Tuesday, November 18, 2014

FUELGILT 2014 conference and my activities

Last weekend i was fully involved in fuel conference. Lots of things i can share about the conference. Let me first start with my role in it.

1.  Representing Fedora @ conference.
2. My talk about "Why Globalization? world wide picture"
3. Celebrating 10 yrs of Lohit project and workshop on Lohit2.

1. Represented Fedora @ conference.

    We started planning for this event with Fedora Ambassador group well 2 months in advance and designed T-shirts for branding Fedora as a best platform for Language computing. This T-shirt was distributed to all active contributors to promote message Fedora perfect from language computing perspective. Most of them were available in conference wearing this T-shirt, it truly made people aware regarding yes Fedora takes care for language computing aspects and proud for same.


    I met number of people in conference and talked on how can Fedora help them. Specifically mentioned language team is very active in Fedora, most of the innovations happened first in Fedora including IBus, Harfbuzz and Updates regarding Fonts also gets in quickly in Fedora. Fedora i18n team weekly meets AT #fedora-meeting on Tuesday  06:00:00 to 07:00:00 UTC and discuss open issues.

    Analysed issues mentioned by ShivaKumar K.M  regarding corpus processing and requested Biraj Karmakar  to test Fedora 21 for Bengali and provide some report.

    Parag given talk on "How to create hunspell dictionary on Fedora". It was very well attended talk from audience. They learned practically on how to make hunspell dictionary from simple word-list and see it working. It increased there interest on hunspell dictionary. I talked with Omshivaprakash and he suggested it is possible to get some online tool for maintaining hunspell. This is the same thought we were thinking from last couple of months also discussed same with Libreoffice Caolan. Already some work has been done and soon will publish same.


    Parag also demonstrated wordxtr package avaialable in Fedora. He demonstrated it with html page and shown how quickly one can extract words with it.

    Wanted to distribute some Fedora stickers but somehow missed to collect some from Siddhesh before he moves to Phnom Penh, Cambodia for FAD.

    Discussed with Arky about how much language support Firefox OS does has and they also facing same issues which we were face some years back. In Fedora now we have nicely written criteria for language support. I mentioned him, link is here :)


    Event page for FUELGILT 2014 conference

    Overall i am happy with the presence of the Fedora in this conference. Will improve it further in upcoming conference around Language Technology.

    I would like to thanks here Rajesh, Chandrakant and Ankit for supporting activities around Fedora in this conference.

2. My talk about "Why Globalization? world wide picture"

    This was the first talk on second day. We got pleasing but unexpected rain that day. It delayed most of things. Since i was the first speaker most of the arrangements for speakers happened that time. Started talk around 10:15am.


    Its tricky subject to present. In this talk i targeted the users. Mentioned the importance of supporting not only major language of world but also as much as possible on platform. How it is important to preserve first languages of people. I have mentioned couple of important research that has been done to showcase how persons first language is very important. Also how first language can help for effective branding of products.

    Slides are available At slideshare Soon we will have youtube video for my talk.
   
3. Celebrating Lohit 10 yrs of Lohit project and workshop on Lohit2.

    This is moment i was waiting for long time. Though number of plans were there. We decided we will celebrate with cake in conference like FULEGILT where number of open source contributors and users get together.

    Cake arrived on time and we just thought lets start workshop by cutting it.
    Audience suggested Shilpa (present actively working on lohit2), Rahul Bhalerao (past maintainer of Lohit) and me to cut cake together.


    Later we had small presentation on Lohit 10 years. In this presentation Shilpa explained why Lohit project is important, What are the achievement of Lohit project in 10 years and what is plan for future through lohit2 project.

    Already big blog, will write one more to mention things happened in conference. Photo credits to Krishnababu and Bhushan :)

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