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संस्कृत संज्ञानिकी

Knowledge Technology for Sanskrit

August, 2019

Towards Paradigm Shift from Interpretation Phase to Innovation Phase

Knowledge Technology for Sanskrit: R&D prospects on 11th October 2019 at K M Auditorium, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Copernicus Lane, Delhi.

Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan was founded in 1938 to promote Sanskriti (Indian Culture) and

Sanskrit, the mother of languages.

Knowledge is residue of thinking. It is created at the boundary of old. Knowledge flows from community to community spatially and temporally. Knowledge links to network of ideas, memory, predictions, procedures, beliefs, cultural expressions and experiences. Sanskrit scriptures have rich treasure of linguistic, philosophical, cultural, scientific and technological knowledge.

Sanskrit is linguistically advanced and rich in content in literature, philosophy, astrology, science and technology. Ayurveda is the medial science which finds growing relevance in the modern society. Metallurgy was advanced. There is description of aeronautical advancements. Fundamental contribution in Mathematical Science is known to all. Concept of zero, basis of 10, multiplicative principle, Sulb Sutras contain instances of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, squaring of fraction, etc. Measurement of time covers very wide spectrum. Kalpa is in terms of light years; yuga in terms of thousands of year, whereas ghatika is a fraction of a second. Vedic mathematics computes from either left to right or right to left; and uses pattern based short cuts and new ways of encryption. Scientific developments had followed holistic approach that takes into consideration multiple knowledge frameworks. Multiplicity of knowledge frameworks and linguistic tools of inferencing facilitate innovation.

Vedas are oldest documented treatise of knowledge around 1500 B.C. Contextual interpretations and development of basic concepts in various fields - cosmology, nature, self,

We welcome short notes of about 250 words describing achievements and prospective

research directions / futuristic projects in the field of Knowledge Technology for Sanskrit.

Ministry of Electronics & IT

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society, and nation - were made by several scholars till around dawn of Christian era. Scientific and Technological developments on Ayurveda (Medical Science), Arthashastra (Economics), Mathematical Science, Logic, Jyotish (Astronomy), Material Science, Linguistics and Language Resources, Agricultural practices, etc, were made till around 1500 A.D. Thereafter the economically advanced and culturally rich Bharat faced barbaric invasions and massive loss of documents on scientific, technological, and cultural advancements over five centuries. Sanskrit studies survive only in Interpretation phase. New India may regain glory of pursuit for innovation for peace and prosperity of mankind by restructuring traditional knowledge using emerging knowledge technology and integrating that with modern scientific education.

This workshop may pave a way towards paradigm shift from Interpretation phase to Innovation Phase in Sanskrit Studies and Research.

Broad areas for discussion may include

(i) Input-Output (keyboard, voice, OCR, thought driven, display (print, voice, sign) for normal and impaired users)

(ii) Processing tools (parser, spell checker, grammar checker, summarizer, etc.) (iii) Linguistic data resources (Lexicon, Linguistic Data resource, Ontologies, etc.)

(iv) Standards (Vedic symbols and Devanagari script, Phonicode, IPA (International

Phonetic Alphabet), CNL (Concept based Networking Language), etc.) (v) Applications (Education, Health care, Raga based therapy, heritage, etc.) (vi) Capacity Building (traditional technology-enabled Learning practices, pedagogy,

teachers training, Massive Open Online Courses, etc.) (vii) Sanskrit based Cognitive Computing (Building Consciousness, Brain Simulation,

Augmented Intelligence, Cognitive Augmentation, etc.) (viii) Strategy for Synergistic Collaboration between Government, Academia and

Industry.

Tentative format for project proposals for presentation: 1.Title of project, 2. Aim and scope, 3. Implementation strategy, 4. Duration, 5. Estimated budget, 6. Prospective tie-up institutions, 7. Spin-off benefits / outcome

Thanks are due to the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MEITy),

Government of India for supporting this workshop on Knowledge Technology

for Sanskrit: R&D Prospects.

