Train-the-Trainers principle is flawed
FOSS is making its way to schools and colleges in India in a big way. There are Govt sponsored projects that are working towards replacing proprietary software being used in labs and introducing FOSS technologies in college curriculum. Notable mentions are the FOSSEE project at IIT Bombay, IOTA in West Bengal , DSERT initiatives in Karnataka and numerous initiatives in Kerala and Gujarat.
The typical way in which they operate is that they train the teachers/professors in the schools/colleges. They conduct workshops spread over a few days and distribute GNU/Linux DVDs and training material at the end.
I have been part of the first such workshop session conducted at NIT Durgapur. We somehow managed to get around 90 teachers from high schools from Bardhaman and Bankura districts. 98% of them had no exposure to computers. Most of them did not even have computers in schools. Even if they did, they would never come close to using it. When you look at it that way it makes no sense to train them. The model was based on a simple logic: Lets teach school children FOSS. When they graduate and become engineers and managers FOSS shall be their natural choice.
Here are the flaws in the above logic: A college professor or teacher teaches stuff that she has mastered over a period of time. You may introduce FOSS to a teacher and he may even be very bright and receptive, but to teach it to students in a class is too much to ask. It takes 100s of hours of practice to comprehend things well enough to be able to explain to a an average class of 50.
Train-the-Trainers is an attempt at short circuiting FOSS education to get benefits in a short time range, but from what I have seen is that the rate of decay of information passed to teachers in workshops like these is exceptionally high when they go back to their institutions.
For engineering colleges the case is no different. Many professors will find it difficult to put themselves through tuitions and lectures to learn a new technology any ways. Then to expect them to learn it well enough to create a culture of using it locally in labs is again unrealistic. There are professors who drive FOSS usage in institutions in India, but if you ask them where they learnt their FOSS and for how long they have been using FOSS, the answer givesa pretty clear verdict at whether the train-the-trainers over a period of weeks works at all.
Students are the dynamos of an educational institution. In a sensible college where there is a reasonable degree of freedom students create new trends and culture. In my college for example, we started using GNU/Linux and then our professors followed to keep up with us.
I feel a lot of time and energy is being wasted in looking at the problem as a hierarchial graph. It does not show you facts like lack of interest after a certain age, ego in teachers and the lack of motivation and time these teachers have to learn a new tech.
I believe these programs should turn their focus to students. Cover as many as possible. If you have covered the brighter percentage of the class you will surely have influenced their decision making for decades to come.
How object files add up
For those who do not know:
When you compile a single source file using the command: gcc abc.cpp -o out , out is an object file as well as an executable. For a single source file, the object file and executable are both the same.
If you have multiple files, you can write a makefile to generate several object files, each belonging to a certain number of source files. While compiling all these .o object files the makefile helps the object files to come close to each other and form a huddle filling up the vital pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, creating one executable program out of all these .o files.
foss.in 2009
I went to foss.in this year with extremely high expectations although it was my first time. In the end, I came out content and happy.
As soon as I entered the NIMHANS Conference Hall gate I saw the huge banners and not many people outside. I assumed people are busy hacking or attending conferences. From quite far away I could recognise Kishore Bhargava sitting at the registration desk. There was some confusion there since I was a speaker and my delegate code was not important. They kept searching for my delegate code and found nothing. It was eventually solved.
Once inside the hall I naturally made my way to the Fedora stall since most of my friends were there already. Met Sayamindu, Shreyank, Kushal, Susmit, Hiemanshu, Rangeen and a few more there. Kital and Dmitris were sitting at the Fedora stall most of the time too.
The first auditorium I entered was the one where KDE POTD was happening. Pradeepto was sitting at the edge of the stage (on the floor) with a mic explaining to people how he got involved. Once it got over I went and said hi to him and Kartik Mistry. From what I heard, it was one of most successful POTDs ever in the history of FOSS.IN .
I had my workout session in about an hour or so, so i went to the auditorium which was assigned to me. I sat through a Rahul Sundaram talk on PackageKit. It was a pretty complete overview of PackageKit’s features. At the end of the talk my name was announced and Rahul Sundaram shook my hand and said “So you are Debayan, nice to meet you.”.
About 30 minutes before the session I noticed that in the schedules page the organisers had changed my workout session to a talk. I was not prepared for that. Fortunately I had a presentation from the Indic Meet held around 8 months back in Pune. I edited it to a certain degree, changed the headers and went onto the stage.
