AI India Compilation

Special Interest Group
in Artificial Intelligence
(SIGAI)
presents
A compilation
of
AI research in India
2006
Computer Society of India
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Preface
The special interest group in AI, of the Computer Society of India, is happy to present you
this compilation of AI activities in India. The compilation is aimed at furthering interaction
amongst AI researchers and to spread awareness of AI work in India.We hope that you will
find this compilation useful.
At the outset, let me mention that this compilation is an ongoing process, and hence surely
incomplete at any point of time! We will be maintaining an updated version of this on the
SIGAI website at http://sigai.cdacmumbai.in; do send in your inputs as and when you find
anything relevant. If you would like your group to be included, please fill in the form on the
last page. If you would like to have someone you know included, please let us know using
the referral sheet at the end or request them to fill in the form at the end of this booklet and
mail it to us. We would like to expand the reach to cover all the AI groups, however small,
in this compilation. Do spread the word around. We will keep updating the compilation
regularly based on such inputs.
This compilation is a process we started with the first national event of SIGAI - the
National Workshop on AI, held in CDAC Mumbai during July 2006. We have since then
revised the template incorporating additional information, and have also tried to reach out
to more institutions.
The compilation owes much to the conveners of SIGAI - Prof PVS Rao and Dr S Ramani,
and also to the steering committee of IJCAI-07 for the vision, guidance and support.
Wish all of you a prosperous and AI enriched new year!
M Sasikumar
Secretary, SIGAI
January, 2007
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Table of Contents
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai........................................................................................ 6
Division of Remote Handling & Robotics (DRHR)...................................................................... 6
Autonomous Robotics Section (ARS)...................................................................................... 6
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing............................................................................. 7
CDAC Mumbai..............................................................................................................................7
Knowledge Based Computer Systems Division........................................................................ 7
HP Labs India, Bangalore.................................................................................................................. 9
Language Technology and Applications .......................................................................................9
Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata...........................................................................11
Management Information Systems.............................................................................................. 11
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai............................................................................. 12
Department of Biotechnology......................................................................................................12
Computer Science and Engineering............................................................................................. 12
Interactive Intelligence Laboratory ........................................................................................ 12
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur........................................................................................... 14
Department of Computer Science and Engineering ....................................................................14
Department of Electrical Engineering .........................................................................................14
Department of Mechanical Engineering ......................................................................................15
Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (KanGAL)............................................................... 15
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur...................................................................................... 17
Computer Science & Engineering................................................................................................17
Department of Civil Engineering................................................................................................. 17
Soft Computing in Civil Engineering...................................................................................... 17
Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati........................................................................................ 21
Department of Computer Science and Engineering ....................................................................21
Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE)...................................................................22
Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Mumbai............................................................................24
Department of Computer Science and Engineering.....................................................................24
Natural Language Processing with focus on Indian Language Computing............................ 24
School of Biosciences and Bioengineering.................................................................................. 25
Intelligent Systems.................................................................................................................. 25
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad........................................................ 27
Centre for Data Engineering........................................................................................................27
Centre for Visual Information Technology (CVIT).....................................................................27
Language Technologies Research Centre....................................................................................28
Search and Information Extraction Lab.................................................................................. 30
Speech Processing Group....................................................................................................... 31
Robotics Research Center .......................................................................................................... 33
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.................................................................................................. 35
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Unit............................................................35
Indian Language, Script and Document Processing group..................................................... 35
Jadavpur University, Kolkata........................................................................................................... 36
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Computer Science & Engineering Department ...........................................................................36
National Chemical Laboratory, Pune................................................................................................37
Chemical Engineering and Process Development Division..........................................................37
Artificial Intelligence Systems Group (AISG)........................................................................ 37
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research .......................................................................................... 40
School of Technology and Computer Science ............................................................................40
Spoken Language Processing................................................................................................. 40
Tata Consultancy Services Limited.................................................................................................. 42
TCS Mumbai............................................................................................................................... 42
Cognitive Systems Research Laboratory (Applied Technology Applications Group)............ 42
TCS Delhi ................................................................................................................................... 43
iLab, Applied Artificial Intelligence........................................................................................ 43
Technology Innovation Lab.................................................................................................... 44
Area-wise Index of Research groups................................................................................................46
Information Template for the Compilation......................................................................................47
Referral Sheet................................................................................................................................... 48
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Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai

Division of Remote Handling & Robotics (DRHR)
Autonomous Robotics Section (ARS)
Information provided by: Prabir K Pal (pkpal@barc.gov.in)
Major focus areas of the group: Applications of AI in Robotics: Gait studies of legged robots,
Motion planning of Robot manipulators, Mobile robot navigation and mapping, Neural networks
for robot learning of obstacle avoidance and goal following.
Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Please include any website for more details for each project
1. Laser based Mobile Robot Navigation & Mapping: We wish to develop software for map-
building and localization over a wide (40m x 40m) indoor area with the help of range data from
Laser Range Finder. We have in the past developed such software for use in smaller areas. Our
effort is directed to make the software highly reliable for use in industrial setup as a pose sensor.
2. Mobile robot navigation in outdoor environment with 3D laser range finder and panoramic
camera. At present, we are busy building the robot. The task of navigation in outdoor
environment is very complex because of the fact that the planes of the sensors keep changing
continuously. We are yet to start solving these problems. But we have deep interest in this area
as it is of utmost importance in many real applications of deployment of mobile robots.
3. Force sensing and control in robot manipulation: This is again a very important area for
autonomous handling of objects by robots. We plan to buy a robot arm, integrate it with
Force/Torque sensor and gripper and write controller programs for force sensing and control.
This is yet to start.
Most recent 3-5 publications:

1. Pal, P.K. and Kar, A., "Sonar-based mobile robot navigation through supervised learning on
a neural net", Autonomous Robots 3, pp. 355-374, 1996.
2. Pal P.K. and Kar D.C., "Gait Optimization through Search", The International Journal of
Robotics Research, Vol.19, No.4, April 2000, pp. 394-408.
3. "Sensor based mobile robot navigation through curvature activation and context switching",
Asim Kar and P.K.Pal, National Conference on Advanced Manufacturing & Robotics,
Durgapur, Jan 15-16, 2004.
Some significant past projects executed:

1. Development of a motion planner for an in-house 4-axes robot (1991-93)
2. Robot learning of obstacle avoidance and goal following behavior using recurrent neural net
(1994-96)
3. Development of a mobile robot and its navigation software for simultaneous localization and
mapping (SLAM) (2002-2005)
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Centre for Development of Advanced Computing

CDAC Mumbai
Knowledge Based Computer Systems Division
Information provided by: Dr M Sasikumar (sasi@cdacmumbai.in)
Other senior members: Jayprasad Hegde (jjhegde@cdacmumbai.in); Kavitha Mohanraj

(kavitham@cdacmumbai.in); Jojumon K (joju@cdacmumbai.in); Ananthakrishnan R
(anand@cdacmumbai.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.cdacmumbai.in/research/kbcs
Major focus areas of the group: Data Mining, Expert Systems, Natural Language Processing,
Soft Computing, and Planning and Scheduling.

1. MaTra is an English to Hindi machine translation aimed at producing indicative translations for
relatively open domains such as Web documents.
2. Setu is a Cross Language Information Retrieval from English to Hindi built using MaTra for
translation and a traditional search engine for web search. Setu is, currently, part of the DGF
supported ICT R&T centre project.
3. Mulyaankan is a data mining application aimed at discrepancy detection in valuation of import
items, developed for the Department of Valuation.

1. Some Issues in Automatic Evaluation of English-Hindi MT: More Blues for BLEU, R.
Ananthakrishnan, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, M. Sasikumar and Ritesh M. Shah,, ICON 2007,
Hyderabad, India, Jan, 2007
2. MaTra: a Practical Approach to Fully-Automatic Indicative English-Hindi Machine Translation,
Ananthakrishnan R, Kavitha M, Jayprasad Hegde, Chandra Shekhar, Ritesh Shah, Sawani Bade
and Sasikumar M, Symposium on Modeling and Shallow Parsing of Indian Languages
(MSPIL'06), IIT Bombay, 2006.
3. Software Localization: Some Issues and Challenges, M Sasikumar and Jayprasad J. Hegde,
Conference on Sharing Capability in Localization and Human Language Technologies
(SCALLA), 2004.
4. A Lightweight Stemmer for Hindi, Ananthakrishnan R and Durgesh Rao, Workshop on
Computational Linguistics for South Asian Languages at the 10th Conference of the European
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'03), 2003.
5. Natural Language Generation of Compound-Complex Sentences for English-Hindi Machine
Aided Translation, Vivek Mehta and Durgesh Rao, Symposium on Translation Support
Systems, STRANS-03, 2003.
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1. OCCPTS: Heuristic system for scheduling the movement of oil tankers for distributing
petroleum products across refineries and consumer ports.
2. PIPES: A heuristic search system for scheduling the pumping of various oil products through a
pipeline
3. Mathemagic: A remedial education system for 10th standard mathematics
4. Vidya: An immersive situated learning system for Hindi
5. Vidwan: A rule based expert system shell
Any major achievements (restrict to 2-3):

1. The group organizes the well known biennial KBCS conference series on AI, and brings out the
AI quarterly, Vivek.
2. Work in the group has resulted in four PhD theses and a number of Masters projects.
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HP Labs India, Bangalore

Language Technology and Applications
Information provided by: K.S.R. Anjaneyulu (anji@hp.com)
Other senior members:Ramani Srinivasan (ramani@hp.com)
Website (for more information): http://www.hpl.hp.com/india
Major focus areas of the group: Recognition and Ink Processing, Information Embedding on
Paper.

