Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2023

Technology in Bharathiya Bhasha for Schools

Before I try and put my views on what we should be doing in terms of Technology in Bharatiya Bhasha (Indian languages), I would quickly like to skim through what is the current status or the work that has happened, especially in terms of using technology in Bharatiya languages. If you look specifically at the topics for discussion, on Day 2, Session IV session ,  namely, development of Indic keyboard , handwriting recognition for Bharatiya scripts or the voice-to-text conversion for Bharatiya languages , they broadly fall into the realm of Human Machine Interaction or Human Computer Interaction . A significant amount of work has happened and is happening, as we speak, in several academic institutes, startups, established industries, but in isolation and in pockets and in many cases the same things (same languages, same use case) is being done. Fortunately, several academic institutes have been liberally funded by the department of science and technology and the progress in terms of

Publishing Journey - Questions and Answers

At what point in your career did you start publishing your works and what really motivated you?  My journey into publishing my work began during my master's program, although I can't pinpoint the exact moment it started. It was around the time I was pursuing a master's in engineering, and towards the end of my program, I found myself involved in a research project as a research assistant. This project involved classifying ships in the ocean using emerging neural network technology. While the specifics of the project aren't crucial, what mattered was the timing – this was when neural networks were just gaining traction, and I recall the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks publishing its initial issues around that period. Working with limited computing resources in the early '90s, I achieved some promising results, and it felt like something worth sharing with the scientific community. I was fortunate to be part of a research team that had a strong culture of publish

Authorship or Acknowledgement? Order of Authors!

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These days labs write papers

Appraisals - The Yearly Ache

{A Personal View} Background Apprisals are an yearly ache that we have imposed on ourselves to make ourselves a better person than we were previously. It is stressful to both the  assessor (manager) who is on one side of the spectrum and the assessee (team member). It is at this time of the year the distance between the manager and the team members is at the maximum, even though they are part of the same team. Irrespective of which role you play you have a solid list of greviences against the  other role. So it is nothing to do with the role, it is to do with the situation. While the tension is on during the apprisal time - the folks in human resource bring in their wisdom and introduce the dreaded Gaussian curve\band and introduce a constraint where you as a manager have to necessarily have a certain number of your team members in a certain region under the curve and then the finance folks attach a monetary value to each part of the curve. These two, the constraint linked to money, ma