DIU Blog

A seminar on “Bangla-2- Braille Machine Translation: One Step towards Human Rights”, was jointly organized by Bangladesh Electronics Society and Daffodil International University (DIU on April 5, 2011 at 4:00 PM in the DIU Auditorium. Presided over by Professor Dr. Lutfar Rahman, President, Bangladesh Electronics Society Professor Dr. Aminul Islam. Vice Chancellor, Daffodil International University was present in the seminar as the Chief Guest. Professor Dr. Syed Akhter Hossain, Professor and Head, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, DIU was the keynote speaker in the seminar. The seminar was also addressed by Prof. Faruk Ahmed, Former President, Bangladesh Electronics Society, Nazma Ara begum Popy, Convener, National Disabled Forum, Sydul Hoque, Chief Executive, Blind Education Research Development Organization ( BERDO), Prof. Dr. AKM Fazlul Hoque, General Secretary, Bangladesh Electronics Society.

Addressing in the seminar the Speakers Said, Human desire and healthy life is an expectation for universal world. Despite this, disability in vision, hearing, and speech changes the path of desire. More than 4 million individual is visually disabled out of which less than 1% is educated. The visually disabled people read using Braille which is more than 200 years old methods. But this low education rate is primarily due to the lack of books written in Braille since this takes long time to type and huge cost is involved in creating the books. As a result our visually disabled brothers and sisters are not able read text books as well as different books for their life. In this seminar Professor Dr Syed Akhter Hossain presented a talk on Bangla-2-Braille, a machine translated software system for Braille conversion. This software can generate Braille code from Bangla text using a computer in just minute. As a result the Braille book creation will be faster and with the help of printing, the long existing problem of book availability for the visually disabled people will be solved. This software is innovated from a undergraduate research work accomplished by the graduates from Military Institute of Science and Technology.

A large number of students participated. The seminar was ended with questions and thoughts sharing.