Soumalya Ghosh

Wireless sensor network-based fire detection, alarming, monitoring and prevention system for Bord-and-Pillar coal mines

Fire is a major concern for those who work in underground coal mines. Coal mine fire can occur at any time and often results in partial or total evacuation of mine personnel and could result in the loss of lives. Therefore, having a warning system that is capable of detecting fire and generating an alarm is important. In this paper, we present the response time of a proposed system for detecting fire hazard in a Bord-and-Pillar coal mine panel (Hustrulid and Bullock, 2001). It uses wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and can be used to detect the exact fire location and spreading direction, and also provide the fire prevention system to stop the spread of fire to save the natural resources and the mining personnel from fire. The proposed system is capable of early detection of fire and generating alarm in case of emergencies. The performance of the proposed system has been evaluated through rigorous simulations. Simulation results show that the average network delay varies almost linearly with the increasing the number of hops.

Virtual keyboard design: State of the arts and research issues

Recent advancement in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) open up a scope for computing in Indian languages. Off late, computing devices are evolved in different shapes like cell phone, PDA, iPod etc. In these devices, it is not possible to afford hardware keyboard because of the limitations in size and weight of devices. To alleviate this problem, application developers propose virtual keyboard. The virtual is an on screen graphics keyboard and is flexible to compare with its hardware keyboard counterpart. There are many reported strategies towards the development of virtual keyboards in English language, but those well known strategies are not properly applicable for virtual keyboard design in Indian languages. In this paper, we survey the existing strategies and critically examine their applicability to design virtual keyboard in Indian languages. We then propose an approach to design any Indian language compatible virtual keyboard.

An Approach to Design Virtual Keyboards for Text Composition in Indian Languages

Of late there has been significant development in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which offers interaction with computing systems in a large scale. Text input mechanisms in users’ own languages are necessary for bringing the ICT advantages to the English illiterates. QWERTY keyboard, however, which was designed for text entry in English, is not as suitable for text composition in other languages. As an alternative, researchers advocate virtual keyboards in users’ mother languages. This article proposes an approach to designing virtual keyboards suitable for text entry in Indian languages. Composition of texts in Indian languages using virtual keyboards needs special attention due to the presence of large character sets, complex characters, inflexions, and so on. First, we examine the suitability of existing design principles in developing virtual keyboards in Indian languages. Then we propose a virtual keyboard layout suitable for efficient text entry in Indian languages. We have tested our approach with the three most spoken languages in India, namely, Bengali, Hindi, and Telugu. Performance of the keyboards have been evaluated, and the evaluation substantiates that proposed design achieves on average higher text entry rather than with conventional virtual keyboards. The proposed approach, in fact, provides a solution to deal with complexity in Indian languages and can be extended to many other languages in the world.

Effective virtual keyboard design with size and space adaptation

In recent years, there are huge developments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT in present form has offered to interact with the computing system in users own language. But, there are several challenges to be addressed to achieve the full advantages of ICT. One of the biggest issue is standard text input mechanism. In practice, the text input mechanism is mainly realized through the virtual keyboard. A numbers of work have been proposed to design virtual keyboard with optimum layout. So that performance of text entry can be enhanced. Still there are demand of more improvement to make an efficient text entry mechanism. In this paper, a new concept of adaptation in virtual keyboard is proposed. Our objective is to develop a user friendly interface through adaptation of key size and centroid distance between keys. As a mean of adaptation, we provide several states (keyboard) on the basis of key size and center distance between keys. Upper and lower threshold values for a performance metric of a state are defined by evaluating the states using motor movement time and searching time. If one individual user performance is in between the range of upper and lower threshold values for the keyboard then no adaptation is required. Otherwise, the keyboard is adapted according an algorithm proposed in this paper. The proposed approach is experimented with real users and results substantiate the efficacy of the approach.

Designing an efficient virtual keyboard for text composition in Bengali

Recent advancement in communication and information technology (ICT) flourishes the computing and handheld devices in urban and rural areas in India. Now people all over the world communicate each other using hand-held digital gadgets like PDA, cell phone etc. in addition to desktop PC and laptop. But, text entry task remains critical in English as well as Indian languages. Moreover, non-availability of standard mechanism in Indian languages makes obstruction in better text composition. Text entry through standard hardware keyboard is not viable in many digital gadgets because of size, mobility restriction etc. As an alternative to hardware keyboard, virtual keyboard based text entry has been advocated with easy to personalize, low cost and user friendliness. This paper proposes an approach to design a virtual keyboard for text entry in Bengali language. The proposed approach can be extended to other Indian languages with a minor modification.

Development of multimodal user interfaces to Internet for common people

In recent years, there is a rapid advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). However, the explosive growth of ICT and its many applications in education, health, agriculture etc. are confined to a limited number of privileged people, who live in digital pockets. We term these underprivileged people as common people, who are digitally illiterate as well as language illiterate. According to the UNESCO report, population of such people in the globe is 64% and in developing countries like in India, China etc. it is around 76%. It is therefore an urgent need to include this large set of population in the ICT revolution. This issue has been addressed in this paper and we propose to develop a solution in ICT for common people. We propose a multimodal interface mechanism to Internet so that common people can interact to Internet with their mother languages, speech and icons. The proposed approach has been tested with people in India and results are presented.

Accessing dynamic web page in users language

In recent years, there is a rapid advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). However, the explosive growth of ICT and its many applications in education, health, agriculture etc. are confined to a limited number of privileged people who have both language and digital literacy. At present the repositories in Internet are mainly in English, as a consequence users unfamiliar to English are not able to get benefits from Internet. Although many enterprises like Google have addressed this problem by providing translation engines but they have their own limitations. One major limitation is that translation engines fail to translate the dynamic content of the web pages which are written in English in web server database. We address the problem in this work and propose a user friendly interface mechanism through which a user can interact to any web services in Internet. We illustrate the access of Indian Railway Passenger Reservation System and interaction with Wikipedia English Website signifying the efficacy of the proposed mechanism as two case studies.