Conference on ICTs for Differently-Abled/Underprivileged in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship

It has been 10 days after 1st National Conference on ICTs for Diffrently-Abled/Underprivileged in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship wound up at Layola College, Chennai. Since the Conference organizers Layola College and Center for Internet and Society didn’t bother to inform the participants or the world on what happened at the conference, I am writing down on what happened at a conference which could have made a difference in the field.

Since the conference addresses the need of accessibility and accessible technologies, let me start with a look into existing situation in the field. The cues of using different Information Communication Technologies for the empowerment of differently-abled has its root in successful implementation of these in Latin languages. Major communication technologies in use for improving accessibility range from Text to speech engines, Automatic Speech recognizer, Screen Readers etc. Open standard, including web standards play an important role in improving accessibility. Some other technologies like character recognition, have some roles in the field though not as direct as this. In the context of Indic Languages, Localisation , local language computing and localised assistive technologies also play a key role in increasing the accessibility of 1/6th of world population

The primary problem for lack of reach of advances of technology to the differentially-abled is penetration of technology. So, we should consider all those who work on improving the penetration of the technology as the primary component of any related discussions. For example, any text speech system is of no use along with a screen reader, if we don’t have enough screens which are localized to read. Internationalization of existing modules, so that it can have localized versions is also an important aspect. Along with many others the lack of localized screens remained an important reason for penetration of technology among the under privileged. In an Indian context, development of any useful system is heavily dependent on the availability of useful interfaces. Which adds another technology group working in localization/internationalization arena to the whole set of technology providers.

There are groups and/or individuals who had demonstrated and are working hard to introduce FOSS based solutions for the accessibility problems in India. Starting from cost advantage to sustainable development of the technology is the main reason for these demands for Open Standards and FOSS based solutions. Primary organizer of the conference is even a good advocate of open standards.

More over, if you consider ICT development in technology related to Indian Languages, development efforts are on for last 30 years. But, a useful system is not yet in place. Among many other factors, loss of existing knowledge is an important reason for this(precisely duplication of efforts). This could have been avoided if these systems were Free and Open Systems(there are many more reasons to it, but this is one important factor). Govt. is spending a lot of money on developing different systems for Indian Languages ranging from Robust OCRs/Handwriting recognition systems/Text to speech converters etc. Differently-abled communities are one of the direct benefactors of most of these technologies. To ensure sustainable development and use of technology, it was decided that these projects will be developed and implemented as FOSS solutions. But, later govt. added “Intellectual Property” as a measure of evaluating the project and this just negated the effects of development of sustainable and accessible commercial models on top of the Research and Development went into it. Fear of dying the technology developed along with termination of project is now again looks at the ones who continue to develop it.

In case of India, most of the interesting work came out/released so far on accessibility are done by non state actors. Though there are lot of organizations in the field and many issues are to be addressed from state policy to access to the technologies, co-ordination efforts were limited. So a National Level Conference with dedicated tracks on academics/technology, Workshops for differentially-abled, workshops for building accessible systems(web developers), workshops for NGOs including a tracks on Policy discussions and panel discussions is always expected to establish the much needed coordination and a communication pipeline between different players. In case of India, inclusion of the state and non-state actors in localization efforts and push to FOSS technologies is inevitable for a sustainable model. When it is conducted by credible organizations like Center for Internet and Society who support Open Standards and work for a govt. level policy, naturally we expect the conference to make a mark on the front.

Since the technologies for improving accessibility in Indian Languages is still in its infancy, it is expected from the conference to bring the different actors in the field together. On the contrary, due to faults in organizational activities and negligence from organizers, lot of names were missing from participants. I should say no organization who work FOSS related technologies for improving accessibility were represented. In short words, what could have become an important stepping stone in addressing issues in using ICTs for differently-abled, ended up as place to finalize details of pilot implementation of govt. developed technology at some centers(for which i don’t think such a conference was not required!). Though organizers had a chance of making a difference related to bringing all people together, if they plan a conference round table with out an agenda, i do have serious reservations about what they wanted from the conference.