Organisational support is by the staff of the Bhavan under the patronage of Shri

Ashok Pradhan, Director of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Delhi Kendra.

Thanks are due to Dr. S K Shrivastava, Shri Vijay Kumar and TDIL team at MEITy

for advising the team at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan - Prof. Shashiprabha Kumar and

Prof. Om Vikas in Editing, and Shri Pushpendra Sharma in coordinating the event.

Authors may correspond on dr.omvikas@gmail.com , M: +91-986 840 4129

mailto:dr.omvikas@gmail.com

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Recap

Sanskrit Resources and Tools Available on TDIL-DC Portal

at www.tdil-dc.in . For details refer to June issue of संस्कृत संज्ञानिकी

Projects submitted in July issue of संस्कृत संज्ञानिकी

1. Title of the Project: Vedic Heritage Portal at IGNCA, New Delhi

Vedic Heritage Portal (http://vedicheritae.gov.in ) at IGNCA, contact pjha@ignca.nic.in ,

2. Title of the Project: Neuroscience of Voice and Speech Production:

Self-Control and Self-Awareness of Phonation

Contact: Vinod D Deshmukh, MD, PhD, Univ of Florida. Email: vinodsmind@gmail.com

3. Title of Project: Violation of Energy Conservation in Physical Systems

(Annamaya Kosha): Experiment Design

Contact: Dr. Kushal K. Shah, IISER, Bhopal, Email : kushals@iiserb.ac.in ,

4. Title of the Project: Sanskrit based Gnananithi for information archival and retrieval

Contact: Gopi Kumar Bulusu, SCCI and Sankhya Technologies, Email: gopi@sankhya.com

5. Title of the Project: Revisiting Paninian Grammar Guidance for 21st century Sanskrit and Computers

Contact: Dr. BVK Sastry, Yoga-Samskrutam Univ. USA, Email: sastry.bvk@gmail.com

Relevant Articles received from Eminent Scholars ( संस्कृत संज्ञानिकी, July, 2019)

1. Prof. Amba Kulkarni, Univ. of Hyderabad on “Sanskritam SangaNakayantrakshetram – Sanskrit in the age of Information Technology”, presented in the National Seminar on Sanskrit-

Development plan for next 10 years, at Udupi on 6th Feb 2016.

Contact: Prof. Amba Kulkarni, Email: apksh@uohyd.ernet.in , ambapradeep@gmail.com

2. Prof. Subhash Kak, Oklahoma State University, USA on “Panini’s Grammar and Computer

Science” by Saroja Bhate and Subhash Kak.

Contact: Prof. Subhash Kak, Email: subhash.kak@okstate.edu

3. Shri Subrat Kumar Prusty, Director, DoT, “SOIL – Sanskrit Operating System for Indian

Languages”. Contact: Email: subratprusty1@gmail.com

http://www.tdil-dc.in/http://vedicheritae.gov.in/mailto:pjha@ignca.nic.inmailto:vinodsmind@gmail.commailto:kushals@iiserb.ac.inmailto:gopi@sankhya.commailto:apksh@uohyd.ernet.in%20,%20%20%20ambapradeep@gmail.commailto:subhash.kak@okstate.edumailto:subratprusty1@gmail.com

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NEW PROJECTS in August, 2019

Projects by Prof. Peter M Scharf.

