Debayan’s Weblog

The concept of giving things away for the good of others is a noble one. It is philanthropic in nature and a generous thing to do. That is the case with commodities and money. How is it different when it is applied to knowledge?

With money, if you share it, you lose some part of it. With knowledge however, sharing never decreases it in any amount, and as a result of feedback from those you have shared it with it may increase. This is the core concept of sharing source code in Free and Open Source Software paradigm.

Knowledge however does have a monetary value attached with it. If you can hide it from others and sell the results, you make profit. That is the core concept of how proprietary software works.

So does this mean that someone giving away source code to his application is always a good hearted person? Maybe not.

Lets analyse what a student stands to gain on releasing the “recipe” to his application:

1. Popularity/Fame

2. Feedback from better people

3. Solutions to problems that he himself can not fix

4. Industry standard skills in documentation and planning

5. Online code portfolio for potential recruiters

6. Extending the skills acquired to grab fellowships/Summers of Code

7. And hence…. money…….

Call me blind, but I can not see why any student would not want the 7 things on the list above. What has it got to do with a good heart? Well, there was a time when it did. Those were the early golden days of the hacker culture, when a geek would write his own drivers simply because he needed them. It would mean 2 things to him

1. Satisfaction

2. His job gets done

Thanks to the salient features of the open source business model, incessant struggle of people like Richard Stallman, industrious and adventurous organisations such as RedHat, Novell, SUN and the current economic slowdown, proprietary software is slowly but surely on its way out.

So if you are a girl and your guy is a open source geek, do not assume he is a nice man. He is just on the right track to earning a lot of money.

I remember a time when I was in my 2^nd year and someone I now really hate (for personal reasons) told me how great Linux is. At that time I replied saying “MS-DOS is just as powerful as Linux”.

That was then, and this is now.

I currently contribute to the Indic OCR project. It all began in my 2^nd year, when a group of professors from ISI Kolkata visited our college and delivered a seminar on Digital Image Processing. OCR was one topic that was discussed at length. I wanted to work on OCR but never found the resources since I had no computer at that time.

After around a year of active involvement with our LUG and having built CodeCracker, it was summer internship time. I applied to the Google Summer of Code for a project called LTSP (Linux terminal server project), and was assigned a mentor, which is pretty close to being selected. My application was ultimately rejected and I was dejected.

I never gave up my love for OCR and applied to a few research institutes’ fellowship schemes. My project proposals were nothing fancy. I simply wanted to implement existing algorithms for Indic OCR and then free the code, but those proposals were rejected.

I went back home in the summer vacations pretty upset. It had been a month into the summers and I had no internship. Shreyank and I had applied for NOSIP , but I did not like the projects that NOSIP had. I then tried out GNOME hacking. I read a few online tutorials and used jhbuild and had some fune with gtk.

It was then that I applied for an internship at Red Hat. I got a pleasant reply from a person called Mr. Sankarshan, which was pretty unexpected. After rejecting 3 of my proposals, he finally agreed to mentor me on my OCR proposal.

I had managed to go through the Tesseract-OCR source code, which is a pretty good OCR engine for english, and figured out how to alter the images being OCRed via C++ routines. I soon figured out what I have to do to accommodate Indian languages like Hindi and Bengali. I played around with the scanned image, which is essentially a matrix of 1s and 0s and devised my own algorithms. I wrote code that could clip the “maatraas” between two successive “aksharas” and then use the existing recogniser to OCR Hindi/ Bengali text-images. Via the internships I also learned how to plan my work and how to report it properly.

It turned out that Indic OCR is a very important project for many people around the world, and an organisation named Sarai decided to award me a fellowship. So here I am, working on making the first freely available Indic OCR system.

My only advice to beginners: Do it only if playing with code thrills you, otherwise find something else that does.

Links:

http://code.google.com/p/tesseractindic

http://code.google.com/p/ccnitdgp/

Things to blog about:

• ISI trip
• 2nd February
• 3rd February
• 4th February
• 5th February
• RTI link
• Kids in lab
• Days ahead
• Abhas Abhinav

ISI Trip: I had mailed Dr. B.B. Chaudhuri of ISI Kolkata to help me out regarding training data and testing ground truth data and thanx to Mr. Gora’s recommendation, he allowed me to meet him in Kolkata. I met him at ISI and spoke to him for about 40 minutes regarding different issues in Indic OCR. He discussed some really good ways to significantly reduce recognition time etc, and rued the lack of good research assistants.
He could not share data with me at that moment because of lack of manpower and copyright issues. I was returning dejected, but I met Dr. Mandar Mitra at the gates. Mr. Sankarshan, my mentor who originally started me down this path, had introduced me to him in Kolkata about a month back. It really helped and he took me to his lab. He mined last 7 8 years his work and gave me everythin useful he had, includeing a lot of ground truth data and some images with bounding boxes information.
But that is not the most important thing i acquired there. While talking to Mandar Mitra, it dawned on us that the entire training process can be automated using python scripts, and there is no need of manually feeding data using scanners and all.
i have since done some work and posted the same at http://debayanin.googlepages.com/hackingtesseract. To be honest, I am terribly busy with our own FOSS fest http://mukti09.in and will be able to work full time on this only after its over.

2nd February: Mukti 09 was “inaugurated” by IT minister of West Bengal. Prof. Debesh Das. We had organised a sit and draw contest and comuter quiz contest for school children, but since most schools are having exams, only 2 3 schools turned up. The minister’s speech was good. The best part though was little kids from R.E.Model school working in our labs. They loved it.

3rd February: We had 3 workshops. Python, GCC and FOSS EDA. The last one in particular we were most excited (jittery) about. Just when it was time to start the video broadcast of Aanjhan(aka tuxmaniac) via skype, the net died totally.We almost gave up and told people that it was cancelled. Suddenly the net sprang back to life and we set it up quickly. Unfirtunately the mic dint work, so  i had to do some typing. It was very well received. Most of the people who attended do use Fedora Electronic Lab now, and the ECE HOD also appreciated the initiative. Aaanjhan lit up the audience with his youthful energy. Some ECE professor called me and aske dme to do it again so his M..Tech scholars can attend.

4th February: My SVN talk was cancelled because i could not find a free lab. There some out-station participants from B.C.Roy college and they were disappointed. So I took them to Jhups and explained SVN to them. Other than that, there was a workshop on scilab (matlab equivalent) by CDAC people. I did not like their attitude, but the workshop was good.

RTI Link: Inspite of discouragement from fellow friends and people on IRC, I pushed ahead with my efforts to get the RTI act information put on the website. I mailed Prof A.K. Mitra twice and our director once. I did not hesitate to write “it maybe illegal not to carry the RTI link on the college website”. Around a months later, I see the link on the website now. And guess who the PIOs are, the 2 people i mailed !!

5th February: We basically received Satya and Abhas for Mukti. We also had this FREE-P-L event in the night. I introduced Darshana to Abhas. Abhas is overall a very cool person. We had beer with him in his gust house room, and that caused some problems/complaints to the HES manager, but nothing serious happened.

Abhas spoke his heart (brain?) out about the FOSS philosophy and a million related thing. Abhas deserves a separate post. Will cover him there.

Will blog about 6, 7, 8 later.

Pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/debayanin/Mukti09#