Just as an example, I will take the OCR round table. They practically invited only OCR Consortium and Debayan Banerjee from technology developers side. That too most of the consortium members got invite on the first day of conference(they were even made to walk around for their TA). Only Debayan was there to represent all OCR developers outside consortium. About the proceedings of the Round Table, practically consortium presented details of the OCR project(including technological challenges, what we have achieved and small example of how on basis of Gurumukhi along with a demo). I still didn’t understand how they failed to invite everyone else! Even for Debayan(i think he got a chance to learn a lot) but for organizers i have no idea what they gained from him. They didn’t even give a chance to him to explain what he did. Interestingly, the organizers had no idea of what should be done. There was no agenda for round table. Mr. Deependra from National Association for Blind took the pain to note down the action points and decisions. Apart from finalizing the pilot implementation of consortium’s OCR at selected centers it was decided to start a mailing list of all round table members for future communication. Practically consortium didn’t gain much other than announcing to lot other people that we exist. Debayan might have gained a lot after the interaction with all the Professors. The ones who represented NAB and Access India also gained a little. Nothing was there in plate for anybody else.

The decision for a pilot implementation of consortium developed technology at the centers of NAB(?) was not a direct result of the conference or round table. Due to pressure from govt. to see its technology field tested somewhere, talks were on with NAB for sometime on possibilities. The conference just gave the final touches to the decisions. If you look from that angle, i am not quite sure what the organizers did in the whole round table exercise. Since they didn’t care to set an agenda for the meeting, i don’t think they have anything to their credit on this whole exercise.

Interestingly, everyone was interested in trying out the technology, in public or exclusive and unfortunately, govt. policies related to “Intellectual Property” had some effect there. Still i do believe the things we have in consortium product is very minimal and before concentrating on producing on top of it, we should concentrate on developing the existing technology. I believe we could only have an OCR frame work, not a complete OCR solution which will satisfy everyone. For different purposes, we may have to tune the components in framework. In that case, a tunable system framework should be the final target. The current development is nowhere near that target. As it was correctly explained in Round Table, currently it will be able to help only in conversions of large books. Only later revisions can handle the bigger challenges. Even the questions on time line of the project were not addressable because the consortium will exist only till the govt. supports it. But i would say, at least in these discussions, the consortium was happy to give away content if govt. allowed. They could be later addressed if we are able to address govt. policy. Since Center for Internet and Society stands for Open Standards and access to information and all, they could have taken up the responsibility of taking up the initiative of pressurizing the govt. to release the technology,data and code related to the consortium project. Unfortunately, the only representative of CIS(a lady, Ms.Nirmita) opened her mouth only when Mr. Deependra asked her some thing about coordinating the effort of consortium and NAB(i think, not sure). I would say CIS missed a chance there on making some difference on the scene, here they just helped finalizing some discussions which was on for a long time.

Third day i attended only for very less time. Interestingly, the round table was driven here not even by consortium, but a lady from SigmaSciTech. She had a wrapper for a proprietary sound API and practically she wanted all TTS engines to comply her standards. She was asking whether Dhwani will work with SAFA. Though people were pretty happy with Santhosh’s system, it was interesting to see, how the discussions were directed. I had to leave in between so didn’t get to know what finally happened.

In short, the conference just did the opposite of what it should have done. It helped in accelerating some processes, which I think might have happened even if they didn’t intervene. It did nothing on policy level, no decisions on lobbying govt. for freeing up its technologies related to accessibility(at the least). More over, it gave chance for some to play the big daddy or mommy in the field and dictate to people who work on the field on what to do(thankfully, at least consortium had enough thinking heads to counter it). This was a good opportunity for a lot of people to make a mark, and I do believe they indeed made a mark in their progress card, just that it is in red.

