Blogs

While the COVID-19 pandemic is going on, Kerala free software communities started doing interview series with active contributors. The interviews were very informal and was about personal journey and the story behind the projects. And they were all in Malayalam. I gave 3 such interviews in last few weeks. I am going to list them in this blog post. Humans of SMC Series This was an initiative by Tinkerhub, a non-profit organization which promotes the creation of tech-talent focused among youth, especially students. Hrishikesh interviewed me for them. ...

കേരളത്തിന്റെ സാക്ഷരതാപ്രസ്ഥാനത്തിന്റെ തുടർച്ചയായി സാർവത്രിക ഡിജിറ്റൽ സാക്ഷരതാ പദ്ധതിയ്ക്കായി ചില ശ്രമങ്ങൾ 2019 സെപ്റ്റംബർ മുതൽ ഞാൻ നടത്തിയിരുന്നു. സർക്കാറിന്റെയും മറ്റുസ്ഥാപനങ്ങളുടെയും ആഭിമുഖ്യത്തിൽ ആ പദ്ധതി മാർച്ചിൽ തുടങ്ങാനിരിക്കെ കോവിഡ്-19 മഹാമാരി ഗുരുതരമാകുകയും പദ്ധതിയുടെ ഭാവി അനിശ്ചിതത്തിലാവുകയും ചെയ്തു. അതേ സമയം ഇത്തരമൊരു പദ്ധതിയുടെ ആവശ്യകത ഇരട്ടിക്കുകയും ചെയ്തു. പദ്ധതിയെപ്പറ്റി സർക്കാറിന്റെ ഔദ്യോഗികപ്രഖ്യാപനങ്ങൾ വന്നോട്ടെ എന്നുകരുതി ഞാൻ ഒന്നും പബ്ലിക്ക് ആയി എഴുതിയിരുന്നില്ല. പുതിയ സാഹചര്യത്തിൽ ഈ പദ്ധതിയ്ക്കുവേണ്ടിയുള്ള ഞാനടക്കമുള്ള ഒരുപാടുപേരുടെ പ്രയത്നത്തെ രേഖപ്പെടുത്താനാണ് ഈ ലേഖനം. തുടക്കം സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങിന്റെ പ്രവർത്തനഫലങ്ങൾ കൂടുതൽ ആളുകളിലേക്കെത്തുകയും അതോടൊപ്പം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടർ, മൊബൈൽ, ഇന്റർനെറ്റ് തുടങ്ങിയവ എല്ലാവരും വ്യാപകമായി ഉപയോഗിക്കാൻ തുടങ്ങുകയും ചെയ്തതോടെ കഴിഞ്ഞ കുറേ വർഷങ്ങളായി എന്റെയും സുഹൃത്തുക്കളുടെയും നല്ലൊരുഭാഗം സമയം ഇതുസംബന്ധിച്ച സംശയനിവാരണത്തിനും സഹായങ്ങൾക്കുമായി മാറ്റിവെക്കേണ്ടിവരുന്നുണ്ട്. ഈമെയിൽ, സോഷ്യൽ മീഡിയ തുടങ്ങി പലരീതിയിൽ ആളുകൾ നിരന്തരം ബന്ധപ്പെട്ടുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്നുണ്ട്. ഞങ്ങൾ ഈ മേഖലയിൽ ഗവേഷണവും സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയർ ഡെവലപ്മെന്റും ചെയ്യുന്നവരാണെങ്കിലും വലിയ തോതിൽ ഇങ്ങനെ സമയം മാറ്റിവെയ്ക്കാനില്ലാത്തവരാണ്. ഈ സാഹചര്യത്തിലാണ് എന്തുകൊണ്ട് ഗവൺമെന്റിനുതന്നെ ഒരു മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് സാക്ഷരതാ പരിപാടി തുടങ്ങിക്കൂടാ എന്ന ചിന്ത ഉണ്ടാവുന്നത്. ജൂൺ മാസത്തിൽ ഇക്കാര്യം ഞാൻ സാക്ഷരതാമിഷൻ ഡയറക്ടർ ഡോ. പി. എസ്. ശ്രീകലയോട് ഈമെയിൽ വഴി ചർച്ച ചെയ്യുകയും അവർ അത് ചർച്ച ചെയ്യാൻ ഒരു ദിവസം നേരിൽ കാണാൻ വരാനാവശ്യപ്പെടുകയും ചെയ്തു. ...