Previous projects completed. 1. International digital Sanskrit library integration funding agency: National Science Foundation, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems period: 1 January 2006 -- 30 December 2009. link: https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/nsf2005.html The International Digital Sanskrit Library Integration project created a globally distributed, internet-based digital library in Sanskrit from formerly independent projects. The project standardized Sanskrit text-encoding, revised the Unicode Standard to include characters necessary for Indic cultural heritage, supplied truthed data for optical character recognition, prepared the major digital Sanskrit-English lexicon for integration with linguistic software, produced several other digital lexical resources, produced a full-form Sanskrit lexicon and morphological analyzer, and fostered international collaboration in the area of Sanskrit computational linguistics by hosting the Second International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium held in May 2008 at Brown University at which participants founded the Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Consortium which has held four international symposia since then. 2. Enhancing access to primary cultural heritage materials of India funding agency: U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access period: 1 July 2009 -- 30 December 2013 link: https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/neh2008.html link: https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/catindex.html The project selected a small but important set of texts represented in the Indic manuscript collections at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania, and in the Sanskrit Library’s collection of digital texts. The Brown University Library and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the University of Pennsylvania made high-quality digital images of ninety manuscripts of the great Indian epic Mahābhārata, and sixty-eight manuscripts of the preeminent Vaiṣṇava text Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Sanskrit Library assistants collected catalog data and inserted that data into the XML template Scharf made in accordance with the Text-Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) manuscript guidelines, and Scharf completed editing the catalog the first week of May 2012. Scharf and Amey Huchins, the catalog librarian at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the University of Pennsylavania, worked out parameters to map the completed catalog data onto the standard MaRC records used by libraries. 3. Sanskrit lexical sources: digital synthesis and revision funding agency: U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, and the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft period: 1 July 2009 -- 30 June 2014 link: https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/nehDFG2009.html link: https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/integratedDictionaries.html This project extended the Sanskrit Library’s multidictionary interface by integrating supplements to the major bilingual dictionaries already included, and by adding specialized dictionaries, and indigenous Indian monolingual dictionaries. The project links these lexical resources with digitized Sanskrit texts, and morphological analysis software.

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4. Bringing ancient Indian semantic and syntactic theory face to face with contemporary computational linguistics funding agency: Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal financée par l’Etat et la Région d'Ile-de-France, gérée par la Fondation de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure period: 1 February 2012 -- 30 June 2013 https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/bp2012.html India developed an extraordinarily rich linguistic tradition over more than three millennia which has much to offer contemporary linguistic theory in the areas of phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The project investigated ways in which Indian semantic and syntactic theory might contribute useful insights to contemporary formal linguistics, and designed ways in which these theories could be formalized and implemented computationally. Under the project a formalization of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī using XML was begun which was completed in 2017. 5. Developing automated text-image alignment to enhance access to heritage manuscript images funding: U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access period: 1 July 2013 -- 30 June 2015 link: https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/neh2012dev.html This project enhanced access to Sanskrit manuscripts by developing human-validated automated text-image alignment techniques in order to provide access to digital images via related machine-readable texts, and a sophisticated search interface. 6. Cataloguing the Houghton Library’s Indic manuscript collection funding: U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access period: 1 July 2013 -- 31 December 2016 link: https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/neh2012cat.html link: https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/catindex.html This project completed the descriptive cataloguing of the entire collection of 1,700 Sanskrit manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University and provided access to them in the Sanskrit Library's digital manuscript catalogue index.

Current projects at IIIT Hyderabad 1. Revising the Latex Sanskrit Devanagari encoding program IIIT Hyderabad B.Tech. project The LaTeX skt package produces superb Devanagari by transcoding from the Velthuis Romanization meta-encoding for Sanskrit. However, the program is limited to lines of eighty characters after which it fails to form conjuncts. The project revises the package to use the Sanskrit Library phonetic encoding, which is unambiguous and complete for Vedic, extends the line limit indefinitely, and adds missing characters and those now impossible to form. 2. Web-based introductory Sanskrit course IIIT Hyderabad B.Tech. project The aim of this project is to implement a detailed algorithm for an interactive digital version of a first-year university-level Sanskrit course with intelligent feedback systems that utilize the Sanskrit Library's transliteration, sandhi, and inflection software.

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3. Sanskrit Web-based reader development IIIT Hyderabad B.Tech. project By employing current Web technologies, the project revises an obsolete pair of apps previously mounted on the Sanskrit Library website that ran a Sanskrit reader program and an elaborate index. The reader program displays Sanskrit in alternate scripts, sandhi analysis, word stems, morphological and lexical identification, translation, and notes. The index program permits access limited to specific lemmata or inflected words, to morphological and lexial categories, and to text ranges. 4. Paitāmbarī implementation The Sanskrit Library A small team of computer scientists implement the XML formalization of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī described in no. 4 under Previous projects.

