At a media dinner recently, a friend from Malaysia said he had only two seasons in his country, the rainy and the dry seasons. I jokingly said that there was still another season -- the haze season.

It was a very bad joke, I admit, as the infamous haze plays havoc with everybody's life. Needless to say, we all suffer because of it -- Malaysians, Singaporeans and Indonesians. Domestic and international flights have to be canceled. People cannot go to work. Respiratory ailments have become very common.

The cause, as we all know, is large-scale forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan. Most are deliberately set by some utterly selfish human beings to prepare hectares of land for planting. Their cost is minimal, but the cost to the affected areas is enormous.

How can we fight it? A clear choice is to involve those who are immediately affected by the environmental damages as well as conscientious members of the community. One big hurdle, however, is the bureaucracy. Each time a concerned farmer tries to alert the authorities, he has to go up the administrative hierarchy until his report gets to the subdistrict office. By that time, the fire may already be raging out of control.

So why not make use of the cell phones to bypass the slow bureaucracy and allow the Good Samaritan file a report directly to the agencies in charge? After all, cell phones have already penetrated rural areas and network coverage is now quite extensive.

With a cell phone, anyone can immediately notify the agencies if he/she sees a forest fire start to break out. Or, if a fish-breeding farmer detects signs of water pollution, he can send an SMS to a dedicated number to alert the agencies in charge of environment protection.

A team of four students from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) took their idea and developed an application called "Butterfly". Last Tuesday, my colleague Erwida Maulia of The Jakarta Post wrote a complete report on this application and the development team's presentation before the state minister for the environment.

Developed by four young Indonesian students, the Butterfly application filters and groups reports together and then ranks them based on urgency. It enables faster responses to threats to the environment. (JP/Zatni Arbi)

On the surface, the application looks very simple. However, the four brilliant young students had done their homework thoroughly. They had noticed that the agencies' unresponsiveness was also caused by the overwhelming number of reports on potential environmental issues that they received -- usually from concerned NGOs.

So, one of the main features of the application is the ability to group together reports from the same location with the same environmental problem. Next, the application will analyze the reports and determine their urgency based on keywords.

Keywords such as "forest" and "fires", for example, will have a higher priority than keywords such as "logging", because forest fires require a more immediate response.

Butterfly can receive text messages sent from cell phones and PDAs. People can even file their reports online. If the person sending the report has a GPS-capable smartphone, information on the exact location can be supplied and the team from the ministry will be to give a faster response.

The application is so well designed that it won the Rural Innovation Award at the Imagine Cup held by Microsoft in Paris early last month. The group of students, who call themselves the Antarmuka Team, got the help they needed to developing it from the Microsoft Innovation Center at ITB.

More importantly, the four ITB students brought home yet more proof that we Indonesians have a talent pool that is on par with other nations on this planet. Unlike our badminton heroes, our young and bright minds do not typically receive a nationwide celebration when they arrive home after winning a global competition -- but they are our future.

As part of their accomplishment, the four students -- Arief Widhiyasa, Dimas Yusuf Danurwenda, Ella Madanella Dwi Mustika and Erga Ghaniya -- will have the opportunity to work at the Microsoft Research Center in Bangalore.

Clearly, some concrete steps must be taken by the government and local industries to ensure that Indonesian jewels like these four young students will be able to participate in building the future of our IT industry.

-- JP/Zatni Arbi

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