It has been more than a month since lockdown is announced in Kerala. The world has changed and never going to be same. I thought of leaving a write up here, mainly for future self to recollect how did I spend this time at home. Sunday, March 21st was general curfew in India. On the same day, Kavya’s grand father passed away at Thodupuzha. Since travel was not allowed on the day, we could not travel from Thiruvananthapuram to Thodupuzha. On Monday 22nd we travelled in a taxi to Thodupuzha. The funeral was very minimal due to the special circumstances and government orders that prevent people to attend functions. We returned on the same day back to Thiruvananthapuram. While we were travelling back, lock down was announced from next day - 23rd onwards. ...

A new version of Manjari Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 1.800 adds tabular number and slashed zero opentype features along with bug fixes. New version of the font is available at: https://smc.org.in/fonts/#manjari Tabular numbers The Kerala health department publishes daily COVID-19 reports and they use Manjari(example). Sometimes the numbers in table in Manjari font is slightly difficult to read when you want to compare the numbers in columns across rows. This is because each digit will take a proportional horizontal space and not fixed width. ...

A new version of Chilanka Malayalam typeface is available now. Version 1.500 adds glyphs required to support International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration New version of the font is available at: https://smc.org.in/fonts/#chilanka Chilanka was the first typeface I designed in 2014 for Malayalam. The usecase I had in mind while designing it was to use it in comic or non-serious contexts. But once it was released, contrary to my expectation, people used for serious Malayalam writing. The identity it acquired since its release was more about writing that are personal, such as invitations, intimate letters, reflections of childhood, innocence, nostalgia etc. This was a pleasant surprise to me and happy to see its widespread use everywhere. ...

Many months back, I started an experiment to see if Malayalam handwriting recognition can be done in a non-machine learning based approach. This blog post explains the approach, the work done so far and results. Handwriting recognition can be done while the user is writing(called online handwriting recognition) and recognizing a sample somebody wrote in the past(offline recognition). Online and offline recognition problems are different problems. This is because, in online recognition, it is possible to capture additional details such as pen up, pen down, pen movement directions and rotations. These details provide an extra advantage on recognition. In offline recognition, we only have a sample written by somebody in the past. It is also important to note that optical character recognition(OCR) for printed content on a paper has differences with handwriting recognition. Printed content often have regularities(single font, uniformly aligned content etc.) ...

On February 15, I attended the Professional student summit organized by higher education department of Kerala. The summit aims to provide a venue to interact with professionals with the students. Around 2000 students from 2nd to 4th semesters from different colleges of law, engineering, medicine, agriculture, fisheries, veterinary and management in Kerala attended the summit. The Chief Minister and Minister for Higher Education also attended the Summit. This is the second edition of the event. The first one was in 2019 at same venue - Cochin university of science and technology. ...

The Bureau of Indian Standards(BIS) had published a Part of Speech(POS) tagset for Indian languages. POS is the process of assigning a part of speech marker to each word in a given text. In this article, I am reviewing the tag set defined in it. While developing mlmorph project I had explored a candidate POS tagging schema for Malayalam. I did not choose BIS tagset for the reasons I am going to explian in this article. Along with the tagset, we will also analyse the ILCI-II Malayalam text corpus published by TDIL using the BIS POS tagset. I will start with some of the concepts and how that applies to different languages. ...

I presented the Malayalam Morphology Analyser at 2nd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages- LORESMT Dublin, Ireland as part of 17th MT Summit. Paper: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-6801 Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/… Proceedings from the LORESMT workshop: https://aclweb.org/anthology/volumes/W19-68/

Happy to share the news that I am awarded by President of India for contributions to Malayalam language. Maharshi Badrayan Vyas Samman by the Hon. President of India is in recognition of my contributions in the field of Malayalam language. The award, instituted in 2016, is given to the substantial contributions to languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabi, Pali and Classical Oriya, Classical Kannada, Classical Telugu, and Classical Malayalam. This is given to young scholars in the age group of 30 to 45 years. The Presidential award carries a certificate of honor, a memento and a cash prize of ₹1 lakh. These awards are announced once a year on the occasion of the Indian independence day on 15th August.