1. Generic Gesture and Character Recognition
This project explores generic features and algorithms for recognition of isolated gestures and
characters. A supporting activity is the creation of linguistic resources to support research in
handwriting recognition in Indic scripts. Annotated handwritten datasets developed at HP Labs
India as a part of this research activity are now publicly available. We also co-organized the
IWFHR-10 On line Tamil Character Recognition Competition, an effort to establish the state of
the art in Tamil character recognition.
Our research in this area focuses on the development of annotated datasets of handwriting in
languages and scripts. We also look at recognition of specialized sets of gestures and shapes.
The core research areas in this field are: analysis of writing styles to devise handwriting
recognition strategies, training and objective evaluation of robust handwriting recognition
algorithms, and other applications including script and writer identification.
2. Lipi Toolkit (http://lipitk.sourceforge.net)
An offshoot of our work in handwriting recognition is the open source Lipi Toolkit, a collection
of tools and algorithms for building handwriting recognition engines. The toolkit is being used
internally as well, for example, for gesture recognition for the Gesture Keyboard, a text input
solution for Indic languages.
Our research in this area focuses on: graphical tools for handwriting data collection, scripts and
graphical tools for the analysis of recognition accuracy and errors, algorithms for handwritten
shape recognition, build scripts for building engines, and support for UNIPEN 1.0 and a
standard shape recognition interface. The toolkit focuses on: supporting collaborative HWR
R&D in academic and industrial settings, tools for user interface research, supporting
commercial HWR development, promotion of standard ink representations and interfaces,
promotion of sharing & reuse of tools, algorithms, code and handwriting datasets, and
promotion of product and solution development.
3. Document Image Processing
The work on Document Image processing focuses on document image repurposing, document
retrieval and archival targeted at HP's imaging devices. In emerging markets many enterprises
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are paper centric and extend opportunities to develop solutions for digital image analysis which
is the core area of our research program. Our research in this area focuses on solutions based
on analysis of digital images of paper documents. The interesting part of the research is that it
retains the end-user's present method of working on paper.
The core research areas in this field are: detection and segmentation of various objects in the
document image, image registration and ink extraction, and document image matching.
4. Security of Paper Documents
Security practices for paper documents are required in order to authenticate the document
source, the integrity of the information, and to distinguish copies from originals. We are
presently exploring various approaches to achieve this. The security practices for paper are
highly important in a variety of applications. An example for this is the delivery of Government
services through privately operated kiosks. Our research in this area deals with increasing the
density of information that can be embedded on paper, being able to deal with documents that
have pictures and different scripts, ensuring tamper-proof security of these documents, etc.

Please visit http://www.hpl.hp.com/india

Please visit http://www.hpl.hp.com/india

1. Gesture Engine that drives the Gesture Keyboard an innovation from HP Labs India that won
the Wall Street Journal's Runners-up Prize in 2006
2. Lipi Toolkit described above. A toolkit that fosters research in Handwriting recognition.
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Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata
Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata

Management Information Systems
Information provided by: Amitava Bagchi (bagchi@iimcal.ac.in)
Other senior members: Ambuj Mahanti (am@iimcal.ac.in), Asim K. Pal (asim@iimcal.ac.in),

Anup K Sen (sen@iimcal.ac.in), Subir Bhattacharya (subir@iimcal.ac.in), Rahul Roy
(rahul@iimcal.ac.in), Somprakash Bandyopadhyay (somprakash@iimcal.ac.in), Debashis Saha
(ds@iimcal.ac.in), Uttam Sarkar (uttam@iimcal.ac.in), S. D. Vaidya (sdvaidya@iimcal.ac.in),
Parthasarathi Dasgupta (partha@iimcal.ac.in)
Major focus areas of the group: AI Search Methods, Game Playing, Combinatorial Optimization,
Soft Computing and Artificial Neural Networks, Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Workflow,
Insurance, (Internet) Auctions etc.
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Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai

Department of Biotechnology
Information provided by: Mukesh Doble (mukeshd@iitm.ac.in; mukeshd@biotech.iitm.ac.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.biotech.iitm.ac.in/old/faculty/md.php
Major focus areas of the group: Neural Networks, Principal Component Analysis

1. Development of Quantitative structure activity relationships between structural/molecular
descriptors and biological activity using neural network models.
2. Analysis of ECG and EEG signals using neural network models for disease prediction and
classification.

1. Mukesh Doble (2005). Mathematical Modelling of Production of Hydantoinase, Asia-Pacific
Biochemical Engineering Conference, Korea, 16 May, 2005.
2. Venkata Rama Saran Kishore, Ravi Kishore, Mukesh Doble (2004). Neural Network modelling
of Hydantonase production, International Conference on Intelligent Sensing, Madras, Jan 2004.
3. S S Bhagwat, H S Bevinakatti, Mukesh Doble (2005). Transesterificatin of substituted ethanols
with ethyl acetate-modelling studies, J Biochem Engg (2005), 22 (3), 253-260.
Computer Science and Engineering

Information provided by: Hema Murthy
Other senior members: B Ravindran, Deepak Khemani
Major focus areas of the group: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Synthesis,
Reinforcement machine learning, Case based reasoning, Planning and Constraint Satisfaction.
Interactive Intelligence Laboratory

(Part of the Reconfigurable and Intelligent System Engineering (RISE) Group)
Information provided by: B. Ravindran (ravi@cs.iitm.ernet.in)
Other senior members: Vimal Mathew (vml@cse.iitm.ernet.in), Shravan Mathur Narayanamurthy

(shravmn@cse.iitm.ernet.in), Munu Sairamesh (msairam@cse.iitm.ernet.in), B. H. Sreenivasa
Sarma (sarmabhs@cse.iitm.ernet.in), Sriram Raghavan (sriramr@cse.iitm.ernet.in), M. Saravanan
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(msn@cse.iitm.ernet.in), P. Swapna Raj (pswapna@cse.iitm.ernet.in), Dinakar Jayarajan

(dinakarj@cse.iitm.ernet.in), Aakanksha Gagrani (aakanksha.gagrani@gmail.com)
Major focus areas of the group: Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation, Data Mining,
Natural Language Processing (Information Extraction, Document Summarization)

1. Reinforcement Learning - Issues in Knowledge Representation and Scaling up.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a trial and error learning paradigm, built on foundations from
behavioral psychology, operations research and optimal control theory. We are focusing on
extending RL algorithms to more complex problem domains, by incorporating richer
representations of the world, complex control architectures, multi-agent systems, and
developmental models of learning.
2. Data Mining, Information Extraction, and Document Summarization.
We are engaged in several problems related to information extraction: including the use of
recent advances in graphical models for document summarization and image labeling; structured
multi-document summarization; and relevance measures for data mining.
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Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Information Provided by: Amitabh Mukherjee (amit@iitk.ac.in)
Other senior members: Harish Karnick (hk@iitk.ac.in), R.M.K. Sinha (rmk@iitk.ac.in)
Major focus areas of the group: Natural Language Processing, Vision, Soft Computing,
Robotics, Reasoning.

1. Spatial Reasoning, Spatial Reconstruction and Story Animation from Linguistic Models, Interval
Algebra based reasoning.
2. Robotics: Qualitative models of re-grasping, Soccer Playing Robots, vehicle motion planning.
3. Automated & Commonsense Reasoning.
4. Application of AI techniques to document processing, text recognition, computer vision, speech
processing, natural language processing and design of knowledge based systems. Application of
artificial neural networks and fuzzy computing techniques in pattern recognition. In natural
language processing, one of the primary aims is to design machine aids for translation from
English to Indian languages & vice-versa and among Indian languages. R.M.K. Sinha's approach
is based on a new concept of using Pseudo-Interlingua, word expert model utilizing Karak
theory, pattern directed rule base and hybrid example base. His investigations also include
exploring design and development of special parallel architectures for computer vision and
natural language processing. R.M.K. Sinha has been working on R & D for Indian Language
Technology for the last three decades and his research has touched and provided direction to
almost all facets of providing technological solution to the problem of overcoming the language
barrier in the country. The multi-lingual GIST technology and several other packages for Indian
language processing have been developed under his supervision.
Department of Electrical Engineering

Information provided by: P.K. Kalra (kalra@iitk.ac.in)
Other senior members: Laxmidhar Behera (lbehera@iitk.ac.in), S.C. Srivastava (scs@iitk.ac.in),

S.N. Singh (snsingh@iitk.ac.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.iitk.ac.in
Major focus areas of the group: Expert Systems applications, Cognitive Modeling, Soft
Computing
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1. KARMAA (Knowledge Acquisition, Retention, Management, Assimilation & Application)
2. Intelligent Control
3. Quantum Learning System
Department of Mechanical Engineering

Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (KanGAL)
Information provided by: Kalyanmoy Deb (deb@iitk.ac.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.iitk.ac.in/kangal/
Major focus areas of the group: Optimization problems in engineering design, Multi-objective
Evolutionary Algorithms, Machine Learning

1. Multi-objective evolutionary optimization (NSGA-II)
2. Robust and reliability based multi-objective design optimization
3. Constraint handling using evolutionary optimization

1. Deb, K., Mitra, K., Dewri, R. and Majumdar, S. (2004). Towards a better understanding of the
epoxy polymerization process using multi-objective evolutionary computation. Chemical
Engineering Science, vol. 59, number 20, 4261—4277.
2. Deb, K., Anand, A., and Joshi, D. (2002). A computationally efficient evolutionary algorithm for
real-parameter optimization. Evolutionary Computation Journal, vol. 10, number 4, 371--395.
3. Deb, K., Pratap. A, Agarwal, S., and Meyarivan, T. (2002). A fast and elitist multi-objective
genetic algorithm: NSGA-II. IEEE Transaction on Evolutionary Computation, vol. 6, number 2,
181--197.
4. Deb, K. and Srinivasan, A. (2006). Innovization: Innovating design principles through
optimization. Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-
2006), New York: The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), (pp. 1629--1636).
5. Deb, K. and Sundar, J. (2006). Reference point based multi-objective optimization using
evolutionary algorithms. Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
(GECCO-2006), New York: The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), (pp. 635--642).