Proposed future projects 1. Sanskrit text to speech The Sanskrit Library has developed a phonetic encoding for Sanskrit that codes articulatory features. The aim is to locate the acoustic counterparts and develop a text to speech program from this encoding. 2. Sanskrit Unicode and Font improvement Unicode Sanskrit Devanagari fonts do not now currently display certain combinations of combining characters properly on base characters. Certain fonts that excel in displaying conjunct consonants or accents and other features of Devanagari required for Sanskrit still fail to display properly characters that have two or more modifying combining characters. This project upgrades the best fonts and proposes necessary repairs of character properties to the Unicode Standard. 3. TEI XML Sanskrit text tagging interface Create an HTML interface usable off-line as well as on-line that will allow people tagging a Sanskrit text to select appropriate XML tags and attributes in accordance with the Text-Encoding Inditiative guidelines from a standard set of tags and attributes utilized in the Sanskrit Library's TEI Sanskrit text template. The interface should include menus containing appropriate tags and use context to suggest all and only those tags appropriate for the context. To permit future adaptations to the TEI guidelines or template, the interface should be driven by a DTD or schema. 4. Interactive digital Āyurvedic Sanskrit course The proposed project will produce a digital interactive Sanskrit course that adapts the examples and exercises in a first-year university-level Sanskrit course to utilize the vocabulary and subject matter in Āyurvedic texts. The project also publishes the adapted textbook teaching Āyurveda through Sanskrit for off-line use. 5. Sanskrit data-entry The proposed project will devise a data-entry method for the Indian public that is most efficient for the Sanskrit language based on the Sanskrit Library phonetic encoding and adapt the method to work in text editors typically available in Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac, such as NotePad++, Geany, and BBEdit. Existing data-entry methods require a distinction between dependent vowel diacritics for vowels that follow consonants immediately in the same syllable, and independent vowel signs for vowels that begin a syllable. This distinction between two sets of vowels is not part of the phonetics of the Sanskrit language because the selection of dependent versus

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independent vowel signs in the graphic representation of Sanskrit in Indic scripts is entirely predictable from the context. By including duplicate codes, the existing data-entry methods for Sanskrit are significantly more time consuming and more expensive. The project will permit more efficient and economical production of digital Sanskrit texts. 6. Comprehensive canonical Sanskrit text reference The forty-two volume work entitled New Catalogus Catalogorum (NCC) recently completed by the University of Madras briefly describes all Sanskrit works known by mention in any of the catalogues of Sanskrit manuscripts surveyed. This work therefore comprises the most comprehensive listing of all extant authors and works produced in Sanskrit. The proposed project will utilize this knowledge to produce a comprehensive canonical reference system for Sanskrit authors and works to standardize reference to texts and passages within them in the digital medium. Such a standard is necessary to coordinate philological and linguistic work done on these texts, to facilitate the building of a comprehensive digital library of them, and to enable the construction of analystic linguistic corpora related to the texts such as a morphologically analyzed corpus and a syntactic tree bank. 7. Essential Sanskrit grammatical text markup The proposed project will produce high-quality digital editions of Pāṇinian grammatical texts and provide wide public access to them in an integrated digital library. The proposed project analyzes the essential, most widely used Pāṇinian grammatical texts already digitized, dissolves interword phonetic changes (sandhi) at citation and example boundaries, and integrates the commentaries with the foundational text of the Aṣṭādhyāyī. This integration is achieved by marking up corresponding divisions in texts, and by tagging citations and pratīkas in XML in accordance with the Text-Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. From these XML tags, software that converts XML to HTML creates links between base texts and commentaries on them, and between citations and their sources. The project morphologically identifies examples and counterexamples, and derivations, and tags explicitly mentioned basic elements such as roots, affixes, and augments. The tagging of examples, counterexamples and derivations lays the foundation for future research and applications. 8. Mahābhāṣya commentaries The proposed project will produce digital editions of commentaries on the foundational grammatical text of the Pāṇinian grammatical tradition, Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya, analyzes interword phonetic changes sandhi at the boundaries of examples, cross-references and references to other texts, and integrates the texts with each other and with the foundational text of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. 9. Grammar texts digitization and markup The proposed project digitizes the essential, most widely used Pāṇinian grammatical texts not yet digitized, analyzes interword phonetic changes (sandhi) and integrates them and several other essential commentaries already digitized and with the foundational text of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. 10. Masterpieces of Sanskrit kāvya The proposed project aims to produce digital editions of five of the most famous Sanskrit poetic works, to provide analytic higher-level encoding of them in accordance with the Text-Encoding Initiative guidelines, and to provide wide public access to them in an integrated digital library.

