Abhivyakti

R‬ is a language and environment for Statistical Computing and Graphics. R provides a free/open source, cross­-platform, object-oriented environment to perform data analysis and visualisation tasks. Strength of R lies in its vibrant community, robust package repository and strong graphics capabilities. ‪ R provides all necessary tools required for various stages of a data analysis project. It provides techniques for data acquisition and processing as well as for data analysis and visualisation. It ranges from accessing data in various formats (CSV, XML…) to all possible ways of data manipulation (tabulation, aggregation…)to rich support for graphics (histogram, box plot etc.) to statistical models (regression, ANOVA…). It is not always necessary to use built-in and supported functions and packages. Depending on the requirements, one can also develop his/her own functions, scripts and packages. Recently, CDAC Mumbai has announced a 3-day course on R entitled “Using R...

CDAC Mumbai is organising an Open House on the occasion of National Science Day(28th February, 2014) at its Kharghar, Navi Mumbai campus. This Open House will not only showcase CDAC products and projects, but also include Quiz Show, Programming Competition and Much More.

CDAC, Mumbai has announced the beta release of portal Sangrah – Knowledge Repository for FOSS in Education . This portal contains resources about different categories like Learning Management System, Content Management System, etc. It also contains user experiences for these categories, comparative analysis of various tools from these categories, specialised search, and collaboration facility for community supported content updates. The portal is maintained with least manual intervention as most of the tasks including, resource collection, categorization, user experience identification, comparative analysis, etc are largely automated. The portal is intended for academic institutions, entrepreneurs, among others to help them to adopt Free and Open Source Softwares (FOSS). The portal is still evolving, hence feedback about the portal, improvement suggestions can be given through the feedback section on portal. Users can visit and register on the portal at -  htt...

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has released the new version (version 0.1.2) of GNU/Linux distribution for CognitivelyChallenged . Cognitively challenged people face different kinds of problems such as memory loss, forgetfulness, attention problems etc. Therefore, the major objective of this distribution is to provide an accessible desktop environment suitable to such users. The major highlights of this distribution are simplified and accessible desktop environment, simplified applications, tagged file system, tag-based searching, user’s activity log, reminder facility etc. that are specifically aimed to reduce distraction and memory load during computer interaction. These salient features of the distribution can be of immense help to such users and their caretakers, while using computer. This distribution is based on Ubuntu 10.04 and offers a number of improvements/enhancements over previously released version (version 0.1.1). These improvements/enha...

ALViC- Accessible Linux for Visually Challenged was launched on 11th February, 2013 by Prof R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser, Govt. of India & Shri J. Satyanarayana, Secretary, DeitY, Ministry of Comm. & I.T., Govt. of India during the CDAC Technology Conclave on 11th Feb, 2013 at Indian Habitat Centre, New Delhi. During the 2-days technology conclave, a number of technologies and products developed by CDAC under various thematic area were showcased. ALViC is a complete desktop environment which provides a comprehensive solution for Visually Challenged users. This is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.04; and uses Orca 3.2.0 xdesktop screen reader as the main interaction mechanism for visually challenged users. They can use it out of the box because accessibility features suitable for fully blind as well as for partially blind users are enabled by default. Main Features : Free and open source desktop environment Enhanced Orca with ski...

Anumaan – open source predictive text entry system from CDAC, Mumbai has been added to the database of Softpedia . Softpedia is a library of over 400,000 free and free-to-try softwares. Anumaan on Softpedia can be accessed from here . Anumaan has also been awarded “100% Free” award from Softpedia signifying that Anumaan is a clean product. Anumaan home page

RPM package of GEM (GEstures with Mouse) has been released. GEM (GEstures with Mouse) is a mouse-gesture based input mechanism developed by CDAC, Mumbai for people with motor disabilities. It can be downloaded now from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gem-cdac/files/gem-0.1-1.i686.rpm/download or from http://www.cdacmumbai.in/accessibility.

CDAC, Mumbai has announced the new release of open source predictive text entry system - Anumaan . This release includes new version of standalone flavour of Anumaan i.e. Anumaan-standalone-0.2. This version has been released as part of the activities of project "Enhancing Accessibility for FOSS Desktops" under NRCFOSS-Phase II being carried out at CDAC, Mumbai. Anumaan gives predictions based on preceding text/words used by the user in his/her text and user can use these predictions, while composing text. By incorporating predictions, user can improve his/her rate of text entry to a great extent. Anumaan is mainly intended to help persons with motor disabilities, specially ones facing problems in hand and finger movement. Such persons face difficulty in using regular input devices like keyboard for text entry related tasks. Anumaan can help such persons immensely in their text entry related tasks by way of predictions. However, It is equally useful for com...

About training In India, about 7-8 million people are suffering from full or partial visual impairment. Such people have to be provided with different kinds of support devices to access the world and to perform routine tasks like bill payments, banking transactions, reservations etc.. Now technology, either software-based or hardware-based, has made it possible for these people to access the world in their own way. But a large section of blind population is still away from advantages of modern assistive technologies. The main reasons for this gap are not only the lack of awareness about assistive technologies available and lack of hands-on practice to use it, but also the cost of technology. Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) tools/techniques play an important role in creating assistive technologies that are free-of-cost, available to all and easily maintainable for a large portion of population in a country like India. For visually challenged people, available co...