The talk was a little dis-organised, as I was improvising on the spot. OCR inherently is a good topic for presentation. You can WoW the audience just like that. Once the talk was over I got many questions. Krishnakant Mane asked me some 6 question back-to-back. I answered to the best of my abilities. As soon as I got off the stage a lot of people came up to me to discuss further. I met a few people who had worked on OCR before and wanted to join the project and some people who gave me links to resources that I could use for OCR training and testing.
I was looking forward to hooking up with a bunch of Indic guys and discussing a few ideas I had. Santhosh Thottingal, the grand daddy of Indic was missing that day. I decided to stick to the Fedora booth and chatted with Sayamindu. I got some misconceptions regarding rendering cleared by him. We hacked on the OCRFeeder GUI and tried to a solve a few problems.
I met Baishampayan Ghosh. He encouraged me to continue working on the project and also gave me some ideas on how to take the project further and build a community around it. I met Akarsh Simha, but I regret not spending more time with him.
One of the most fruitful conversations I had was with kakashi (Real name is Pranav Swaroop I think, man I have a bad memory). He has been working on a Machine Translation tool called Apertium. He was a volunteer and was guiding me during my talk too. He is a guy full of great ideas and I plan to stay in touch with him the future. He is planning to pursue his Masters at some University at Prague. I hope his VISA troubles are solved soon.
I finally met Santhosh ,Jinesh and Lakshmi kamath together. All Indic guys together finally. It was then that I realised that the floor above existed and it was meant for workouts!!
We discussed on a plethora of topics ranging from finding sponsors for an Indic dedicated server to better algorithms for correcting incorrect classifications in the OCR. kakashi, santhosh and I discussed at length on how to crowd source Indic development. We also sat together and talked to Krishnakant Mane on how we could help the visually impaired community with TTS and OCR solutions. It proved to be an impetus for me, seeing where my work would be used and applied if completed.
Needles to say, it was absolutely great to meet my college friend Shreyank Gupta. We had a great time. I liked his look. The long locks of hair suited him well. It was unfortunate that I missed his talk since I was at Chennai that day. I did see him getting a lot of stuff done with Hiemanshu and Dmitris Gzelos helping him out.
During the brain storming sessions we had, I got the idea of auto generating test data by rendering them onto an image. That would be the final piece in the puzzle that would free all dependencies on external help for the project.
There was a lot of focus on hardware related projects this time. I could see a lot of people flocking the openbeacon huddle upstairs. Sayamindu and Kushal bought an Adruino board during the conference and played around, playing irritating music.
I finally met Jigish Gohil aka Cyberorg. He was leaving no stone unturned in convincing people that the openSuSE L-i-fe distribution was the best on the block.
There was a speaker’s party held at the hotel banquet hall. We had awesome fun with a lot of leg pulling. I chatted up Marko Andre who works for Nokia and is a Gnome contributor. He had worked on pattern recognition too at one point of time and was interested in my work.
There was a healthy dose of music this year. Its difficult to put into words the fun that I had during both the programmes. I loved the blues session by ‘Blues before sunrise’ as much as ‘The Raghu Dixit Project’ the next day.
Overall it was an excellently organised event. The quality of the delegates was quite high in terms of technical knowledge. Most people just wanted to fiddle with stuff, and that was truly the spirit of FOSS.IN.
I really regret not having a camera. Looking forward to a point in life where I can have one.
NCIDEEE Chennai
I attended the OCR round table at NCIDEEE 2009 held at Loyola College, Chennai. We left the hotel at around 9:30 AM and reached Loyola College. We were lead into a huge hall with empty seats. Within no time the seats filled up with student.
I approached Prof. C.V.Jawahar and told him about my project. He had already heard of my work thanks to Jinesh. Jinesh was along with me. I showed him a new character classification technique that I have been thinking about implementing in Tesseract. He seemed to like it. He said “good”. 
Then a person announced the guests and speakers for the day. Strangely, my name was missing. Every single person also got a memento except me!
The talks began. Prof. Shantanu Choudhury from IIT Delhi gave almost an hour long talk about the status of the OCR consortium project. Yes, there is an OCR consortium and he leads the consortium. It is being funded by the Indian Government and their aim is to produce a working Indic OCR for 10 languages. They are into their third year.