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Projects by Prof. Amba Kulkarni

Department of Sanskrit Studies, University of Hyderabad

Email: ambapradeep@gmail.com , apksh@uohyd.ernet.in

1 Use of Technology for Sanskrit

Sanskrit has a vast repository of knowledge in various disciplines such as Mathematics, Ayurveda, Language science, Philosophy and so on. While the translation of several important texts in several languages exist, still there always is a need to understand the texts in origin without resorting to their translations.

This demands for a software that will present any Sanskrit text with following analysis and features:

• text in unsandhied form,

• morphological analysis of every word,

• sentential analysis,

• dictionary access for every word,

• displaying the sangati at different units of discourse,

• presentation of discourse structure through graphs

While software for some of the above tasks are available, there is a need for improvement in the performance and their coverage. Good user interfaces are needed. Smooth integration of these tools for user friendliness is in order. The last two tasks have not yet attracted due attention.

2 Use of Indian Grammatical Tradition

India is known for her contribution to the theories for verbal communication. These theories are objective in nature and thus provide useful insights for developing algorithms for mechanical analysis and generation.

Some of the concepts from the tradition such as ākāṅkṣā and sannidhi have been effectively used for the development of mechanical sentential analysers. As a follow up, the concept of yogyatā needs to be understood further. Various classification of Lakṣaṇā would also be useful for understanding the use of metaphors.

A project may be envisaged where traditional Sanskrit scholars team up with computational linguists to model yogyatā and lakṣaṇā computationally.

mailto:ambapradeep@gmail.commailto:apksh@uohyd.ernet.in

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3 Development of Dependency Grammars

Dependency grammars have been found to be suitable for various tasks related to Natural Language Processing. In the 19th century, modern Indian languages such as Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi had grammars developed following the Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī. However, during the last century, these languages have undergone changes, and there is a need to rewrite grammars for these languages and write fresh grammars for other Indian languages following Pāṇinian framework. Such a grammar would be useful for the computational purpose.

Such frameworks may also be developed for foreign languages such as English, French, German, Japanese, etc.

Relevant Papers by Scholars

1. Nanini Chatterjee Singh: a new paper on Hindustani raga music,

“Cultural differences in the use of acoustic cues for musical emotion experience”,

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222380 Paper uploaded on www.bvbdelhi.org/kts/

2. Om Vikas, “Pursuit of Innovation in Vedic Studies”, in the Draft Report of 2nd Sanskrit Commission. Paper uploaded on www.bvbdelhi.org/kts/

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222380http://www.bvbdelhi.org/kts/http://www.bvbdelhi.org/kts/

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INTRODUCTION to CONTRIBUTORS

Prof. Vinod D Deshmukh, MD, PhD Neurologist, Florida, USA Email: vinodsmind@gmail.com

Vinod D Deshmukh MD PhD is a retired neurologist from Jacksonville, Florida. He was an

Associate Professor of Neurology at University of Florida. He also had his own private practice at

the Flagler Hospital, in St Augustine, Florida.