Gangwars in campus: How it becomes the last blow to student freedom

Last Friday(13th Nov 2009), when i was chatting to a friend, incidentally he mentioned that college is suspended indefinitely. I was amazed to hear that since its long time my old college had any serious problem to shut themselves down. Before everyone was saying the smooth running of college is impaired by so called political(?) activities of student. Management brought a new principal to crunch the political activities and he was able to crush the activities to a large extend(mainly by helping only one gang). So, for last two years, gang wars of the scale mentioned here was absent in the college. Only small scale scratchings were there.

I simply asked him what happened. The reply was interesting. In a college, where authorities now claim that there are no political activities which impaired the academic and cultural activities, a new gang war happened. A new gang of students identifying themselves as “Amigoz” were beaten up by students of Mechanical Engineering dept.(interestingly, amigo is the spanish for Friend and friends was the name of the Mechanical sympathisers when i was in college). What happened is pretty simple, the so called “amigoz” decided to celebrate “amigo day” on 12th of November(technically “amigo day” or “Día del Amigo” or “friends day” is on July 20th). I don’t exactly know how. May be some cultural event or something like that and it seems Mechanical students tried to gate crash it. But it seems some local amigos(read friends) and police deflected them(as an effect the “all mighty” mechanicals lost their face ). So the p***** of mechanicals decided to take revenge on the amigoz and did what any other 18 year old will usually do. They just walked into the ECE block and bashed up any “amigoz” or their amigos. There were many injuries and a proud mech. soldier(lowest rank in old NY gangs) was injured from a broken window and got admitted in hospital too. As usual police arrived after the show. Now comes the better part, the sympathisers of “amigoz” in the locality warned students and management promptly suspended the college activities.

Now, everyone might be thinking what is so big in this! Actually nothing, its the normal stuff happening in any college around Kerala, sometimes it comes with the label of a political clash and becomes 40pt headlines in newspapers. Otherwise it ends up like this. I can’t spot any difference between the clashes in Nov 2007 and this. But then it was a big reason for college to convince themselves and any authority that elections to the student bodies in college and the political(?) activity related to it was the root cause.Politics and student freedom were cursed and made look like the biggest daemon haunting the college.

There were no elections held to the student union and as an effect no cultural activities were planned or conducted for last two years(still management is collecting the 500 Rs. for the non existing union activity from every student!). That means, as an effect of some gang wars, which had no remote relation to any political activity, the only student body in college got extinct, saying this will end all the fights in the campus. Did anything happened to the gang wars, no. So, who are the ultimate losers, every student of the college!

This incident just shows that, banning of the political activity in college and taking strong measures against exercising any democratic freedom haven’t changed the situation even a little, so now i can’t understand why college authorities is not ready to go forward with elections to the student body. I think the answer is, its not fights they fear. Its that, students participating in democratic activities might realize that they have some basic rights and might stand for it. Authorities fear the days when a student decides to stand up for what is his.

P.S: If i haven’t got any facts right here, just let me know, i will try to fix it.
P.S1: everything i wrote here are my thoughts, feelings and observations everyone has a right to disagree with it.

Experiments with Tesseract

I promised my friends at Swathantra Malayalam Computing long time back about extending Tesseract to support Malayalam. For last some weeks i have been talking with Debayan who does for Bengali and was trying to understand the detail of work required. We decided to work together on enhancing the existing tesseract system for indic languages. I will be following the work up in Indic tesseract space.

I conducted some small intial experiments. It gave me an idea of what i have and what is to be done(i am looking forward to a high performance system with efficiency for practical use).

To test the symbol classifier of tesseract(note just classifier), i trained it with a single page and tested on another of same font.

Training data was of about 1000 symbols.Which is pretty small compared to the usual number of symbols we encounter in malayalam which is pegged around 250-350(there are many variations! Hussain sir can give a better number). To my amazement, tesseract training is easy,simple and takes pretty less time(performance evaluation might be immature since, we haven’t trained it perfectly yet).