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Mumbai has released beta versions of GNU/Linux distributions for Differently-abled people. These distributions are part of the activities being carried out under “ Enhancing Accessibility for FOSS Desktops ” project under NRCFOSS-Phase II at CDAC, Mumbai . There are three distributions specific to three different kinds of disabilities namely: 1. GNU/Linux distribution for Visually-challenged: This is a GNU/Linux distribution (beta version – 0.1.1) created specially for visually challenged users. Visually challenged users can use it out of the box because accessibility settings required by them are already enabled. 2. GNU/Linux distribution for Physically-challenged: ‘ GNU/Linux for Physically Challenged-Beta-0.1.1′ is a special distribution for physically challenged people, so that they can easily access FOSS desktops. 3. GNU/Linux distribution for Cognitively-challenged: This GNU/Linux distribution has...

CDAC, Mumbai has released beta-0.1 version of GEM (GEstures with Mouse). It is an open source input mechanism which uses gestures as input to the system. Gestures can be drawn using a mouse or some equivalent device like touch pad, joystick, pen tablet etc. Gestures can drawn either as single-part (continuous) or multi-part (discontinuous) as shown in screen shots below: Drawing a single-part gesture in input window Drawing a multi-part gesture in input window This Input mechanism is intended for people suffering with different kinds of motor disabilities, who may face problems in using mouse and keyboard in conventional way. Hence, it provides them with an alternate and effective mechanism for using the system to perform various tasks such as navigation, executing commands & keyboard shortcuts, and launching applications etc. on Linux desktop. More details about GEM can be accessed at http://www.cdacmumbai.in/accessibility . GEM related URLs: 1...

In today’s world, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is growing day by day. We use these technologies very extensively in fulfilling our routine tasks like bill payments, banking transactions, reservations and many more to the extent that ICT is not a luxury, but necessity today. A large section of the society comprising people with disabilities finds it difficult to use ICT in the same way as normal people do. This includes the visually impaired (fully or partially blind), hearing impaired, people with cognitive disabilities (memory loss, etc.) and cerebral problems etc.. Such people have to be provided with different kinds of assistive technologies either software-based or hardware-based to make ICT accessible to them. A large number of software-based assistive technologies are normally in the form of applications running on desktops which make common desktop applications (office applications, browser etc.) accessible for the disabled person. Fr...

Many softwares have been developed for adopting technology in education for resource availability, sharing, and access to them even after school/college hours. There have also been developments aimed to ease other educational activities like course enrollment, conduct of examination from setting question papers to correcting answers and displaying results. Such softwares are available in the market in both forms proprietary and open source. Unlike the proprietary softwares, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) alternatives are free of cost, source code is available with the software, and the institution has freedom to modify the source code to customize the software as per requirement. For modification and maintenance the institution has full freedom to develop the required skills in-house with the help of faculties and system admin staff or they can choose to hire external help. However, one of the problems is there are many FOSS tools available and a novice institution/...

CDAC, Mumbai , at its Kharghar, Navi Mumbai Centre, has been conducting a monthly seminar series called (FOSS) From the Open Source Self for quite some time now on every third Saturday of the month. The purpose of this series in the form of lecture demos is to introduce people to the wide range of high quality software(s) available in open source. Response so far has been good enough. This month's seminar will be held on March 20. The topics of this seminar include: 1. NLTK - NLTK [Natural Language Processing Toolkit] is a complete Open Source suite of Python modules, linguistic data and documentation for research and development in Natural Language Processing. It provides utilities for many NLP tasks like chunking, stemming and parsing to name a few. It is a useful tool for students, professionals and researchers interested in Natural Language Processing and is widely used by NLP community all over the world. 2. GNU Build System - The GNU build system ...

Today Anumaan (alpha-0.1 version) has been released by C-DAC, Mumbai as a part of its activities and commitment in the area of accessibility. Anumaan is a perspective-based, on-screen predictive text entry system for GNOME desktop. Basically, it is an extension of an Input Method (IM) mechanism (on GNOME desktop) in the sense that it extends its (IM) notion by including the power of text prediction. It has support for UTF-8 unicode encoding. The system allows users to train it and personalize and as per their writing style into different named domains. Hence, it adapts to user's writing style in some sense. Although, the current version does not support live mode adaptation, still a user can train a domain as many times he likes. Anumaan is designed for a (text) sequence prediction based on a certain Context.The context can either be a partial word context or a partial sentence context. Therefore, it is intended to help people suffering from different kinds of motor disability by...

NCOSS-09 was successfully concluded on May 26, 2009. This two day conference was organized to provide a plateform to showcase the work or research being done in open source with respect to various verticals like knowledge management, e-commerce, Indian language computing etc. Experts and distinguished professors expressed their views on open source through invited talks apart from paper presentations under various vertical-specific sessions. The common view point was that India must play a crucial role in the adoption of open source world wide. Although there are many initiatives both in government and private sector, but still a lot more is required to be done. Apart from paper presentations, demo hall session were also organized as a showcase of open source technology. Pre-conference tutorials held one day before i.e. May 24, 2009 also received good appreciation from the audience. In the last, during the panel discussion, views were expressed on the various barriers in FOSS adoption....

NCOSS-09 begins at CDAC, Navi Mumbai on 25/05/2009. This conference will provide a platform to showcase niche technologies being developed in the area of FOSS and discuss about open source softwares in various verticals like knowledge management, e-learning, e-commerce, Indian Language Computing etc. More details on http://ncoss.cdacmumbai.in .

Last three days to go for NCOSS. For latest updates visit http://ncoss.cdacmumbai.in