He has published over sixty scientific articles including a monograph on Brain Blood Flow. His

recent articles were on the Neuroscience of Meditation, the Multistream Self, Turiya, Prana-

Dhyana, Vedic Psychology as a Science of Wisdom, Secular Wisdom, and The Cognitive-Pause

and Unload, the CPU hypothesis of Meditation and Creativity. A chapter on “The Embodied Brain,

Mind and Self” and an article “Purusha and Prakriti” are in print at present.

His latest book is called “The Astonishing Brain and Holistic Consciousness: Neuroscience

and Vedanta Perspectives.” It was published in (2012) by Nova Science publishers of New York.

Poetry, photography and oil painting are his hobbies. He has published six books of his original

poetry, essays and photographs: 1) Presence: the Key to Mental Excellence (1990), 2) The Last

Leaf (1993), 3) A Poet's Walk (2002), 4) A Poet’s Vision (2005), 5) Natural Bliss (2015),

and Now and Beyond (2019).

He was awarded “The Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Award” by the Marquis Who’s Who

Publications Board in 2018.

His website: http://poetsmiles.com/

His email address: vinodsmind@gmail.com

Vinod D Deshmukh, MD, PhD.

mailto:vinodsmind@gmail.comhttp://poetsmiles.com/mailto:vinodsmind@gmail.com

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Prof. Peter M Scharf, Professor Emeritus, Email: peter.scharf@iiit.ac.in

Peter Scharf earned his B.A. in philosophy at Wesleyan University and his doctorate in

Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he taught Sanskrit at Brown

University for 19 years and conducted research on the linguistic and philosophical

traditions of India. Since 2011, he has held several visiting professorships: Visiting

Professor at the Maharishi University of Management Research Institute, International

Blaise Pascal Research Chair at the University of Paris Diderot, Visiting Professor in the

Department of Sanskrit Studies at the University of Hyderabad, Visiting Professor of

Sanskrit in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of

Technology Bombay, and currently Visiting Professor in the Language Technologies

Research Center at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad.

He is also the director of the Sanskrit Library sanskritlibrary.org, an international digital

Sanskrit library which he founded in 2002.

His work over the past fifteen years developing innovative research and instructional

technology for Sanskrit has proven to be eminently successful. He has obtained more

than a million dollars in grants to integrate manuscripts, texts, lexical resources, and

linguistic software. In projects that produce a new paradigm of access to primary cultural

materials of India, he catalogued and digitized Sanskrit manuscripts at Brown University,

the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University, aligned manuscripts with

corresponding digital text allowing focused access to sought passages in the manuscript

images, and developed image-text alignment software to automate the process. He

digitized some forty-five Sanskrit lexical sources and integrated them to allow

simultaneous lookup. These lexical sources include not only the major bilingual

dictionaries, but also indigenous thesauri, lists, specialized dictionaries, and monolingual

Sanskrit dictionaries usually neglected by the scholarly community. In view of the success

of these projects, he was awarded a prestigious International Blaise Pascal Research

mailto:peter.scharf@iiit.ac.in

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Chair in Paris for a year where he brought Indian theories of semantics and syntax face

to face with modern computational linguistics and directed a project to build a tagged

corpus of Sanskrit texts. The year culminated in an edited volume of papers on Sanskrit

syntax published in 2015.

He is now developing a computational implementation of Pāṇinian grammar based on

an XML formalization of the entire Aṣṭādhyāyī he completed in 2016, and is investigating

the use of Pāṇinian models of verbal cognition in computational syntax. He has been

invited to spend the coming year as a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies

in Shimla to translate and elucidate the early 17th century cognitive linguist

Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa’s treatises on the conclusions of the Pāṇinian tradition.