He was followed by Prof. C.V. Jawahar who gave an amazing and amusing talk on the difficulties faced in OCR development. I was well aware of most of the problems since I have faced all of them in my experience. He kept giving disclaimers all through that the performance of an OCR is a very difficulty quantity to measure and is heavily situation dependent. He had a slide on alternate development models. He said open source development model does not work well for OCR because code was not as important as the technology involved in OCR (?). He said at that time that he had no problem in giving away the source code, but was confident that no one could use it properly (?).
His talk was followed by a few more talks. What I found disturbing was that all these institutes were developing separate code bases for separate languages. A professor from Punjab University displayed a Gurmukhi OCR which uses three different classifiers. He reported 98% accuracy.
There were a few more talks. I was feeling very sleepy. Post lunch there was a demo of the OCR they have been developing. They ran it on a Fedora box and the interface was Gtk. I found the OCR to be very slow (took around 1 minute to OCR one page) and the output had vowel reordering errors. The page was pretty noise free. I was impressed with the interface, but not with the performance.
The people present with visual impairments asked a lot of questions and were disappointed to learn that OCR has still not matured as a technology. There was a particular visually challenged person who asked the professors to release all the code.
I sat, wondering, if I was at all supposed to give a talk. Infact one of the organisers introduced me to one of the guests as a professor from IIT! I quickly corrected the error.
Two sessions went by and no one knew who I was and what I was doing there.
We moved to a smaller room with a few chairs and sat in a circle to discuss action points with the visually challenged people. People were still curiously looking at me wondering why the organisers had paid for my travel and lodging.
The discussions started. It was a very interesting discussion and I was waiting for a turn to say something. I eventually found it. I jumped in asking a question about their plans of freeing the source code. They said that there are Govt. restrictions and the Govt. “owns” the code hence he could not release it although he wanted to do it. I asked Prof Shantanu if there were Intellectual Property issues keeping them form releasing the source code. He agreed there were. I asked him whether he could request the funding agencies to allow them to free the code since it was slowing down the speed of development. He said “Sure, we will do that”, but he was saying that to every single suggestion given to him. He had to. I felt they were asking too much of him. I explained to them that freeing the code will take a lot of burden off their shoulders, especially in the areas of designing UI and creating custom applications and test data. They seemed to agree but kept mentioning the Govt. clauses.
I discussed the example of Tesseract OCR (all professors were familiar with the project) as a testament to the fact that OCR code must be freed. But they did not seem to understand.
I started a discussion on RFID based obstacle/object identification/detection and the use of SONAR. That turned out to be an interesting few minutes of dicussion and Prof. Shantanu seemed to have done some research on the topic.
As things drew to a close, I said to the visually impaired person sitting next to me “Dont worry, I am working on it too”.
Everyone kept asking me what I do, and I did not know what to say, since I recently quit my job. I told people there about FOSS.IN and that OCR is on of the sessions there. They were surprised to find out that there are people other than them working on OCR!
It ended with a burst of frustration and anguish from the Professors over the arrangements made. We headed back to the hotel.
Am typing the last line of this post, and looking forward to adding some code for tomorrow session at FOSS.IN
Free Indic OCR Workout for FOSS.IN 2009
The TesseractIndic project has been chosen for a hacker session at FOSS.IN 2009. If you are planning to attend FOSS.IN this year, go through this workout wiki and see if you are interested attending this workout. FYI, there have been several new releases for the project in the past week. Kindly read about it at http://hacking-tesseract.blogspot.com/ and visit http://code.google.com/p/tesseractindic .
The workout is schedule on 3rd December at 7 PM.
About God
Very often I meet people who preach religion. People who teach how to get closer to God. It irritates the hell out of me.
I believe in God, but I do not believe in religion. Not very long ago I used to be an atheist. My parents were religious people all along, and kept advising me to offer prayers, but I would never listen to them.
However as fate would have it, I turned a believer.
If you are an atheist, I hope you always remain that way. Only a very disturbing experience will make an atheist turn towards God, in desperation. I hope that situation does not arise in your life, ever.
Here is the point of this post: God is not to be taught or to be learnt. He is to be experienced, on your own. To be felt. Its like bungee jumping. You have to experience it to understand it. No amount of reading about it or thinking about it gets you any closer to it. That is my belief anyways
About Regionalism
Regionalism is a serious threat to our nation. It has the potential of breeding unrest in our country. There has been enough said on this issue in every magazine and newspaper, but here is what I think about it.
Certain elements in Maharashtra are against the idea of Biharis coming and working. I have grown up in Bihar. I did my schooling there. I spent 18 years of my life in that state. The state is truly poor and an educated man can not earn a good living there. Hence one has to move to other states.
