'Virtual teacher' for Indian languages in the offing

An international collaboration for developing a ‘virtual human’, which would allow people anywhere in the world to learn Indian languages, was proposed during the inaugural of an international conference on Contemporary Computing and Informatics held at Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, here on Thursday.

“We can foresee that a student could learn a new language with the virtual teacher helping the student to pronounce words and explains the grammar,” said Nadia Magnenat, Director, Institute of Media Innovation, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The virtual teachers would allow lessons to be personalised, with aspects such as training on phonetics too being provided by the computer programme, she said.
She said that such a virtual human, with expertise on Indian languages will be developed soon, allowing people from around the world to learn them.

Speaking on the evolution of information technology devices, she said, “The computer today has to understand images, languages, emotions and behaviours. It is far more than just processing  information,” she said.

Contemporary computing methods had allowed users to see virtual 3D worlds and interact with the computer on all topics. Due to such developments, virtual humans have become a reality, she said.

Data volume

Gred Hoefner, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens Technology and Services, India, said that according to analysts at International Data Corporation, the volume of digital data stored worldwide was expected to increase by a factor of 40 to 50 between 2010 and 2020, growing to 40 zettabytes. A zettabyte is one followed by 21 zeroes.

“To put it another way, six terabytes of data will be stored for each of the world’s inhabitants by 2020, which is equivalent to the amount of text contained in three million books. A new era of automation and digital services is dawning. In the coming 30 years, the computing power, storage capacity and data transmission rates are expected to grow a thousand fold,” he predicted.

Remote maintenance

Speaking of the ‘remote-maintenance centers’ operated by the company, he said that the centers analyse the data from all of the systems, ranging from traffic lights to wind turbines, allowing the company to offer anticipatory maintenance and real-time remote diagnosis. Such IT devices, he said, will change business models of computers in the future, he said.

During the three day seminar, keynotes on topics such as assisstive social robots, real-time crowd simulation, uberveillance, big data analytics and web intelligence, will be delivered by experts from India and abroad.