Events

SMC Website

SMC new website launched in Bengaluru. Riya Sabu volunteered to initiate the new website, Hiran Venogopalan contributed to the design, Santhosh Thottingal polished it to the current form, Joice Joseph, Subin Siby and Akshay S Dinesh provided infrastustural and miscellaneus support for the website release.

Send bugs and patches to https://gitlab.com/smc/website-2024

Annual General Body

SMC's Annual General Body Meeting was held at PG Centre Thrissur on September 29, 2024. Detailed report of the same will be published as a separate blog post. (Edit: The report is here)

Software

Announcing Indic Keyboard v3.6

New version of Indic Keyboard is available on Google Play Store and F-droid. This version is entirely a community lead effort. We thank all the contributors.

Major Changes

• Updated emojis (contributed by Vivek K J )
• Support for newer versions of android (contributed by Mujeeb Rahman K)
• Varnam integration - some more work needed to make it work on latest versions of android. (contributed by Subin Siby)

If you need to report bugs, here is the repo.

Mlphon Version 1.4.0

Mlphon updated version released.

Research

The research paper "What is lost in Normalization? Exploring Pitfalls in Multilingual ASR Model Evaluations" by Kavya Manohar and Leena G Pillai is now accepted for publication in the premier NLP conference, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024) to be held at Miami Florida during Novemebr 12-16, 2024.

The work explores the issues associated with the evaluation routine implemented in OpenAI's Whisper that wrongly reports word error rates in automatic speech recognition models in Indic languages.

Community News

Tulu Tilagari in Unicode

Tulu-Tigalari script is officially supported in Unicode 16. Attestation and discussions here.

IndiaFOSS

IndiaFOSS 2024 was held at NIMHANS Convention Center on 7th - 8th Sep 2024.

Wiki Loves Onam

Wiki Loves Onam 2024 Campaign Successfully running with crowdsourcing 2000+ images related to Onam. Luca Science Portal and Kerala Biodiversity Monitoring Networking is Running a supporting campaign for WikiLovesOnam For Documenting Kerala's Native Flowers.

State of the Map 2024 (SotM) Conference

SotM Conference was held at Nairobi, Kenya during September 6 - 8, 2024.  Nikhil (Onsite) and Manoj Karingamadathil(Online) from OSM Kerala Community Participated in the conference.  Manoj Karingamadathil and Athul R T presented a poster on Map Kerala Initiative: Unveiling Kerala's Open Data Landscape.

Wordcamp Kerala 2024

WordCamp Kerala 2024 is going to be held at  Kozhikode on November 9, 2024 (Saturday) at the Malabar Marina Convention Centre.

Wikimedia Technology Summit

The 3rd Wikimedia Technology Summit (WTS 2024)  to be held at Hyatt Gachibowli, Hyderabad, India during October 4,5 2024.

Software Freedom Day

FSUG Thrissur celebrated Software Freedom Day 2024 on 21 Sep at PG Centre, Thrissur. Free Software Community of India (FSCI) is an umbrella organization which connects many such user groups across India. FSCI (@fsci) also maintains various free software services, you can find and support them here: https://fsci.in. The beta release of Prav App (https://prav.app) was also celebrated.

Joint Statement on Defamation Proceedings against Wikipedia: Protect Open Knowledge, Freedom of Speech and Privacy in India