MUMBAI: With the new government focusing on connecting every village with broadband and digitisation of analog cable TV, Centre for Development and Advanced Computing (CDAC) has come up with a number of opportunities for advanced interactive services.
Set up in 1988, CDAC already provides a number of products and services catering to a large market ranging from health care systems, datawarehousing, multimedia and multilingual technologies, networking solutions to technical consultancy, training and e-governance solutions.
The company set up a Graphics and Intelligence based Script Technology (GIST) group soon after its origin which built the Indian Language Computing Solutions. Porting of Indian languages onto the video medium with subtitles, this technology is being used by tickers and banners on TV stations, news channels, cable operators, etc.
Now with the onset of digitisation in India, CDAC-GIST is coming up with new services to broaden the reach of channels by supplementing content in local languages.
Speaking at Broadcast India conference, CDAC- GIST technical officer Shubhanshu Gupta said, “Digitisation has offered us a great opportunity for advanced services that will offer the viewers day to day information as and when it comes. Our main aim is to enrich the experience of Indian viewers in the grassroot level.”
“Multilingual subtitle and caption will address the viewers with diverse linguistic background. We plan to transfer television into a multi-lingual university and provide a solution to educate the country in the most cost-effective way. The device will do sub-titling for national as well as some private channels.” he added.
The company is also planning to facilitate distance learning, public information and alerts, health education on television.
With a lot of education content already online on various platforms available for e-learning, CDAC will provide a way to re-use the content and disseminate it through television.
“Our technology will provide the already available content on television through set top boxes. It would also include test whose results could be given to UGC for evaluation and analysis,” revealed Gupta.
“We also propose getting information regarding the diseases, new medicine, and latest news in the health sector on television with the press of a button to improve the quality of healthcare in the country and keep the citizens more informed,” he added.
Recently, Doordarshan launched a new channel, DD Kisan, dedicated to farmers, as an extension to their daily programme, Krishi Darshan. It provides full time updates on the latest news on farming. Gupta reckoned that CDAC-GIST will enable interactivity on the programmes.
“Our technology will give the farmer all relevant information like local market prices, weather information etc in their local languages to help enhance the reach and to incentivize them to use the channel more,” he opined.
“We are also doing pilot of our Language Independent Programme Subtitles (LIPS) on air digital at four Doordarshan metro DD centres to proliferate Indian language through broadcast media,” he adds.
LIPS Live technology has made it possible to subtitle movies and programs in Indian languages. Several products like MOVE CG 2001 simplify the titling of video programs with high resolution aesthetic fonts.
Another CDAC product MultiPrompter is a solution for teleprompting in Indian languages for TV channels that are mushrooming in the Indian subcontinent.
CDAC also helped government in launching the bharat domain name in devanagri script covering several languages including Hindi, Bodo, Dogri, Mailthali, Marathi, Konkani, Nepali and Sindhi.
If a person from Maharashtra opens the website, the home page will automatically open in Marathi while if a person from Tamil Nadu tries, it will open in Tamil, he reveals.
C-DAC has also helped in establishing standards such as ISCII, Unicode, ISFOC, etc. for Indian language applications on computers and electronic media. It is also working for standardization of W3C (Languages on Web), Internationalized Domain names, Governance, linguistics formats, storage, input, display fonts, etc.
C-DAC was set up to built Supercomputers in context of denial of import of Supercomputers by USA. Since then C-DAC has been undertaking building of multiple generations of Supercomputer starting from PARAM with 1 GF in 1988.
It set up National Centre for Software Technology (NCST) in 1985 that initiated work in Indian Language Computing around the same period.
Similarly C-DAC started its education & training activities in 1994 as a spin-off with the passage of time and it grew to large efforts to meet the growing needs of Indian Industry for finishing schools.
