Tools required for meaningful Human computer interaction in Indic Languages

Posted on May 10, 2013 by srix — No Comments ↓

Am trying to consolidate all the different type of language and interaction tools required to make computer better at understanding and interacting in human languages. I have captured it as a mind map in Xmind . This will be a living document and welcome any suggestions on tools / technologies that I have missed.

Interestingly most of the technologies like nlp, speech recognition and speech translation are still at very nascent stage. But sadly there is hardly any research being done for Indian / Indic languages like Hindi , Tamil etc. some technologies are relevant to only Indic languages for example Symbol translation. Languages like Tamil owing to its ancient nature, have different scripts at different stages of its evolution , namely Brahmi-tamil script, vateluthu (வட்டெழுத்து), modern script. Symbol translators convert a text from ancient script to modern script of the same language.

 

 

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Universities wiping out trees in the name of project record.

Posted on April 30, 2013 by srix — No Comments ↓

Cut trees for project record

Cut trees for project record

Every year lakhs of student in India religiously perform a task , vital for the graduation, called Project submission, The evidence for project submission is the project record. Typically A hard bound notebook of bonded A4 paper with water mark of the student registration no.. Contents are printed typically on one side of the pages. Students of Computer science , who writes program solely to be executed on the computer, also has to print the program and submit the project record. Except for few premier institutions that have upgraded themselves to the digital age , most of the colleges are still stuck in the 90’s practice.

Couple of years back, Indian railways allowed its passenger to board train by showing digital copy of the ticket instead of printout. Reason, was every day 3 lakh sheets were printed for etickets. This number, has considerably come down by allowing digital copies.

I did a rough calculation, which I have shared below. Every year Indian universities and colleges wipe out 50000+ trees for a process which doesn’t have direct benefit to either Students or faculties. Did you ever touch your record note book after you submitted your project?

There are other serious side effects in using a project record

  • Projects cannot be searched. if a student wants to find out any earlier work on his/her current project, it is extremely difficult to do it now.
  • Universities cannot verify fake or duplicate projects, since it is not searchable.

Better alternative.

  • AICTE or University should mandate that all college projects should be submitted as digital copy in a prescribed template instead of paper records.
  • A central database where students can search and study previous projects.
  • The central database can be used by employers to verify the student’s work.

 

 

image courtesy: background image from itc.nl

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Posted in General, Technology

Blogging using speech recognition

Posted on April 3, 2012 by srix — No Comments ↓

I’m blogging after quite a long time but there’s something special about this blog. This blog, I’m not typing but using speech recognition instead. After training Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 for a while I can tell you that my accuracy has increased by leaps and bounds. The only problem that I’m facing with the DNS is that I have to boot into Windows everytime I use the software. I wish nuance had released a Linux version too.

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Tethering Motorola Defy. Internet over USB on Windows and Linux

Posted on January 26, 2012 by srix — 1 Comment ↓

I purchased Motorola Defy Android mobile phone running Android 2.2.2, ( the later Defy+ runs Android 2.3). the phone supports 3G hotspot over  WIFI. But for some reason my phone kept crashing after few minutes of use of the hot spot feature. So I wanted to setup the tethering over USB. I use Kubuntu and Windows . Here, I wil explain how to tether your Motorola Defy phone using USB. The same should work on DEFY+, though I have not tested on it. Both the approaches doesnot require the phone to be rooted. And I use Airtel 3G in India

Tether on Windows:
Follow the instruction here. https://forums.motorola.com/posts/bc40b2fbdc Its stratigh forward and works for DEFY.

Tether on Linux:
This involves litle bit of tinkering. Follow the instructions in this article http://www.humans-enabled.com/2009/12/how-to-tether-your-verizon-droid-as.html . The original article itself is capable of tethering DEFY. I have altered couple of steps to suit me and am sharing it here.

Step 4:
my rule for DEFY is
SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{“22b8:428c”}==”22b8″, MODE=”0666″,

Step 10:
If you are using DEFY with android 2.2.2 , then don’t bother to download the Azilink with Android 2.3 patch. Download the latest release from the Azilink site itself.
cd ~
mkdir azilink
cd azilink
wget http://azilink.googlecode.com/files/azilink-2.0.2.apk
adb install -r azilink-2.0.2.apk
wget http://azilink.googlecode.com/files/azilink.ovpn

Step 11 & 12:
I had merged steps 11& 12 as follows
vi start_modem

#Type in the text below, then hit ZZ to save
adb forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927
sudo echo “domain lan” > /etc/resolv.conf
sudo echo “search lan” >> /etc/resolv.conf
sudo echo “nameserver 192.168.56.1″ >> /etc/resolv.conf
sudo openvpn –config azilink.ovpn

Follow the rest of the steps from the original article. Azilink About page quotes ” since this program doesnot run as root it cannot forward ICMP-based ping requests. To simulate this all pings are translated internally into UDP pings. Unfortunately, many hosts do not respond to UDP ping requests.” So don’t be surprised if you cannot ping your host but still able to use the internet.

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Posted in Technology

Run Tweetdeck on Linux without Adobe air.

Posted on December 10, 2011 by srix — 3 Comments ↓
D2

In my recent post , I had cribbed about why Am ditching Tweetdeck for Gwibber. Primarily it’s because am not getting any more Adobe Air updates for Linux. But there is good news. Twitter which acquired  Tweetdeck this year, has released native ( that means no more Adobe Air dependency) versions of the sotftware on Windows and Mac. But no release yet for Linux. Then how can this be a good news. Well , apparently , the Windows native version runs decently well on Linux over Wine. Wine lets you run Windows software on other operating systems.

Here is the instruction to get Tweetdeck 1.0 running on Ubuntu 11.0. For RPM  based ditros like Fedora use yum (appropriately) instead of apt-get.
First upgrade the Wine package to the latest. This is not required , but it is better to always use the latest Wine to get the best performance. AS on date wine-1.3.34 is the latest stable version for Ubuntu 11.10
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine

Now, download the latest Tweetdeck from http://www.tweetdeck.com/. It will be a .msi file eg. TweetDeck_1_0.msi
wine msiexec /i TweetDeck_1_0.msi
This will launch the installer. clik on install.
The tweetdeck is ready to be used . You can select it from you GUI or start it in command line as follows.
wine  ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Twitter/TweetDeck/TweetDeck.exe

There are however few quirks.the notification window doesn’t pop up always. Something That I hope Wine will fix  soon.

 

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