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India Beyond 2020 Webinar
It was my privilege yesterday to be invited to spoke in a panel organised by the Dr APJ Abdul Kalam International Foundation run by House of Kalam, Rameswaram. Inspired by Dr Kalam’s Vision 2020, the half-a-day webinar titled “India Beyond 2020” covered topics on Health Care, Education, Industry & Rural development. The webinar was inaugurated by Padma Shri awardee Sri Y.S.Rajan (Honorary Distinguished Professor in ISRO) and the eminent speakers included Dr A.Sivathanu Pillai (Former Chief Controller, R&D, DRDO), Padma Shri awardee Dr.Mylswamy Annadurai (NDRF, Chairman IEI & Former Director ISRO), DR.M.S.Vijayaraghavan (Former Advisor & Ex-Office Special Secretary to the government, Prime Minister Office) and others. I was asked to…
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Career options in Artificial Intelligence – for Engineering Students
As a Professional Speaker, I get invited or engaged for a talk by many (OK, let’s say a few!). Out of them, I try to excuse myself from agreeing to speak at private engineering colleges as I find their programs to be uninteresting and are organised only for showing numbers to the AICTE. Also, most of them are situated in the suburbs or in the neighbouring towns of Chennai, it takes me more than half-a-day to travel there and return. Disclosure: I studied my Bachelor in Engineering from a private college: SVCE, Pennalur. Following my talk last month at Loyola College, Chennai on “AI & Transformation“, the Faculty of Computer…
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AI and Transformation – A memorial talk
Thanks to a recommendation by my friend Dr Gopal Krishna Raju, I was invited to deliver a memorial lecture today at the prestigious Loyola College, Chennai. The event was conducted by their PG & Research Department of Commerce – a one-day seminar in memory of Prof A G Soundara Rajan. The topic was Artificial Intelligence and (Business) Transformation. I wasn’t interested in playing in my voice a canned presentation or something that was way more of engineering for an audience consisting of Commerce discipline Post-Graduate students from a number of colleges in Chennai. Instead, I prepared a (custom) talk for them – starting with a brief introduction of AI/ML, proceeding…
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Technical talk at NIC, Chennai
Today, on invitation from the Senior Technical Director of NIC (National Informatics Centre), Chennai, I delivered a technical talk at their Tamil Nadu Head office at Rajaji Bhavan, Chennai. It was attended by all their district officers across Tamil Nadu. For those who are not familiar, NIC is a Government of India organization established in 1976 that powers the numerous electronic applications and computing backbone of central and state governments across India. Today, the majority of citizen services and the government administration across India is happening electronically and with that, the role and importance of NIC have been steadily growing. My presentation was a demonstration of the various open-source tools,…
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Tools & Applications available for Tamil
I was invited to present a guest talk for the annual Tamil Internet Conference 2019, that is underway at Anna University, organized by INFITT along with Tamil Virtual Academy and others. I presented a talk with demos titled aptly as “செயல் விளக்கம்” – Demonstration of tools for Tamil for writing and coding. I demonstrated the following: Google Voice Typing in Tamil on your PC – கூகுளின் குரல்வழித் தமிழில் உள்ளிடல் வசதி. How to use Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine to convert scanned pages in Tamil to PDF with Embedded Text (in Tamil) feature enabled, so that search in Tamil and copy and paste of text works. I will write a post…
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Sterling resorts, Fern Hill, Ooty
As readers of this blog know I enjoy travel, not the strenuous type, but the relaxed version called the “Slow Travel”. I believe, when you travel it is important to be comfortable, go out to observe the places, stop and smell the roses on the way, take a few good pictures for memory and to enjoy the local food and culture. I would like to see this as “Lazy Travel” – not hurrying to finish the items in your checklist – certainly not about camping or long travel – but to plan for spending reasonable time to do justice to a place that you are going. For me, the travel…
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Future of IT Outsourcing Industry and The Road Ahead
The global outsourcing market especially the IT outsourcing market after a few choppy and trying years, hopes to find its lost rhythm back in 2019. Mint newspaper says the sector will grow faster in the year starting 1st April, thanks to twin trends of larger contracts and increased outsourcing. In this background, I am composing my thoughts here on how the Software Services firms especially the small ones in India can reinvent themselves and plan their road ahead. Source: Statista. After a few choppy years, 2018 stabilized the global market of the outsourced market. 2019 is expected to be a growth year. Outsourcing is not new to me! My grandfather…
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IEEE & CSI talk on Rebooting Software Services
Last year, I had conducted a half-a-day workshop for NASSCOM on “Rebooting Software Services Industry” where I presented on why the threat of a premature death of the industry as written by mainstream media is real – this is the industry that has made India an export powerhouse – and what needs to be done to tackle the problem and grow. My friend Mr Sankaranarayanan followed it up with C6 Framework which is a tool for company’s embarking on the difficult task of change – something that the Indian IT Industry urgently needs to do. Today, the industry is feeling a bit more confident – the headwinds of automation and…
