Jepsen: I think it’s very clean – Silicon Valley makes stuff for the billion rich people in the world but there are 6.5 billion people in the world. A lot of people talk about the digital divide; I decided I wanted to do something about it and try to use my skills to help solve it. So far so good – it keeps getting bigger every couple of months.

Aurora: Were you associated with MIT or did you come to MIT with the idea?

Mary Lou Jepsen: I was at Intel and after a painful year at Intel I thought it was time to go back into academia. So I applied to a bunch of universities and made the shortlist at MIT and ended up in Nicholas Negroponte’s office in Jan 05. I was supposed to be there for a 5 minute interview, you know sort of cursory interview, see if I, you know, said the right things, didn’t have stuff between my teeth, I don’t really know, but it ended up being a three hour discussion of how to design the $100 laptop and create an organization that would use them to transform education. By the next morning I had joined with Nicholas, was on a plane to Europe, and started to work on designing the $100 laptop.

Aurora: Sounds like there’s a lot of bureaucracy there.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Bureaucracy? (laughs)

Aurora: In the opposite sense … you know because often when you have initiatives like that they’re taken up with “maybe we should go to a committee with this.” But right away you’re into doing what you want. That’s great.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Right. So it’s very much like a start-up, except we didn’t even write up a business plan. So AMD, Google and NewsCorp all kicked in 2 million dollars with no business plan whatsoever, just to get it started. We didn’t have to write a business plan. So we didn’t have to create, like you would, I’ve done start-ups in Silicon Valley, like you would to go out and get venture capital. We didn’t know that we would become a non-profit. We then decided to become a non-profit, I think in April. Realizing that was the way to reach the goal; we thought that maybe the best way is to create, you know, a lot of people will say ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.’ Procter and Gamble’s biggest gross margin product is the little shampoo tabs it sells to people in the developing world. They make a huge amount. Or cell phones, the big thing that’s been happening in telephony in the last 5 years isn’t in the rich countries, it’s the next billion and next billion. And there’s a lot of profit there. And so we thought, well let’s use the capitalistic machinery to get this to happen. But what became very obvious is that we can get a lot more work done as a non-profit. Our goal was never to maximize gross margin, it was trying to get laptops to kids to improve education. … By becoming a humanitarian effort, what’s actually happened is we’ve been able to mobilize the engineering talent in an extraordinary way in the world.

Aurora: Can you tell me a little bit about who your target audience is?

Mary Lou Jepsen: The children of the world, the poor children of the world in various different countries.

Aurora: And how does this help them?

Mary Lou Jepsen: If you give a kid a laptop, you give them more opportunity. They can explore whatever they’re interested in. They can read what they’re interested in… So by giving kids opportunity, basically, you don’t kill their curiosity. A lot of times we drill it out of them and so we’re trying to give them another option. But even if you wanted to do drill and practice with a laptop you can and there’s just a lot more content with it.

Aurora: Briefly, can you tell me what is in a $100 laptop?

Mary Lou Jepsen: There’s a CPU, there’s WiFi, and there’s a sunlight readable screen that’s super high resolution. It’s very low power so you can crank a crank to recharge the batteries. The batteries last a really long time, about 12 hour battery life on the laptop. There’s a microphone, two speakers, and gamer buttons. There’s a transformer hinge so you can turn the display around and hold the thing like a book when you shut the cover so the display sticks up or you can turn it the other way. There’s TV, video, and three USB ports. There are also peripherals — I’m designing a $100 projector, a $10 DVD player, and we’re making a $100 server. There’s mesh networking. There’s voice-over IP. There’s a ton of software that runs on it. It’s instantly on. Its splash proof, drop proof, and spill proof.

What else is on the machine? There’s a lot of stuff. Oh, the microphone jack, I didn’t even talk about this yet. You can plug in a microphone to it or you can plug in any sensor. So you can make it a 30 cent EKG machine in a hospital, for example, or an oscilloscope because usually a microphone jack filters out some of the frequencies. We got rid of the filtering part – turned out to be easy, so the microphone jack is much more useful. There are lots of little things like that.

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