1. Evolutionary optimization for continuous variables
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2. Multi-modal optimization
3. Multi-objective test problem design
4. Evolutionary multi-objective optimization and decision-making
5. Various applications of optimization methodologies
6. Evolutionary optimization with theoretical basis

1. S. S. Bhatnagar award and Thomson Citation Laureate Award to Prof. K. Deb.
2. NSGA-II paper judged as the fast-breaking paper in engineering in Feb'04 by ISI Web of
Science.
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Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Computer Science & Engineering
Information provided by: Anupam Basu (anupam@iitkgp.ac.in), Sudeshna Sarkar
(shudeshna@gmail.com)
Other senior members: Pabitra Mitra(pabitra@iitkgp.ac.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.facweb.iitkgp.ernet.in/~sudeshna/
Major focus areas of the group: Natural Language Processing, Search, Machine Learning,
Planning

1. Natural language processing - various tools for Bengali.
Working on two major projects: Indian language to Indian language machine translation and
cross language information retrieval.
2. A recommendation system framework that makes recommendations for text documents and
works with dynamically changing content and shifting user interests. Project: minekey
(http://www.minekey.com/)
3. Multi-modal Participatory Content Repository for the Education of Rural Children, sponsored
by Media Lab Asia

1. Monojit Choudhury, Anupam Basu, Sudeshna Sarkar(2006). Multi-Agent Simulation of
Emergence of Schwa Deletion Pattern in Hindi, The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social
Simulation (JASSS), Volume 9, Issue 2, March 2006.
2. Monojit Choudhury, Rahul Saraf, Vijit Jain, Sudeshna Sarkar and Anupam Basu (2007).
Investigation and Modeling of the Structure of Texting Language JCAI-2007 Workshop on
Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data, Hyderabad, India, Jan 2007.
3. Devshri Roy, Sudeshna Sarkar and Sujoy Ghose (2005). Automatic annotation of documents
with meta data for use with tutoring systems, 2nd Indian International conference on AI, IICAI
2005.
Department of Civil Engineering

Soft Computing in Civil Engineering
Information provided by: Sudhirkumar Barai (skbarai@civil.iitkgp.ernet.in,
skbarai@iitkgp.ac.in, skbarai@rediffmail.com)
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Website (for more information): http://softcomputing.tripod.com
Major focus areas of the group: Soft Computing, Data Mining, Cellular Automata

1. Cellular Automata in Structural Optimization
Structural analysis and design optimization is important to a wide variety of disciplines. The
curent methods for optimization process require significant time and computing resources. By
implementing cellular automata(CA) simulations, structural analysis and design optimization
can be performed significantly faster than conventional methods. The main objective of the
work was to study shape and topology optimization process for structures by using the concept
of cellular automata. Considering the cells as the finite elements, the stress analysis is carried out
by the finite element method (FEM). The design variables were modified by applying a local rule
to the stress states of the updated cell and its neighbouring cells. Design studies based on
topology optimization and thickness sizing are performed; results demonstrate the applicability
of the cellular automata environment for efficient optimal design of structures.
2. Parallel Neuro Simulator for Structural Engineering Problems
Many researchers have demonstrated successful applications of neuro regression and/or
classification models for structural analysis, design, diagnostics and control problems. In the
course of neuro data modeling many neural network models could be created at the cost of
computing time. Sometimes it may take days together for training a network for particular
structural engineering problem. When a particular neural model is selected based on the
performance, others are discarded. In this process, one can loose too much of time in
computing and important information may go undetected. The research work was an attempt
to demonstrate the problems of structural engineering by multiple neural network schemes on
PARAM 10000. The study problems were: material behaviour modeling and weld defect
classification.
3. Parallel Genetic Algorithm for Structural Optimization
With the use of computer aided search tools like genetic algorithms, solutions to non-linear
structural optimization problems can be obtained easily and efficiently. The ever-growing need
for more powerful computational resources has led to the parallelization of conventional genetic
algorithm. The work involved development of two versions of genetic algorithms in parallel
processing environment. The first version had independent populations thriving at each node.
The second version further incorporated a migration scheme in which fitter elements migrate
between the nodes after specified generations. Complete codes applicable to the parallel setup
of PARAM 10000 have been developed, incorporating latest proposals for selection and
constraint handling. A comparative study had been carried out for the singly reinforced beam
cost optimization according to Indian Standards. An extension of the second version, which is
independent from pre-specification of mutation and crossover rates, had also been studied.

1. S V Barai and Piyush Agrawal (2006). Parallel Neuro Classifier for Weld Defect Classification,
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Abraham, A.; Baets, B.d.; Köppen, M.; Nickolay, B. (Eds.) Applied Soft Computing
Technologies: The Challenge of Complexity, Springer 2006, ISBN: 3-540-31649-3
2. S V Barai (2006). Material Behaviour Modelling using Machine Learning Model, Divisional
Journal – Civil Engineering, Institution of Engineers (IEI), Vol. 87, November 2006, pp:59-66.
3. R. Rajarao Dharmacherla and S V Barai (2005). Structural Optimization using Cellular
Automata, International Journal of Lateral Computing, Vol. 2, No. 1, December 2005, ISSN
0973-208X, pp-14-21.
4. A K Dikshit, S V Barai and Sameer Sharma (2005). A study on air quality prediction: An
opportunistic Neuro-Ensemble Approach, Journal of Environmental Systems Vol. 30, No. 3,
pp:17-31.
5. P Sriram and S V Barai (2005). Weld Defect Classification using Wavelet Neural Networks,
International Journal of Lateral Computing, Vol. 1, No.1, May 2005, pp:15-22, ISSN: 0973-
208X

1. Material Behavior Modeling
Material behavior modeling involves the development of mathematical models based on
experimental data, experts' observations and reasoning. Against the rigorous iterative exercise
of developing mathematical models, machine learning (ML) model - neural networks (NN) offer
a fundamentally different and appealing approach to the derivation and representation of
material behavior relationships. Such networks would contain sufficient information about the
material behavior complexities, non-linear characteristics, stress strain behavior, material
properties etc. Further, these networks could be used effectively as material model to
reproduce the trained experimental data and untrained experimental data. The work was
towards identification of comprehensive data set and developing a systematic approach for
material model using NN. Demonstration examples of this study were taken up using the
experimental data of shear behavior of reinforced concrete beam under effects of fire.
2. Liquefaction Potential Assessment
Liquefaction potential assessment has been a very important problem from the point of view of
geotechnical engineering. It is well known that many factors such as soil parameters and seismic
characteristics influence this problem. Various researchers have attempted to solve this problem
using artificial neural networks (ANN). However, many authors have missed important issues
such as proper data modeling, ANN model selection, and performance evaluation of ANN for
liquefaction potential assessment. Covering these aspects, the study was carried out to model
liquefaction potential data using a ML classifier.
3. Weld Defect Classification
Maintenance of complex welded structures such as pressure vessels; load bearing structural
members and power plants has long been recognized. The commonly used approach is non-
destructive evaluation (NDE) of such welded structures. The work was towards an application
of Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN) Model for weld data extracted from reported
radiographic images. The study highlighted better performance of PNN model in comparison to
other well-reported models such as backpropagation neural networks (BPNN) and Linear
Vector Quantization (LVQ) Models. Further, PNN model was advocated as automated weld
defect classifier.
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4. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) Based Ozone Forecast Using Moving Window Modelling
A new concept named, moving window modelling concept was used in combination with ANN
for developing ozone concentration forecast models. The effects of different input combinations
on ozone forecast were evaluated. The data of Maidstone from 16/04/2000 (midnight) to
31/12/2001 (11:00 P.M.) was used for the model development. The model was trained with
13480 training examples and tested at 1496 independent test points. The models’ performances
were evaluated with wide variety of statistical parameters. The index of agreement (d2) was
found to be in the range of 0.88 and 0.9883 with mean percentage absolute error (MPAE)
varying between 14.7% and 46.56%. Historical concentrations of NOx, CO did not improve the
models’ performance much in terms of index of agreement (d2) but had shown considerable
effect on mean percentage absolute error (MPAE). The historical values of ozone concentration
proved to be most important input and historical values of NO2 concentration proved to be the
second most important input parameter in ozone forecasting.

Best Paper Award: 1st World Congress on Lateral Computing, December 2004
- 20 -
Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati

Information provided by: Shivashankar B. Nair (sbnair@iitg.ernet.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.iitg.ernet.in/engfac/sbnair/public_html/projects.htm
Major focus areas of the group: Robotics, Soft Computing, Speech Processing, Agents, Natural
Language Processing.

The major work being carried out is in the domain of Intelligent Mobile Robotics where symbol
grounding is imperative. A working prototype, featuring simple speech to text interface cascaded
with a natural language processor for conversion to robot-comprehensible commands was initially
developed. Deploying robots on the network became a primary concern.
Robots in the Net (RobIN) and RobIN-II were some of the initial attempts at facilitating an easy-
to-use deployment procedure. Later a feature to facilitate intelligence sharing amongst robots over
the network (intelligent Robots in the Network: iRobIN), was incorporated. Further to allow
untethered robots to roam around and communicate with each other a Mobile Ad hoc Network of
Intelligent Robots (MANER) was also built. Attempts are now being made to facilitate robots
within MANER to exchange/share intelligence amongst themselves. If more information is required
to cope with a problem at hand, they will attempt and reach out to others (robots) on the wired
network using the iRobIN framework. Current work involves the building of a
RoboSapienNetwork which finds its roots on iRobIN, MANER and SapienNet. The latter is a
human network that allows for unobtrusive discovery of information of people in the immediate
neighbourhood. It is envisaged that RoboSapienNet will allow both humans and robots to interact
and share intelligence and together form a congenial society.
Apart from this, we have used several bio-inspired techniques for intelligent control of robots.
Work on the use of artificial immune systems to make robots assist, co-operate and co-exist, has
also been carried out. Robot control techniques using Artificial Neural Networks and Genetic
algorithms to learn to avoid obstacles (on ground and space), to learn gaits, etc., have also been
tried and tested on real robots. It is envisaged that these techniques will be embedded on robots
that populate the RoboSapienNet implementation and eventually form a society of intelligent, co-
operative robots capable of co-existing with the human beings.
Besides these, other activities comprise the use of Genetic Algorithms, Artificial Neural Networks
and Fuzzy logic in a variety of intelligent applications including roller bearing dimension
optimization, question-answering systems, searches on the web, sensorimotor control and text
processing for both English and Indian languages.
- 21 -
Relevant URLs:
iRobin and MANER: http://www.iitg.ernet.in/engfac/sbnair/public_html/iRobIN/robin-index.htm
RobIN: http://www.iitg.ernet.in/engfac/sbnair/public_html/RobIN/Default.htm
RobIN-II: http://www.iitg.ernet.in/engfac/sbnair/public_html/iRobIN/rajusbnair-badapanda.pdf
MANER and SapienNet: http://www.iitg.ac.in/engfac/sbnair/public_html/SapienNet.pdf