Prof. Amba Kulkarni, University of Hyderabad Email: apksh@uohyd.ernet.in , ambapradeep@gmail.com

Amba Kulkarni is a computational linguist. Since 1991 she has been engaged in showing the relevance of Indian Grammatical Tradition to the field of computational linguistics. She has contributed towards the building of Anusaarakas (language accessors) among English and Indian languages. She is the founder head of the Department of Sanskrit Studies, University of Hyderabad established in 2006. Since then her focus of research is on use of Indian grammatical theories for computational processing of Sanskrit texts. Under her leadership, a Consortium of institutes developed several computational tools for Sanskrit and also a prototype of Sanskrit-Hindi Machine Translation system. In 2015, she was awarded a 'Vishishta Sanskrit Sevavrati sammana' by the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, New Delhi for her contribution to the studies and research on Sanskrit based knowledge system.

mailto:apksh@uohyd.ernet.in%20,%20%20%20ambapradeep@gmail.com

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Prof. Kushal Shah, IISER, Bhopal,

Email: kushals@iiserb.ac.in , atmabodha@gmail.com

Dr. Kushal Shah is a faculty member at IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education &

Research), Bhopal in the EECS Department. He has done his BTech from IIT Madras in

2005, PhD from the same place in 2009, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the

Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. After that, he has been a faculty member at JNU

(2010-12) as well as IIT Delhi (2012-17), before joining IISER Bhopal in August 2017. He

has diverse research interests in the broad areas of Dynamical Systems, Plasma Physics,

Genomic Signal Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He has

published several papers in reputed international journals and has also received the INAE

Young Engineer Award 2014. He is very keen on working with like-minded people to bring

together Vedanta and Modern Science.

mailto:kushals@iiserb.ac.inmailto:atmabodha@gmail.com

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Dr. BVK SASTRY

Email: “venkatakrishna bevor” , sastry.bvk@gmail.com

Dr. BVK Sastry (Bevoor Venkatakrishna Sastry) is the Founder –President of Yoga-

Samskrutham University’, Florida, USA. The vision and mission of University is to

facilitate higher education which fulfills the implementation of the call from Srimad

Bhagavad Gita (6-46) - Tasmat Yogi Bhava: Therefore, become and be a Yogi. Dr. Sastry

redefined Yogi as a Citizen of Nation who is healthy,

ethical, cultured and Conscientious.

Dr. Sastry is an Educator, a researcher, an on-line

Education Technologist and a Content Developer with

three decades of experience, internationally. A

Language Technologist, by research passion, he has

served the cause of Samskruth related digital standards,

in the capacity of an invited- member for the 'Vedic Unicode proposal'.

Dr.Sastry holds a US Patent on Samskruth and Computer applications related product.

One of his innovations is ‘One Keyboard for All Indian Languages, based on Brahmi

Phonetics’. Dr. Sastry is promoter of many innovative Language-Appropriate Technology

(L.A.T) projects using Paninian Samskrutham for building Voice Interface for Non-English

like Languages. The project is named ‘Shruti –Kranti’: Voice Primary Computation, which

has practical applications in promoting Multilingual Web complementing the benefits of

Internet of Things. The eventual goal is fine tuning Digital Technologies, devices and

WEB to be user Language appropriate, accommodative and adaptive.

Dr.Sastry is also pioneering the management education program of 'C- School', a new

paradigm ushering in yoga values in management education, promoting applied yoga's

for Nation-Citizen total wellness culture, create total wellness professionals, and train the

Raja-yogi's and Karma-Yogi's as national human-excellence resources.

Dr.Sastry has many publications, conference proceedings, articles, Teaching Programs

to his credit. Dr. Sastry, hails from Karnataka, South India. He holds a Ph.D in Sanskrit.

Dr.Sastry has been honored on many platforms by institutions recognizing excellence of

contributions in the field of Samskruth and Yoga. Dr.Sastry promotes Vak-Yoga teaching:

the Yoga way of learning-practicing Samskrutham, the language of Yoga. The teaching

is developed using the directive in Gita (17-15) to build Vedic mindfulness meditation for

freedom from emotional stresses for total wellness.

mailto:yogasamskrutham@gmail.commailto:sastry.bvk@gmail.com