My initial observations are,

• The segmentation part of Tesseract is not great and it might not work well with Indic languages( from what i understand, lot of research work is going on improving the segmentation of tesseract). I found it handicapped in case of upper and lower matras.
• Since it is not designed for languages with pre base post base modifier forms, it wont do any re arrangement of modifiers(we have to add language heuristics after recognition).
• Their DAWG based language model is pretty buggy at the moment and might not help us much since,
  • In symbol to code mapping, we don’t have a one to one map.
  • The standard word length it assumes and what we have(when counted in unicode level) very different, which makes a dawg based system very inefficient.
  • A simple dictionary based post processor might help us better i think.

I decided on a future work plan(i will soon update the wiki with these details).

Future work

• Understand the code flow and working of tesseract system(mainly how each functions are called from where for what etc.).
• Identify the modules which affects us and try to understand how.
• Keeping the classifier intact, add a better segmentation system(better fix the bugs in current algo if possible).
• Add a reordering mechanism which is scalable to all languages(i have pretty good idea how to do it, just have to find the right place to insert it to get the right results).
• Add a simple aspell or similar spell checker based language model which should help in correcting the words better than an expensive dawg system.

Immediate Plans

• Train with more data(more fonts,more samples,more symbols). I am planning to do this update before 15th of this month if everything goes will according to plan.

By the way sorry for the tech document kind of style! More tech writing is affecting my normal writing too!Plus day night writig code makes it tough to write something which is not in proper syntax!

“Please Read the Offer Document Carefully Before ….”

I hope all are familiar with the above words. After all those Shining India mutual fund advertisements, a warning like this is mandatory. I felt the same for the offer documents supplied at campus placements after reading a news in economic times about the act of Keane India on last monday. A small account of it can be read over here.

I can imagine a little about what was there within the minds of those people who got sacked. I believe all of them were people who got placements through campuses (since Keane takes 80% their workforce from campus and its not easy to sent one with prior experience). All the offer documents i got (not many anyway only two) had one section called “Job Termination“. There was a notice period specified before terminating the job. It usually varies according to your value and employers value.For me those values were in months.

Friends, who get a job from campus are usually not bothered to read through the whole document before agreeing and sending it to specified address. Or even if they mind to read, thinking about loosing the job nobody is ready to reject any job they have in hand. Or moreover, the monetary benefits page blinds them while reading through other instructions. I rejected a job in industry for one in research in academia. As the academia is not as rich as corporate India and my preference was not monetary, what i rejected was the one which gave me more monetary benefits. That made me answer a lot of questions like, how much you think you will get after you complete the course, Is that bigger than what you will get after that time in industry and a lot similar questions. People who are not ready to ignore the curiosity of people also don’t like to reject some offer despite of the risk associated with it.

But they are not understanding that, the value of people who gets fired by a company for which they spent two years is not impressive unless you have made a value for your own. The companies which like new recruits than experienced professionals, sometimes takes around 2 – 3 weeks sometimes to give the offer document after placing a verbal offer. The figures they boasted at the recruitment drive might never match, or appears like only something which you get after the highest performance incentive and no tax cuts. 

Friends, money matters. But it is not the only thing matters. The first job is your life and better be careful with it. Please read the ful document, even the fine prints. In case of any doubt, call the company or mail them. Usually they provide an explanation. Placement offices in colleges, more than making the numbers please teach your students about the importance of a job and how one should be careful about offer documents. More over, students, even you are doing a job, try to make your own space in world so that even at the worst moment of the company, to fire you should be the last option!!!

“So please read the offer document carefully before investing your life“

Love!!! My thoughts!!!