1. Shivashankar B. Nair, K V D Pradeep Kumar, M. Saravanan, "A Communication Protocol for a
Mobile Adhoc Network of Robots", Proceedings of the The International Conference on
Emerging Applications of IT (EAIT 2006), Science City, Kolkata, India, 10-11, February 2006,
pp. 223-226, Published by Elsevier.
2. Nandan Chaturbhuj, Shivashankar B. Nair , "A Co-operative Intelligent Assisting Agent
Architecture for Web Searching and Desktop Management", The Eighth Pacific Rim Workshop
on Multi-Agents, PRIMA 2005, 26th - 28th September 2005, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (To
appear in the Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence, Springer Verlag)
3. Chingtham Tejbanta Singh, Shivashankar B. Nair "An Artificial Immune System for a Multi
Agent Robotic System", Transactions of the International Academy of Sciences: Enformatika,
Vol. 6, June 2005, pp. 308-311.
4. Nair, S.B., Toppo N., "A Framework for Sharing Intelligence Among Mobile Robots on a
Network", Session on Network based Intelligent Control, Proceedings of the 2nd IASTED
International Multi-Conference on Automation, Control and Information Technology (ACIT
2005) Novosibirsk, Russia, 20- 24th June 2005, pp.93-98.

Intelligent Assisting Agent for Microsoft Windows Desktop
(http://www.iitg.ernet.in/engfac/sbnair/public_html/agent_web_page/index.htm)
This project sponsored by Microsoft Corp. USA under their Academic Alliance programme was
aimed at making a plug-in Assisting Agent for the Windows desktop environment that can, in due
course, take over and learn the user's behaviour. The agent learns to mimic a user's desktop
behaviour, schedule tasks, check and filter spam and even comprehend interests and explore further
on the web for relevant content.
Once the profile is built and learnt, the agent behaves semi-autonomously, emulating the user and
seeking his/her inputs for possible deviations. The profile is something that is continuously updated
and learnt. With multiple users, multiple assisting agents come into the scenario and exchange the
learned user profiles, thereby removing redundancy by co-operation. The system uses the
blackboard architecture with multiple agents co-operating to solve these tasks.
Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE)

Information provided by: S. Dandapat (samaren@iitg.ernet.in)
Other senior members: J. S. Sahambi(jsahambi@iitg.ernet.in), H. Nemade (harshal@iitg.ernet.in),

S. R. M. Prasanna (prasanna@iitg.ernet.in), K. S. Rao (ksrao@iitg.ernet.in)
- 22 -
Major focus areas of the group: Speech Processing, Artificial Neural Networks, Support Vector
Machines.

The objective of this group is to develop new methods for processing signals like biomedical and
speech signals. This involves exploring different signal processing tools, pattern recognition tools
and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for developing better methods of extracting features and
modeling them from these signals. The developed features and models may be used in different
tasks, which aid the researchers in these fields, in particular, and society, in large, for better
understanding, interpretation and developing signal processing systems for the usage in different
practical applications. In this direction some of the current research works in this group include,
extracting prosodic information like pitch and duration from the speech signals using neural
network and support vector machines, extracting speaker-specific information from the excitation
source component of speech signal using neural network models, speaker recognition studies using
neural network models and exploring new analysis methods, features, modeling techniques and
comparison techniques using different AI techniques. We are also developing new methods for
extracting features from biomedical signals using AI techniques.
- 23 -
Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Mumbai

Natural Language Processing with focus on Indian Language
Computing
Information provided by: Pushpak Bhattacharyya (pb@cse.iitb.ac.in)
Other senior members: Vaijayanthi Sarma (vsarma@hss.iitb.ac.in), Milind Malshe

(malshe@hss.iitb.ac.in), Krithi Ramamritham(krithi@cse.iitb.ac.in), Om Damani
(damani@it.iitb.ac.in), Rajat Mohanty (rkm@cse.iitb.ac.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~pb (for publications)

http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in (for resources and description of projects)
Major focus areas of the group: Semantics processing; Machine Translation among English,
Hindi and Marathi; Wordnets; Word Sense Disambiguation; Cross Lingual Information Retrieval;
MT Evaluation

1. Wordnets for Hindi and Marathi
These highly important lexical resources are being created to capture lexical semantics leading
to Indian language processing. At the time of reporting, the Hindi wordnet has approximately
22000 synsets (about 35000 unique words) and the Marathi wordnet has approximately 8000
synsets (about 16000 words). The former is being used for automatic lexicon generation and
word sense disambiguation tasks. Please visit the websites mentioned above for more
information.
2. Interlingua based machine translation for English, Hindi and Marathi
We use the Universal Networking Language (UNL) framework (http://www.undl.org) which is
an interlingua. UNL is an effective vehicle for representation of semantics. The current focus is
English analysis and Hindi-Marathi generation. The novel idea of semantically relatable
sequences is being pursued in this context. Divergence phenomena among the three languages
mentioned is also a focus of study.
3. AgroExplorer/aAQUA- Multiligual, Meaning Based Search in a question answer forum
This is in the area of cross lingual, high accuracy retrieval in the agricultural domain. Farmers'
questions and experts' answers are stored in semantic graph form and search is carried out in
this knowledge base, corresponding to user queries. Please visit http://www.mlasia.iitb.ac.in.

1. Medimi Srinivas and Pushpak Bhattacharyya, A Flexible Unsupervised PP-Attachment Method
- 24 -
Using Semantic Information , IJCAI 2007, Hyderabad, India, Jan, 2007.

2. Debasri Chakrabarty, Vaijayanthi Sarma and Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Complex Predicates in
Indian Language Wordnets , Lexical Resources and Evaluation Journal, Accepted.
3. Sanjeet Khaitan, Kamaljeet Verma and Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Exploiting Semantic Proximity
for Information Retrieval, IJCAI 2007, Workshop on Cross Lingual Information Access,
Hyderabad, India, Jan, 2007
4. R. Ananthakrishnan, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, M. Sasikumar and Ritesh M. Shah, Some Issues in
Automatic Evaluation of English-Hindi MT: More Blues for BLEU, ICON 2007, Hyderabad,
India, Jan, 2007
5. Krithi Ramamritham, Anil Bahuman, Subhasri Duttagupta and the aAQUA Team 2006, aAqua:
A Database-backended Multilingual, Multimedia Community Forum, ACM SIGMOD
International Conference on Management of Data, Chicago
6. Kuhoo Gupta, Manish Shrivastava, Smriti Singh and Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Morphological
Richness Offsets Resource Poverty- an Experience in Building a POS Tagger for Hindi ,
COLING/ACL-2006, Sydney, Australia, July, 2006.

1. Technology Development in Indian Languages with focus on Marathi and Hindi
2. UNL project funded by the United Nations

A very successful symposium called "Modeling and Shallow Parsing of Indian Languages" was
conducted in March, 2006, which brought together NLP and linguistics researchers from all over
the country. Please visit http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/~mspil-06/.
School of Biosciences and Bioengineering

Intelligent Systems
Information provided by: S. Arunkumar (sak@cse.iitb.ac.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.btc.iitb.ac.in/~sak
Major focus areas of the group: Learning; Intelligent Image Processing and understanding with
relevance to GIS; Intelligent Systems in design, engineering, health-care, manufacturing,
management, medicine, and resource analysis; Natural Language Processing; and Cognition.

1. Learning Semantics:
The process of reading text involves comprehension of read text through a series of steps that
occur in the reader's brain. One of these steps involves the identification of the forthcoming
word in the read text. This depends on the size and content of the short-term memory and co-
occurrence of the word being predicted with other words. The decrease in the size of the short-
- 25 -
term memory possibly due to brain damage leads to reading disorder called Dyslexia. This
semantics model using the short-term memory and co-occurrence may be implemented using a
neural network. The network weights are initialized in a non-random manner based on problem
domain, which leads to significant lower minimum error. The work is applicable to text
classification yielding better classification accuracy than using support vector machines.
2. Heuristics in Scheduling:
Resource-constrained scheduling and resource-minimization problems are NP-complete
problems and the use of domain knowledge with sound heuristics could effect significant
improvements. We consider the class of window-constrained capacitated and non-capacitated
routing problems as those that may arise in vehicle routing and data networks with possibly
time-varying demands and delays. The local routes are generated using criticality measures
whereas the long-haul routes are generated using existing routes merger and templates
generation. A novel algorithm for determining dynamic shortest paths is obtained that is
particularly suitable for data communication and road networks with varying traffic, and
dynamic updates.
3. Optimal Drug Dosage with Relevance to Hypertension:
Drug design and dosage are two sides of the multi-sided complex problem in patient
management. This will have to take into account genetic, physiological and mental aspects of
patients as well as the specific pathways by which the drug operates. Optimal drug dosage for
hypertension was considered in a two-compartment model framework.

1. P. C. Prasad and S. Arunkumar, "From Short-Term Memory to Semantics - A Computational
Model," Neural Computing and Applications,13(2), pp.157-167, 2004
2. P. C. Prasad and S. Arunkumar, "Co-occurrence Based Semantics in Lexical Access: A Model
of Learning," Proc. First Indian International Conference in Artificial Intelligence (IICAI-03),
Dec. 2003
3. S. S. Dighe, S. Arunkumar and M. A. Gadkari, "Case-Based Learning for Prediction of Post-
Myocardial Infaction Outcomes," Proc. IEEE BMES-EMBS99 Conference, Atlanta, Georgia,
USA, October 1999
4. S. Arunkumar, P. R. Warkhede, and S. A. Seshia, An Architecture for Intelligent Information
Retrieval, Bell Laboratories, June 1998
5. S. Arunkumar and T. Chockalingam, "Genetic Search Algorithms and their
Randomized Operators," Computers Math.Applic.,Vol.5, No.5, pp.91-100, 1993.