Now lets say this is wrong. That they should stay in their own states. By the same analogy why do so many Indians go abroad (for work or study)? Is that not very wrong too? And they go inspite of all the attacks that Indians are facing overseas.
Here is my conclusion: India is to the world, what Bihar is to India. Having a sense of perspective helps.
Lost and Found
I woke up at 12 noon. I received a call from sridhar asking me when I planned to visit his office. Sridhar is the proprietor of a start up located at Rajajinagar. They offer training programs to diploma holders on topics such as JBoss, Struts, java etc. They have 17 PCs running on Fedora and need someone to setup networking, repositories and SVN for them. Rangeen did the initial work and then asked me to help out. I went and saw the setup, suggested to him possible solutions. and fixed a date for our next meeting.
Once I was done with that I decided to head to the Reliance WebWorld at Brigade Road. I recently bought a Netconnect Broadband modem. The stupid thing needs Windows to activate itself. I did manage to find a Windows machine finally (it was Sridhar’s laptop by the way) and once I hit the ‘Activate’ button, it said ‘Your device could not be activated. Kindly contact customer care’. So I called up customer care and they said none of my records are registered online, which meant that the guy who sold me the connection did not register my particulars on the server. Now that struck as strange to me, since i received to SMSes from Reliance telling me that they had activated the connection from their end.
Anyways, once I reached the Reliance WebWorld at Brigade Road, the shutter was half shut and it was dark inside. I decided to sneak in. I found a Reliance guy on the counter. He told me that the store was closed for the day, I insisted, and he listened. He keyed in my particulars and said the same thing that the customer care guy had told me over phone. He did suggest some solutions to the problem though.
Once I was done with that, I decided to head back home. I decided to take a path less travelled (sic). I pride myself on my geometry skills. I was excellent at Engineering Drawing at college, and have a good sense of direction in my head. I figured as long as I head in the correct directions I would not go wrong.
But as it turned out, my pride was not well founded. I soon lost my way. After a short while I grew worried. I somehow did not want to ask any bystander my whereabouts. Dont know why.
I kept walking, and lo, I saw a K.C.Das sweet shop infront of me! It took my breath away. For once, I was reminded of my Bengali roots. I immediately started fantasising about the rasogollas in there. I promptly made my way into the store and had 2 rasogollas for the first time in Bangalore. I informed my closest friends via sms about the special occasion.
I headed out of K.C.Das and say Koshy’s ice cream parlour infront of me. I had heard that this particular restaurant was 75 years old. I had a fruit punch for 30 Rs. I was the lone customer. I chatted with the cashier-cum-waiter for a while. There hung three 50 style photos of the original owners of this joint. 2 of them were smiling down on me, as if to say, thanks for visiting. The third one was more serious and wore a tie. I assumed he was an accountant.
I had bought a daily pass in the day, hence I was not too worried about getting back. I took a combination of buses back to Sultan Palya. Bought 20 Rs worth of chicken kabab (am not sure its chicken, but thats what they say it is) and ate it a few minutes back.
In a way, I was lost and found today, in a special way
Google = God?
Now this is really really eerie stuff. Today I came to office wearing my “Holland” T-shirt. I normally never wear this shirt to office.
I fired up my Gmail in the browser, and see a “Study in Holland” Google ad!
A few minutes later, I received a call from this organisation. They were calling a friend of mine, but had my number against his name. I gave them the correct number. A few minutes later, on Google ads, I see the name of the organisation!
What the *hell* is going on here?
Attending OCR roundtable at Chennai
I have been invited to present a paper and discuss OCR related technology at the “National Conference on ICTs for the differently- abled/under privileged communities in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship 2009 – (NCIDEEE 2009)” to be held in Chennai. Looks like giants in the field are coming to attend. The likes of Prof. B. B. Chaudhuri, ISI Kolkata and Prof. C. V. Jawahar, IIIT Hyderabad shall grace the occasion. Looking forward to listening to what they have to say. Seems like I am going to represent the free software community for OCR there.
There is a day (2nd November) devoted fully to OCR. The next day is devoted to Text-To-Speech. The dates do overlap with foss.in. Will miss the first few days at foss.in this year.
[1] http://cis-india.org/events/ncideee-2009
[2] http://www.loyolacollege.edu/NCIDEEE/home.html
ERRATA: The date is 2nd December. Not November
