SMC Monthly Updates for February 2020

Gayathri's first anniversary, improved handwriting recognition algorithm, Indic Project website revamped and more

Gayathri celebrated its first anniversary on 20th February 2020. Designer, Binoy Dominic shared his sheer happiness on witnessing the font he designed almost everywhere.

The font was built by SMC with the support of Kerala Bhasha Institute. The unicode font was designed by Binoy Dominic, open type engineering was done by Kavya Manohar and the project was organized by Santhosh Thottingal.

Professional student's summit 2020.

Santhosh Thottingal led a session on Engineering – Computer science, at Professional student's summit 2020 conducted by Government of Kerala.

Indic project website revamped.

IndicProject, which creates Indian language researches, applications and solutions for majority of India that speak vernacular languages, updated its website. The updated website lists all projects and researches by Indic Project. Akshay S Dinesh spared his time to revamp the website.

mlmorph version v1.1.1 released.

Santhosh Thottingal released a new version of python library for Malayalam Morphological Analyser, mlmorph. In the new version, v1.1.1, Santhosh fixed minor bugs in the web interface, updated lexicon and most importantly added support for permissive modes like ചിരിച്ചേയ്ക്കൂ, പറഞ്ഞേയ്ക്കൂ etc.

Handwriting recognition using Procrustes Analysis.

Santhosh has been working on offline Malayalam Handwriting recognition for the past couple of months. Last month, he updated the algorithm to Procrustes analysis. He penned about the challenges and complexities he had encountered.

IndiaOS videos are out.

IndiaOS, a true spirited open source conference that happened on 18th January of 2020 at Bangalore, released talk videos.

Kailash Nadh, CTO at Zerodha and SMC volunteer, explained how FOSS is deeply rooted in Zerodha's culture and DNA.

Biswas Basu, the super hero who built the ‘Rescue Kerala’ project, shared his experience of building a mission critical, real time project, which rescued many on Kerala floods 2018 and 19. He was also awarded IndiaOS grant for his future project ‘Rebuild Earth’.

If somebody asks you what was the biggest FOSS achievement of Kerala in 2019, you can answer as “Janayugom's FOSS adoption” without missing a beat.

Mujeeb Rahman, co-founder of AlphaFork Technologies, which enabled Janayugom's FOSS adoption, shared his experience of migrating a traditional newspaper institution to run completely on FOSS stack.

Anish Sheela, SMC volunteer, who is actively contributing to SMC's handwriting tool, explained technical challenges encountered.

Software licensing is a sensitive issue. Even SMC recently faced software copyright and license issues. Anivar Aravind, a public interest technologist, working at the intersection of technology, politics and digital rights, who played key roles in resolving licensing issues, discussed about choosing the right software licenses.

DebConf is coming to Kerala.

DebConf for 2022 is coming to Kochi, Kerala. Debian conference team announced it on 20th February.

We acknowledge the efforts of Sruthi, Praveen, Kannan, Mujeeb, Balasankar, Ambadi, Ranjith, Syam and many others who worked hard to make this happen.

GSOC 2020 rejected Indic Project proposal.

Google summer of code for 2020 rejected Indic Project's proposal for mentoring for projects.