1. Optimal Routing of Postal Vehicles, Dept. of Posts, Govt. of India
2. Intelligent Systems in Logistics, BSES Ltd., Mumbai
3. Ruwats: A Decision Support System for Rural Water Supply, Govt. Of Maharashtra
4. Strategic Mobile Communication, Govt. of India

1. Commendation from the Government from the Govt. of India for contribution to strategic
communication.
- 26 -
2. Deployment of the Ruwats system in Maharashtra.
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad

Centre for Data Engineering
Information provided by: Kamalakar Karlapalem (kamal@iiit.ac.in)
Other senior members: Vidit Bansal (vidit_bansal@students.iiit.ac.in), Vikram Pudi

(vikram@iiit.ac.in), P Krishna Reddy (pkr@iiit.ac.in), Soujanya Vadapalli (soujanya@iiit.ac.in),
Lini Thomas (lini@research.iiit.ac.in), Satyanarayana Valluri (satya@iiit.ac.in)
Major focus areas of the group: Agents, Data Mining

1. Multi Agent Systems – dealing with RoboCup RoboRescue and RoboSoccer competitions.
Kshitij – IIIT RoboRescue Team - secured 3rd position in RoboCup 2005 RoboRescue
Simulation Competition. The group has worked on traffic simulation using multi-agent systems,
simulating complex systems such as computer networks for behavior of virus and worm attacks
and developing technologies for massively multi agent systems.
2. Data Mining activities include work on data clustering algorithms and graph mining algorithms.
Developed approaches for time-series mining, and mining mathematical equations. We have also
developed a toolkit to generate synthetic data sets for testing clustering algorithms. Algorithms
for finding association rules, web community extraction, recommendation systems, and search
algorithms are other sub areas of research.
Centre for Visual Information Technology (CVIT)

Information provided by: PJ Narayanan (pjn@iiit.ac.in)
Other senior members: CV Jawahar ( jawahar@iiit.ac.in), Jayanti Sivaswamy

( jsivaswamy@iiit.ac.in), Anoop Nambodari (anoop@iiit.ac.in)
Major focus areas of the group: Character Recognition, Document Image Processing, Vision

CVIT was established with the mission to do fundamental and applied research in the area of Visual
Information Processing, which includes Image Processing, Computer Vision, Multimedia,
Computer Graphics, and Virtual Reality. The centre presently focuses on (a) Document Image
Understanding (b) Content Based Retrieval of Multimedia Data (c) VR & Visualization (d) Video
Processing and (e) Geometric Solutions to Computer Vision Problems.
- 27 -
CVIT is actively involved with building tools for document understating tasks with special
emphasis on the Indian context. These include extensible, multi-lingual OCR systems, form
processing systems, document database systems that can index scanned documents, reading aid for
printed text, and on-line character recognition systems. Advanced prototypes of many of these
systems have been demonstrated at the institute's open house and other forums. The centre believes
that the rich, multi-lingual scenario existing in India provides special challenges to document
understanding research.
Language Technologies Research Centre

Information provided by: Rajeev Sangal (sangal@iiit.ac.in)
Other senior members: Dipti Misra Sharma (dipti@iiit.ac.in), Vasudeva Varma (vv@iiit.ac.in), S
P Kishore (kishore@iiit.ac.in), Lakshmi Bai (lakshmi@iiit.ac.in), Bipin Indurkya (bipin@iiit.ac.in),
Soma Paul (soma@iiit.ac.in), B Yegnanarayana (yegna@iiit.ac.in), Suryakanth V. Gangashetty
(svg@iiit.ac.in), Sriram V (sriram@research.iiit.ac.in), Anil Kumar Singh (anil@research.iiit.ac.in)
, Samar Husain (samar@iiit.ac.in), Rafiya Begum (rafiya@research.iiit.ac.in), M Prashanth Reddy
(prashanth@research.iiit.ac.in), Jagdeesh Yadav (jagadeesh@research.iiit.ac.in) and Arafat Ahsan
(arafat@iiit.ac.in)
Website (for more information): http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in
Major focus areas of the group: Natural Language Processing, Search Engine, Information
Retrieval and Speech Processing
The aim here is to develop aids for overcoming language barriers and make on line text in any
subject domain accessible to readers across languages. A major project is development of Shakti
machine translation system, which translates text in English to various Indian and other world
languages. Work is in progress on parsing of English and Indian languages including shallow
parsers. Effort is on developing taggers, chunkers, statistical parsers, pp-attachment, semantic role
labeling etc. Machine learning techniques are being extensively used. Other related activity is for
building bilingual and monolingual lexical resources, annotated corpora including tree-banks,
grammars, transfer grammars, etc.

The following three projects are in progress in Natural Language Processing area.
1. IL-ILMT: Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation System
Funded by: Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Govt of India
The objective of this project is to develop machine translation system from Indian languages to
Indian languages. The systems would be real-life systems, with a given level of translation
accuracy, and they would be capable of further improvement using machine learning
techniques. The domains of ILMT system are Tourism and Health. It will also lead to the
development of basic tools and lexical resources for Indian languages, such as POS taggers,
- 28 -
chunkers, morph analysers, bidirectional bilingual dictionaries, annotated corpora, etc.

The system would be so designed that it would be scalable, and that it would be robust even if
given sentences are outside the domain. Although, a general purpose system would be
developed, it will be trained on the above two chosen domains. Its performance would be
higher with respect to the chosen domains.
2. E-ILMT: Development of English to Indian Language Machine Translation System

The IIIT-Hyderabad is part of the MCIT, Govt. of India sponsored consortia project on
building a deployable English to Indian Language Machine Translation system. The project aims
at designing, developing and deploying Machine Translation Systems from English to Indian
Languages covering selected domains of correspondence/documents relating to Tourism and
Agriculture Domain. By the end of 18-24 months the MT system is expected to give
approximately 80-85% of accuracy. The Indian languages chosen for this project are
Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Oriya, Urdu and Tamil.
3. Development of Hindi syntactic tree banking:

The aim of this project is to build a resource of tree banking by annotating Hindi Sentences with
karaka relations.

1. Relative Compositionality of Noun - Verb Multi-Word Expressions in Hindi, Sriram V, Preeti
Agarwala and Aravind K. Joshi, Published in the Proceedings of ICON-2005: International
Conference on Natural Language Processing, 18 - 20 December, 2005, India.
2. HMM Based Chunker for Hindi, Akshay Singh, S M Bendre and Rajeev Sangal. Published in
the Proceedings of IJCNLP-05: The Second International Joint Conference on Natural
Language Processing, 11-13 October, 2005, Jeju Island, Republic of Korea .
3. Handling Multi-word Expressions without Explicit Linguistic Rules in an MT System, Akshar
Bharati, Rajeev Sangal, Dipti M Sharma, Sriram V and T Papi Reddy. In Proceedings of
Seventh International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE - 2004, Brno, Czeck
Republic. .
4. Generic Morphological Analysis Shell, Akshar Bharati, Rajeev Sangal, Dipti M Sharma and
Radhika Mamidi. In Proceedings of LREC 2004 - SALTMIL Workshop: First Steps in
Language Documentation for Minority Languages. Lisbon, Portugal. 24th-30th May 2004. .
5. Unit Selection Voice for Amharic Using Festvox, Sebsibe H/Mariam, Kishore S.P., Rohit
Kumar, Alan W Black and Rajeev Sangal. Published in the Proceedings of 5th ISCA Speech
Synthesis Workshop,14-16 June 2004, Pittsburgh, PA .
6. Experiments with Unit Selection Speech Databases for Indian Languages, S.P. Kishore, Alan W
Black, Rohit Kumar and Rajeev Sangal. Presented in the seminar on Language Technology
Tools: Implementation of Telugu, 2003, Hyderabad, India

1. Language Database Development for Example Based Machine Translation
Funded by Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information
- 29 -
Technology
2. Development of Specialized Search Tools for Indian Languages based on NLP
Funded by Dept of Science & Technology, Govt of India
3. RAVI - Reading Aid Software for visually impaired
Funded by Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment

1. Our system achieved the best ROUGE scores in DUC 2006 Summarization competition.
(http://duc.nist.gov for more details)
2. LTRC/IIIT students achieved the best performing system for POS tagging and Chunking in the
contest held as part of the IJCAI-07 Workshop on Shallow Parsing for South Asian Languages
Search and Information Extraction Lab
Information provided by: Vasudeva Varma (vv@iiit.ac.in)
Other senior members: Prasad Pingali (pvvpr@iiit.ac.in), Kula Kukeba

(kula_kk@students.iiit.ac.in), Bhupal Reddy (Bhupal_iiit@iiit.ac.in)
Website (for more information): http://search.iiit.ac.in
Major focus areas of the group: Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Search, Natural
Language Processing, Text Summarization, Document Categorization
Search and Information Extraction Lab (SIEL) focuses on solving research problems in the areas of
Information Retrieval and Extraction using NLP techniques. As a part of the Language
Technologies Research Center (LTRC) at IIIT, this research group tries to address IR, IE and
related problems leveraging on the Language Technologies research that happens in the other
groups at the LTRC. Major activities of this group include building search engines for Indian
languages, domain specific search engines, personalized search engines, named entity extraction,
automatic text summarization, focused web crawling and document categorization.