This is my second article of the series, God,Love,Freedom and Life. All what I write here is just simply my thoughts and my own conclusions so I welcome your opinions on the matter. Thanks for Anwar for inspiring me to write a series like this. It was easy for me to write about God because, its a topic which I studied hard and thought very deep to get some insight. But when it comes to love, I never thought deep into the subject and tried to find whats actually love, or of its several appearances, which one is true.

To start with, whenever we think of love, its an emotion which after all and is a feeling for which people will go to the farthest extents. The parameters of love between one person to another varies. We can never find the same intensity on two relationships. Moreover it is everywhere. When we say we hate someone, it means we love to hate that buddy!

Moreover, how much one love someone else, is the measure of intensity of relation between them. All relationships in the world is ruled by the laws of love. When we think in deep, one can understand, more than thing else, the world is ruled by laws of love.

When I say laws of love, people might get confused, “are there any laws for love? Its a free flowing emotion na?” Ultimate law of love is “There is only one kind of love and its the ultimate,’Love for life’”. When someone is sure, he can’t love his life anymore, it ends all other love. Or we can put it like this, “if there is no feeling of love in any form towards anything in ones life, then his love for life finished.” I believe love is the purpose of life and when love is extinct in ones life, he will be dead. So any living being will be having some kind love to keep him alive.

So there appears the question of the people who are forced to death. Are they dead because they don’t love their life? Always it will not be, there can be another strong reason. It is the disturbances to the energy conditions of one due to love causes that ending. Or simple law of nature, unstable beings can’t exist in nature as it is.

So what is the relation between love and energy? In my view, energy is the factor responsible for the universe, and love is the factor which controls the flow of energy in our lives. So more than an emotion, love is the thing which is responsible for our lives.

Being Lonely(its good if it makes you think!!!)

For me being lonely is the time to think and let your mind gaze through the rich grasslands life. Even when i am in a crowd, sometimes i will go thinking. I never need to be alone to feel alone. Being alone is simply something which happens to me anywhere unpredictable. When I feel like that, what i will try is to draw conclusions on what i observed.

On such an occasion, i was trying to draw conclusions on the truth of GOD. I just tried to think how GOD can be? As he is one capable of driving the whole universe, he will be either somewhere outside the universe at a centralized place or a distributed source. The existance of such a centralized source is something which is beyond imagination and almost impossible when we think that it is having a role in each and everything happening in the whole universe(just think of a big energy source which provides the force for our movements within the earth and for earth to move around the sun and so on). It led me to the conclusion that the force can be something distributed every where in the whole universe(just understand its a simple conclusion by a crooked mind!!! I am ready to believe otherwise if you convince me).

Then also the problem was actually not solved completely. I just kept thinking what can be that distributed source of power be? It should be something associated with each and everything. When i looked in such a sense, it just clicked me that whenever some chemical reaction happens an amount of energy is released. All activities in the universe when thought of can be reduced to simply things which are using energy or things which displaces energy. Energy is the single driving force in all the actions in the universe. All actions are exchanges or conversions of forms of energy!!!

Then I suddenly felt like, is things this simple? But when i started thinking deeply into the facts it appeared to me more clear that, the concept of a single GOD or a group GODS or anything can be rounded off to the definition of it as the ultimate source of energy in the whole universe. Suddenly it appeared something which explains everything to me(may be because it was so simple).

My thoughts then went into the fact that no religion or beliefs are explaining things like this. Then when i thought a little more, i understood that image the god as something like a watchdog and the ultimate jury was a better solution to many problems in the society and answers to a bunch of questions(another of my assumptions!!!cross me if you want, always welcome!!!).

This just a sample of how my thoughts used to go when I am alone(not physically!!!). Please be patient to read more!!!

My New Blog

Hi all….

I decided to keep my English and malayalam writings on different weblogs and decided to start a new one. As I am using blogger already, i thought wordpress will be a better choice so that i can also check out the facilities given by wordpress too. I am moving some my old english posts in my blog here… please bear with me!!!