2022
September Newsletter
September Updates
Nilekani center AI4Bharat
The AI4Bharat was set-up as an initiative of IIT Madras to build open-source language AI for Indian languages. This Center, inaugurated by Nandan Nilekani, is being supported by Rohini and Nandan Nilekani with a grant of Rs 36 crore through Nilekani Philanthropies. According to Associate Prof. Mitesh Khapra, one of the leaders of the center, “Language technology has advanced significantly for English while Indian languages have lagged behind and the Nilekani center at IIT Chennai attempts to bridge that gap”. At the center, the focus will be to conduct foundational work which can benefit society at large. Since, the idea is to energize the ecosystem to do more for Indian languages, all the researched data will be available for start-ups and other industries working on Indian language technology. This data, which can be accessed from the official website – ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in – would include datasets, tools, and pre-trained models being developed at the Centre.
LJL in support of Ukrainians
In Support🎗 of Ukrainian Refugees, LJL collaborated with International Rescue Committee (IRC) and distributed goody bags 🎁 at the #NorthWestUkrainianInternationalFestival on Saturday, September 10. LJL founder Subha Vadlamannati donated her NCWIT Impact award proceeds to purchase the goodies for kids. Special Thanks to Gul Siddiqi and Siri Okamoto for graciously sharing IRC’s space at the venue!
EduLang Updates
This month we made significant progress in deploying the EduLang app! We hope to deploy EduLang 2.0 to the Google and App Store soon!
Subha successfully deployed the EduLang Backend to the Azure Web App Services! The app now runs 24/7 so individuals can call the webapp for their translation needs. The backend is now successfully connected with the frontend and the last step is to deploy to both Google and App Store!
Subha
Eshaan worked on adding important features to the backend and frontend system, which now will translate English books (pdf or picture based) into over 108 different low-resource languages! If your language is not supported, users can use the manual translation feature to add books.
Eshaan
At the Ukrainian festival, native Ukrainian speakers tested out Version 1 of the EduLang app and confirmed our Ukrainian translations!
Ukraine Festival
New features to translate low-resource languages into languages other than English (Hindi, Spanish, etc.) are in the works!
New Features
Upcoming Event
LJL is excited to partner with creAItivity to host this event. The event is planned for Oct 29th.
Translation Project
LJL is excited to work with individuals from all across Ghana to create content in their native languages- dialects of ewe. Translators will be partnering with LJL and submit their translations via the EduLang in-app functionality. Then, children who speak these dialects will have content in their native language and will read and test out the app.
Last week our founder, Subha Vadlamannati had the privilege of talking to Sara Haj-Hassan, COO of Tarjimly. Tarjimly focuses on providing translation services to refugees across the world. Sara leads the development of partnerships with organizations that can benefit from or contribute to Tarjimly‘s services. She has experience working with immigrant and refugee populations both nationally and internationally, and has seen first hand the negative effects of language barriers on access to services. She received her MSW from UC Berkeley, and believes in the importance of relationship-building in creating long-lasting partnerships to achieve shared goals. The talk was very informative and gave LJL several ideas on how we can adjust our approach to community service. Sara’s energy, passion and resourcefulness were very impressive and inspiring! Thank you Sara Haj-Hassan!