CLIA – Development of Cross-Lingual Access System

Cross-language information Access (CLIA) is a sub field of information retrieval dealing with
retrieving Information written in a language different from the language of the user's query. For
example, a user may pose their query in English but retrieve relevant documents written in Hindi.
For example
1. User will be able to give a query in one Indian language and
2. User will be able to access documents available in
a. The language of the query,
- 30 -
b. Hindi (if the query language is not Hindi), and

c. English
3. All the documents would be presented to the user in the language of the query. The results can
also be presented in the language in which the information originally resided. The languages
involved will be Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

1. "Query Independent Sentence Scoring approach to DUC 2006" Jagarlamudi Jagadeesh, Prasad
Pingali, Vasudeva Varma. Document Understanding Conference, Query Independent Sentence
Scoring approach to DUC 2006, New York, June 8th and 9th, 2006, held along with
HLT/NAACL 2006.
2. "A Relevance-Based Language Modeling Approach to DUC 2005", Jagarlamudi Jagadeesh,
Prasad Pingali, Vasudeva Varma. Document Understanding Conference, 9th October 2005 at
Annual meeting of HLT/EMNLP, Vancouver, BC, Canada
3. "WebKhoj: Indian language IR from multiple character encodings" Prasad Pingali, Jagadeesh J,
Vasudeva Varma. WWW-2006 23-26 May 2006 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
4. “Building Large-scale ontology networks”, Vasudeva Varma, Language Engineering
Conference, December 13-15, 2002, University of Hyderabad, IEEE Computer Society
Publications, Pages: 121-127, ISBN 0-7695-1885-0

1. Personalized search engines on mobile devices funded by Nokia Research Center, Finland
2. Information Extraction Engine for Disaster Management funded by ADRIN - Department of
Space, Government of India
3. Indian Language Search Engine funded by Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of
India.

1. SIEL participated in Document Understanding Conference summarization tasks in years 2005
and 2006. In the year 2006, its summarizer is ranked number one in all categories of automated
evaluations
2. SIEL is the only team to participate in CLEF-2006 (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) from
India with entries in Telugu, Hindi and Oromo language ad hoc information retrieval tasks.
Speech Processing Group

Information provided by: Kishore Prahallad (kishore@iiit.ac.in)
Other senior members: B. Yegnanarayana (yegna@iiit.ac.in), Rajeev Sangal (sangal@iiit.ac.in),

Suryakanth V Gangashetty (svg@iiit.ac.in), Gopalakrishna A (gopalakrishna@students.iiit.ac.in),
Venkatesh Keri (venkateshk@students.iiit.ac.in), Sachin Joshi (sachin_sj@students.iiit.ac.in),
Santhosh Yuvaraj (santhosh@iiit.ac.in) , Raghavendra E (raghavendra@iiit.net), Srinivas Desai
(srinivasdesai@research.iiit.net), Sebsibe H Mariam (sebsibe@students.iiit.ac.in)
- 31 -
Website (for more information): http://speech.iiit.ac.in
Major focus areas of the group: Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Dialog systems for
Indian Languages, Speaker Recognition, Speech Enhancement and Speech Signal Processing

The goal of the speech processing group is to build speech based interfaces for human-computer
interaction, providing access to digital content for illiterate and vision impaired people specifically
in the context of India. The speech processing group is actively involved in various research and
development projects such as Text To Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition systems
(ASR) for Indian languages.
Naturally speaking TTS systems are built in Telugu, Hindi and Tamil, while large vocabulary ASR
systems are built in Telugu, Tamil and Marathi. Limited domain speech-speech translation systems
from Tamil-to-Telugu, Telugu-to-Hindi have also been demonstrated. Limited domain dialog
systems where user can interact with the machine in speech-in and speech-out mode are being
attempted.
Our research focus is on real-time, low-memory TTS and ASR engines specifically for Indian
languages, dialog systems, extraction of linguistic knowledge for minority languages, acoustic
modeling for minority languages, statistical based parametric and articulatory speech synthesis, sub-
phonetic modeling for capturing pronunciation variations.

1. Sebsibe H Mariam and Kishore Prahallad "Extraction of Linguistic Information with the aid of
acoustic data to build speech systems", in Proceedings of IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech, and
Signal Processing (ICASSP), Hawaii, USA, 2007.
2. Kishore Prahallad, Suryakanth V Gangashetty, B.Yegnanarayana and Raj Reddy, "Problems and
prospects in collection of spoken language data", in Proceedings of International Conference on
Universal Digital Libraries (ICUDL), Egypt 2006.
3. Kishore Prahallad, Alan W Black and Ravishankar Mosur, "Sub-phonetic modeling for
capturing pronunciation variations for conversational speech synthesis", in Proceedings of IEEE
Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), France 2006.
4. Anumanchipalli Gopalakrishna, Rahul Chitturi, Sachin Joshi, Rohit Kumar, Satinder Singh,
R.N.V Sitaram and S.P. Kishore, "Development of Indian Language Speech Databases for
Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition Systems", Proceedings of International Conference on
Speech and Computer (SPECOM), Patras, Greece, Oct 2005.
5. S. P. Kishore, Alan W Black, Rohit Kumar and Rajeev Sangal, "Experiments with Unit
Selection Speech Databases for Indian Languages", in Proceedings of National Seminar on
Language Technology Tools: Implementations of Telugu, Hyderabad, India, 2003.
- 32 -
1. Text to speech for Telugu, Hindi and Indian English

2. Speech Recognition Systems for Tamil, Telugu and Marathi
3. Reading Aid for Visually Impaired
4. Speech Synthesizers for hand-held devices
Robotics Research Center

Information provided by: K Madhava Krishna (mkrishna@iiit.ac.in )
Other senior members: Bipin Indurkhya (bipin@iiit.ac.in), Amit K

Pandey(akpandey@research.iiit.ac.in), Subhash ( subhash@research.iiit.ac.in)
Website (for more information):

http://www.iiit.net/research/irl/, http://research.iiit.ac.in/~viswanath/robotics/
Major focus areas of the group: Mobile Robotics, Multi Robotic Systems

1. Micro robotic system development: Micro robot is a small versatile low cost robotic system. Its
mechanical structure comprises holonomic drive system making it capable of navigating in tight
space. Micro robot incorporates an array of various sensors for sensing its environment with
high accuracy. It has scalable architecture in all the aspects viz. mechanics, electronics, and
software. It can also be scaled in terms of number of robots in a swarm of robots. It is controlled
from the program running on the computer via wireless communication. Basic functionalities
like motion control, odometric position estimation, integration of sensor readings are
implemented in the onboard controller board. Thus computer is freed up from micro managing
the robot tasks and the amount of data between the computer and robot is reduced to large
extent.
2. Sonar Mapping: (http://research.iiit.ac.in/~viswanath/robotics/sonar_map.html)
We present a methodology for integrating features within the occupancy grid (OG) framework.
The OG maps provide a dense representation of the environment. In particular they give
information for every range measurement projected onto a grid. However independence
assumptions between cells during updates as well as not considering sonar models lead to
inconsistent maps. Feature based maps provide more consistent representation by implicitly
considering correlation between cells as well as forward models of sensors. But they are sparse
due to sparseness of features in a typical environment. We provide a method for integrating
feature based representations within the standard Bayesian framework of OG and provides a
dense and more accurate representation than standard OG methods.
3. Multi-sensor Surveillance: (http://research.iiit.ac.in/~viswanath/robotics/mul_survei.html)
The objective here is to see what kind of coordination mechanisms between sensors enables
optimal detection of targets moving across a surveillance area.
- 33 -
1. Ganesh P Kumar and K Madhava Krishna, "Optimal Multi Target Detection by Multiple Sensors
by Moving to the Maximal Clique in a Covering Graph", IJCAI 2007, accepted (oral
presentation)
2. K Madhava Krishna and Henry Hexmoor, "A framework for guaranteeing detection
performance of a sensor network", Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering Journal, Volume
12, Number 3 / 2005, Pages: 305-317, IOS Press
3. A K Pandey, K Madhava Krishna and Mainak Nath, "Integrating features onto an occupancy
grid for sonar based safe mapping", IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI) 2007 accepted
4. K. Madhava Krishna, R. Alami and T. Simeon, "Safe Proactive Plans and their Execution",
Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 54 (2006) 244-255 (available online at
www.sciencedirect.com) November 2005

1. Text to speech for Telugu, Hindi and Indian English
2. Speech Recognition Systems for Tamil, Telugu and Marathi
3. Reading Aid for Visually Impaired
4. Speech Synthesizers for hand-held devices
- 34 -
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Unit
Indian Language, Script and Document Processing group
Information provided by: Bidyut B Chaudhuri (bbc@isical.ac.in)
Other senior members: S. K. Parui (swapan@isical.ac.in), U. Pal (umapada@isical.ac.in), U.

Garain (utpal@isical.ac.in), U. Bhattacharya (ujjwal@isical.ac.in), M. Mitra(mandar@isical.ac.in),
S. Palit (sarbanip@isical.ac.in)
Major focus areas of the group: Character Recognition, Natural Language Processing, Speech
Processing, Cross Lingual Information Retrieval

The CVPR Unit has been engaged in processing and recognition of bio-medical, remotely sensed
and forensic images, among others. This group is strong in developing pattern recognition
techniques for various theoretical and practical applications. A special interest of this group is the
development of document analysis systems for Indian scripts. The group has pioneered the
development of Bangla and Devanagari OCR systems. Automatic Document text segmentation,
handwritten character recognition, writer identification, postal address reading system and
automatic table-form processing are current areas of interest of this group. Some workable Indian
language Braille softwares (Bharati braille) were also developed and given to an organization for
distribution to the Blind schools of this country.
NLP and speech analysis of Indian languages are among other areas of strong interest of this
group. Development of Indian language Electronic dictionary, Spell-checker, morphological
processor etc were pioneered here. Language statistics, computational stylistics, multi-word
expressions and anaphora resolution are some other topics on which this group is working recently.
The first Bangla speech synthesizer was developed from this institute and our current interest is to
analyse the prosody and intonation pattern of general Bangla spoken words.
This group is also engaged in finding smart approaches for cross-lingual information retrieval,
especially involving Bangla and Hindi documents.
- 35 -
Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Jadavpur University, Kolkata

Computer Science & Engineering Department
Information provided by: Sivaji Bandyopadhyay (sbandyopadhyay@cse.jdvu.ac.in,
sivaji_cse_ju@yahoo.com)
Major focus areas of the group: Language Technology, Machine Translation, Question
Answering Systems

1. Development of English to Indian Languages Machine Translation Systems (EILMT)
2. Development of Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation Systems (ILMT)
3. Development of Cross Lingual Information Access Systems (CLIA)
All these are consortium mode projects initiated by DIT, Government of India involving a number
of institutions at the national level. Jadavpur University is one of the partners of these three
projects. Prof. Sivaji Bandyopadhyay is the Chief Investigator of all these projects on behalf of
Jadavpur University.

1. A modified Joint Source-Channel model for Machine Transliteration, Asif Ekbal, Sudip Kumar
Naskar, Proc. of COLING-ACL 2006, Sydney, Australia, 2006.
2. Dialogue Based Question Answering System in Telugu, Rami Reddy Nandi Reddy and Sivaji
Bandyopadhyay, Proc. of EACL06 Workshop on Multilingual Question Answering (MLQA06),
2006.
3. Handling of Prepositions in English to Bengali Machine Translation, Sudip Naskar and Sivaji
Bandyopadhyay, Proc. of EACL 06 Workshop Third ACL-SIGSEM 06 Workshop on
Prepositions, 2006.
4. A Phrasal EBMT system for translating English to Bengali, Sudip Naskar and Sivaji
Bandyopadhyay, Proc. of MT SUMMIT X, 2005.
5. A semantics-based English-Bengali EBMT System for translating news headlines, Diganta saha
and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, Proc. of the 2nd EBMT Workshop in MT SUMMIT X, 2005.
- 36 -
National Chemical Laboratory, Pune

Chemical Engineering and Process Development Division
Artificial Intelligence Systems Group (AISG)
Information provided by: Sanjeev S. Tambe (ss.tambe@ncl.res.in)
Website (for more information): http://www.ncl-india.org/
Major focus areas of the group:Primary research activities of this group focus on both the theory
and applications of various Artificial Intelligence (AI) paradigms viz. Artificial Neural Networks
(ANNs), Genetic/Memetic Algorithms (GA/MA), Genetic programming, and Fuzzy Logic.
These formalisms have been extensively used for developing new modeling, classification, data
mining and optimization strategies for chemical, chemical engineering/technology, polymer and
biochemical processes. Specifically, AI-based applications have been designed, developed and
validated for steady-state and dynamic process modeling, process identification, nonlinear process
control, process monitoring, fault detection and diagnosis, process optimization, soft-sensor
development and input selection.
Other research interests of the AISG are: Control of nonlinear reacting systems, modeling using
multi-variate statistical methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least
squares (PLS), Modeling and classification using machine learning formalisms such as Support
Vector Machines (SVMs) and Support Vector Regression (SVR).

The AISG has completed several contractual assignments involving AI-based modeling,
classification, soft-sensor development and optimization of a variety of processes/products such
as polyethylene manufacture, gas cracker, adhesives, carbonating towers, lime-kilns and fast
moving consumer goods. The sponsors of these projects have been multi-national and mega Indian
corporations as also public sector units and Government of India agencies.
A few of the AI-based applications developed by the AISG are listed below:
1. Robust nonlinear control with neural networks.
2. Counter-propagation neural network (CPNN) as a look-up table for process fault
detection/diagnosis.
3. Artificial neural network assisted stochastic process optimization strategies.
4. Reaction modeling and optimization using ANNs and genetic algorithms: Case study involving
TS-1 catalyzed hydroxylation of benzene.
5. Development of artificial neural network based process identification and model predictive
control strategies for a pilot plant scale reactor.
6. Linear / nonlinear dimensionality reduction and feature extraction using conventional and AI-
- 37 -
based formalisms such as PCA, SAMANN, self-organizing map (SOM), and locally linear
embedding (LLE).
7. Input selection using fuzzy curves and surfaces.
8. Genetic programming assisted stochastic process optimization strategies.
9. Optimization of continuous distillation columns using stochastic optimization approaches.
10.Genetic algorithms to optimize batch-distillation.
11.GA based optimization of glucose to gluconic acid fermentation.
12.Soft-sensors for biochemical processes using support vector regression
13.Modeling and optimization of bio-chemical processes using ANN-GA hybrid approach
14.ANN-based models for predicting gross calorific value of Indian coals

1. S. Nandi, S. Ghosh, S.S. Tambe, B.D. Kulkarni (2001) Artificial neural network assisted
stochastic process optimization strategies, AIChE. J. 47(1), 126-141.
2. J.J.S. Cheema, N. V. Sankpal, S. S. Tambe and B. D. Kulkarni (2002), Genetic programming
assisted stochastic optimization strategies for optimization of glucose to gluconic acid
fermentation, Biotech. Prog. 18(6), 1356-1365.
3. J. R. Kulkarni, Savita G. Kulkarni, Y. Badhe, S. S. Tambe, B. D. Kulkarni and G. B. Pant,
"Multi-model scheme for prediction of monthly rainfall over India, " Research Report No.
RR-101, ISSN 0252-1075, pp. 1-28, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune 411 008,
India (December 2003).
4. Kiran Desai, Yogesh Badhe, Sanjeev S. Tambe and Bhaskar D. Kulkarni, Soft-sensor
Development for Fed Batch Bioreactors using Support Vector Regression, BioChemical
Engineering Journal, Vol 27, Issue 3, 225-239 (2005).
5. S. Patel, B. Jeevan Kumar, Y. P. Badhe, S. Saha, S. Biswas, Asim Chaudhuri, B. K. Sharma, S.
S. Tambe, and B. D. Kulkarni, "Estimation of Gross Calorific Value of Coals using Artificial
Neural Networks", Fuel , 86, 334-344 (2007).

1. Modeling of gas cracker
2. Soft-sensor development for industrial polyethylene manufacture
3. Design and Development of genetic and memetic programming software for data-based
modeling
4. AI based modeling and optimization of flue-gas conditioning system.

1. An exclusively data-driven hybrid strategy (termed "ANN-GA") integrating artificial neural
networks and genetic algorithms has been designed, developed and validated on several
processes. The major advantage of the strategy is that process optimization can be performed
solely based on the historic process input-output data.
2. A strategy has been developed for constructing artificial neural network models possessing
improved prediction accuracy and generalization performance in presence of data containing
instrumental noise and measurement errors. US and European patents have been filed for the
said invention.
- 38 -
3. A linear/nonlinear data-driven modeling formalism termed as "memetic programming" has been

designed, developed. and validated for a number of process modeling tasks. This formalism is
capable of generating system-specific multiple input - single output (MISO) data-fitting
functions. The formalism employs global and local search of the solution space and has been
found to out-perform genetic programming based solutions.
- 39 -
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

School of Technology and Computer Science
Spoken Language Processing
Information provided by: Samudravijaya K (chief@tifr.res.in)
Other senior members: J A. Sen (asen@tifr.res.in), Nandini Bondale (nandini@tifr.res.in)
Website (for more information): http://speech.tifr.res.in
Major focus areas of the group: Human Language Technology

1. Speech Recognition and Text-to-speech Systems for Indian Languages
2. Spoken and Hand-written Language Resources
3. Pen computing (Indian Languages)

1. Samudravijaya K, "Development of Multi-lingual Spoken Corpora of Indian Languages", In
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, LNAI 4274, Eds. Huo et. al, 5th International
Symposium, ISCSLP 2006, Singapore, 2006, Springer Verlag, Germany, pp. 792-801.
2. Samudravijaya K, “Variable Frame Size Analysis for Speech Recognition", Proc. of the Int.
Conf. on Natural Language Processing (ICON-2004), Dec 19-22, Hyderabad, Eds. R.Sangal
and S.M.Bendre, Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi, pp. 237-244.
3. A . Sen, "A Text Analyzer for Bangla Text-to-Speech Synthesis", Proc., CODEC-2004,
Kolkata, Jan. 2004.
4. Samudravijaya K, Sheetal Shah, Paritosh Pandya, "Computer Recognition ofTabla Bols", Proc.
FRSM 2004, January 2004, Chidambaram, pp. 48-52.
5. Samudravijaya K, Aswin Chandrasekar and Garima Sinha, "Online Hindi Character
Recognition", In `Artificial Intelligence: Therory and Practice', Proc. of Int. Conf. on
Knowledge Based Computer Systems, Eds. Sasikumar M, Jayprasad J Hegde and Kavitha M,
Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, December 2002, pp 445-454.

1. "VOICE - Voice Oriented Interactive Computing Environment", as part of Knowledge Based
Computing Systems project sponsored by Dept. of Electronics, Govt. of India and U.N.D.P.
1988-1993.
2. Text Dependent, Independent and text prompted Speaker Verification System, as part of E-
commerce project (DIT, Govt. India), 2002-2005.
- 40 -

1. Development of Speaker Independent, Continuous, Hindi Speech Recogntion system.
2. Creation of segmented and phonemically labelled, multi-speaker, continuous Hindi speech
database.
3. Implementation of Writer Independent, Hindi character recognition system.
- 41 -
Tata Consultancy Services Limited

TCS Mumbai
Cognitive Systems Research Laboratory (Applied Technology
Applications Group)
Information provided by: PVS Rao (pvs.rao@tcs.com)
Other senior members: Akhilesh Srivastava, (akhilesh.srivastava@tcs.com), Arun Pande

(arun.pande@tcs.com), Sunil Kopparapu, (sunilkumar.kopparapu@tcs.com), Sumitra Das,
Sathyanarayana srinivasan, Ambikesh Shukla, Meghna Maiti, Dipti Desai, Anoop Bal, Kalyan
Godavarthy, Devanuj, Irfan Khan
Major areas of focus in your group: Speech and Natural Language Processing

The Cognitive Systems Research Laboratory has been active in the areas of speech, script and
natural language processing. In each of these areas, its work has been oriented both towards
application areas from the point of view of customer interest as well as research areas of
contemporary interest worldwide. An indicative partial list of areas that the Lab has been working
on are Robust speech recognition, Language modeling, Voice Crafting, Knowledge-based NLP and
Question Answering, Translingual information retrieval and Information extraction from free text
and offline to online script conversion. In the area of speech, novel approaches for robust
recognition have been suggested and investigated. In particular, two approaches have been
proposed: (a) treating the entire normalized spectrogram as a 3-dimensional surface and attempting
recognition by comparison of shapes as between the test sample and the trained model, and
(b) using an idealized vocal tract based generative model to attempt recognition in the articulatory
domain.
Unconventional approaches to language modeling have been tried out and successfully utilized for
development of grammar tools and communication aids in situations where the user has limited
reading ability in the first language and no familiarity at all in the second language. A novel
key-concept approach which dispenses with the need for parsing the question or the information
base.
A flexible question answering system has been developed using the above approach. The flexibility
of the system was demonstrated by applying it for a number of domains including the Tata Infotech
website, textual and database information from the Sahara Airlines database, train and ticket
information from the Indian Railways website, text book on management information systems and
e-book on physical fitness and more recently to extract information from Mumbai and Delhi Yellow
Pages databases.
- 42 -
Translingual information retrieval technology is currently being applied for querying agricultural
information in Hindi. Several working systems have been implemented for extracting all the
relevant information from tender advertisements appearing in the newspapers and from CVs of
applicants to various advertised posts.

1. Sunil Kopparapu, Sathyanarayana Srinivasan, Akhilesh Srivastava, PVS Rao, Classification of
Speaking Style, November 24-25, 41st CSI Annual Convention, CSI 2006, Science City,
Kolkota.
2. Sunil Kopparapu, Akhilesh Srivastava, P.V.S. Rao, Accessing Style of Spoken Speech Oriential
COCOSDA 2006, Malyasia, 9-11 December 2006.
3. Sunil Kopparapu, Devanuj, Akhilesh Srivastava, P.V.S. Rao, Knowledge Driven Offline to
Online Script Conversion National Workshop on Artificial Intelligence, 2-3 July, C-DAC,
Juhu, Mumbai, 2006.
4. Sunil Kopparapu, Lighting Design for Machine Vision Applications, Image and Vision
Computing July 2006.
5. Sunil Kopparapu, Akhilesh Srivastava, PVS Rao, A minimal parsing QA system, HCI
International 2007, PR of China, July 2007.COCOSDA 2006, Malyasia, 9-11 December 2006.
TCS Delhi
iLab, Applied Artificial Intelligence
Information provided by: C. Anantaram (c.anantaram@tcs.com)
Other senior members: Shefali Bhat (shefali.bhat@tcs.com), Hemant Jain (hemant.j@tcs.com)
Website (for more information): http://www.ilab-tcs.com/
Major focus areas of the group: Natural Language Interfaces (Natural Language Processing),
Multimodal reasoning for data-intensive domains, Rule-based reasoning

1. Natural language interface to Menu-driven Business systems:
The current focus is on building natural language interfaces to menu-driven business application
systems. While menu-driven interfaces are a standard mechanism to interact with business
systems, such interfaces can become rather cumbersome for users of large applications,
especially for users who know the kind of data they want from the system, but do not know
which menus to traverse in order to get the data. An architecture of a text-based natural
language conversational interface, called Natas, has been developed for menu-driven systems.
Natas permits the user to carry out a dialog with the system in order to fetch relevant data and
carry out various tasks of the system. The architecture uses semantic web based ontology of the
domain, to aid in the retrieval of the relevant data and concepts from the system.
- 43 -
2. Multimodal reasoning for data-intensive domains

Knowledge-based systems in data-intensive domains need to process voluminous data and
require multiple reasoning mechanisms to work together to produce effective solutions. We
have developed a framework in which multiple heterogeneous reasoning sources are integrated
to build a cooperative problem-solving mechanism. Our reasoning framework integrates
pattern-based, rule-based, and case-based reasoning sources, through an extended blackboard
architecture with semantic-web based representation.
3. Rule-based reasoning
We are working on defining rules on object models in such a way that the object models can
capture various rules in the domain during modeling itself. We have developed a framework for
specifying declarative rules on objects, attributes and associations in the object-model for a
domain.

1. C. Anantaram (2007). A Framework to specify Declarative Rules on Objects, Attributes and
Associations in the object model, to appear in the Journal of Object Technology, ETH Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology, Jan 2007.
2. C. Anantaram and Shefali Bhat (2005). A text-based conversational interface for menu-driven
applications, using semantic-web technology, TACTiCS, TCS Technical Architects' Conference
'05, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Hyderabad, December 2005.
3. Shefali Bhat, C. Anantaram, and Hemant Jain (2006). Enabling E-Mail as an Alternate Means of
Communication with Business Applications, TACTiCS06, TCS Technical Architects'
Conference '06, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Hyderabad, December 2006.
4. C. Anantaram (2005). Processing and Reasoning over large Text and Numeric data sets in C4I2
domain, Closed Door Seminar on Developing C4I2 Capabilities and Embedded Systems,
Confederation of Indian Industry, New Delhi, June 2005.
5. Anantaram (2004). Designing a rule engine for handling business rules, TACTiCS, 1st TCS
Technical Architects' Conference, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Hyderabad, October
2004.
Technology Innovation Lab

Information provided by: Hiranmay Ghosh (hiranmay.ghosh@tcs.com)
Website (for more information): http://www.ilab-tcs.com/
Major focus areas of the group: Knowledge Representation

We take a holistic view of rich media applications. We view the different rich media components
are integral data elements of an application. They need to be generated, processed, transported and
disseminated in an application context, just like numbers and textual data in existing applications.
Integration of diverse forms of media data seamlessly requires their semantic interpretation and
- 44 -
semantic transcoding depending on application needs. We are working towards building such an
environment. To distinguish it from the existing semantic web, which primarily addresses data in
textual form, we call it the Semantic Multimedia Web.
- 45 -
Area-wise Index of Research groups
Area-wise Index of Research groups

AREA REFERENCE PAGES
Agents 11, 21, 27
Case Based Reasoning 12
Cellular Automata 17
Character Recognition 9, 27, 40
Cognitive Modeling 14, 25
Cross Lingual Information Retrieval 7, 24, 27
Data Mining 7, 12, 17, 37
Document Image Processing 9, 27
Document Categorization 30
Evolutionary Algorithms 15
Expert Systems 7, 14
Information Extraction 30
Information Retrieval 30
Intelligent Image Processing 25
Knowledge Representation 12, 44
Language Technology 36
Machine learning 12, 15, 17, 37
Machine Translation 7, 24, 28, 36
Natural Language Interfaces 43
Natural Language Processing 7, 12, 14, 17, 21, 24, 25, 30, 42
Neural Networks 12, 22
Optimization 11, 15
Planning and Scheduling 7, 12, 17, 25
Question Answering 36
Reasoning 14, 43
Robotics 6, 14, 21, 33
Search 11, 17
Soft Computing 7, 11, 14, 14, 17, 21, 37
Speech Processing 12, 21, 22, 31, 40, 42
Text Summarization 30
Vision 14, 27
- 46 -
Information Template for the Compilation
Information Template for the Compilation

Please fill up the template below and mail it to sigai@cdacmumbai.in or to the address on the back
cover, for addition or modification of profile in the compilation.
1) Name of Institution:
2) Department to which your group belongs:
3) Your research group (if there is no explicit group, you can omit this question):
4) Name of the person in charge & his/her email id:
5) Other senior members in your group along with their e-mail:
6) Web site where more information on your work will be available:
7) Major areas of focus in your group:
8) Brief description of at most three projects in progress in your group

(please include any web site for more detail for each project):
9) Most recent 3-5 publications from your group:
10) Some significant past projects executed by your group:
11) Any major achievements (restrict to 2-3):
- 47 -
Referral Sheet
Referral Sheet
If you know of any AI group[s] in India that is not represented in this compilation, please list their
contacts below and send it to sigai@cdacmumbai.in or to the address on the back cover of this
compilation.
1.
2.
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4.
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Special Interest Group

Computer Society of India

Wish all of you a prosperous and AI enriched new year!

Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Most recent 3-5 publications:

Some significant past projects executed:

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing

Other senior members: Jayprasad Hegde (jjhegde@cdacmumbai.in); Kavitha Mohanraj

Website (for more information): http://www.cdacmumbai.in/research/kbcs

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Most recent 3-5 publications:

Some significant past projects executed:

Any major achievements (restrict to 2-3):

HP Labs India, Bangalore

Other senior members:Ramani Srinivasan (ramani@hp.com)

Website (for more information): http://www.hpl.hp.com/india

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Most recent 3-5 publications:

Some significant past projects executed:

Any major achievements (restrict to 2-3):

Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata

Other senior members: Ambuj Mahanti (am@iimcal.ac.in), Asim K. Pal (asim@iimcal.ac.in),

Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai

Website (for more information): http://www.biotech.iitm.ac.in/old/faculty/md.php

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Most recent 3-5 publications:

Computer Science and Engineering

Other senior members: B Ravindran, Deepak Khemani

Interactive Intelligence Laboratory

Other senior members: Vimal Mathew (vml@cse.iitm.ernet.in), Shravan Mathur Narayanamurthy

(msn@cse.iitm.ernet.in), P. Swapna Raj (pswapna@cse.iitm.ernet.in), Dinakar Jayarajan

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

Other senior members: Harish Karnick (hk@iitk.ac.in), R.M.K. Sinha (rmk@iitk.ac.in)

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Department of Electrical Engineering

Other senior members: Laxmidhar Behera (lbehera@iitk.ac.in), S.C. Srivastava (scs@iitk.ac.in),

Website (for more information): http://www.iitk.ac.in

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Website (for more information): http://www.iitk.ac.in/kangal/

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Most recent 3-5 publications:

Some significant past projects executed:

Any major achievements (restrict to 2-3):

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Other senior members: Pabitra Mitra(pabitra@iitkgp.ac.in)

Website (for more information): http://www.facweb.iitkgp.ernet.in/~sudeshna/

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Most recent 3-5 publications:

Department of Civil Engineering

Website (for more information): http://softcomputing.tripod.com

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Most recent 3-5 publications:

Some significant past projects executed:

Any major achievements (restrict to 2-3):

Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati

Website (for more information): http://www.iitg.ernet.in/engfac/sbnair/public_html/projects.htm

Brief description of at most three projects in progress:

Most recent 3-5 publications:

Some significant past projects executed: