Projects
Pandemic days are times where the world recognizes the need for tech based solutions more than ever before. Physical interactions, especially for school going kids, have become a threat to their life. Rural children remain the most affected, making quality education a dire need. The Center is attempting to meet the need for the benefit of society through its projects. The list of on-going projects in education are
Ask Agastya
The initiative of “Ask Agastya” is aimed at creating an “Any Time” learning resource/platform to underprivileged students with access to a non-smart mobile phone and voice network. The learning takes place outside the classroom in a typical “Question-Answer” mode by recording in vernacular language, auto-translating it into English and delivering the response in local language. The Purpose of the project is to create questions and answers from the school curriculum for all categories of students. The availability of such a platform is to make learning easy and accessible to all the students.
Virtual IoT Lab
The initiative of “Virtual IoT Labs” is aimed at removing physical limitations such as access to physical labs and research centers and enable the child to have the same learning experience while accessing the lab remotely through a combination of technologies.
Measuring Learning Effectiveness of Intervention Programs
This project aims to analyze school, instructor, student, and subject information along with student responses recorded in physical classroom environments and identify metrics that will help track student progress on multiple dimensions. Embedded tools/systems will be designed to deploy statistical/ML frameworks that generate the identified metrics to measure the learning effectiveness of students.
The Library Wall (digital)
Online libraries are plentiful, but mostly overwhelming for government school children. More so when rural areas lack sufficient reading devices, they find it ambiguous & confusing to pick what to read given the very wide choice available in online libraries. The Library wall project is to bring digital libraries, with a curated set of books, to rural government schools. This initiative addresses the challenge of making libraries digitally available and accessible for rural students with the help of internet-based technologies. This attempts to provide them with a suitable device/product, on which the students will be able to freely access the digital books collated as per their interest.
Speech Interface for Career Guidance
Nirmaan organization, as a part of their Yuva Disha program, provides end-to-end career guidance and development support for the unemployed youth. While all of these happen through manual phone calls, this highly limits their scale of expansion. In an attempt to solve this, this project has initiated building a speech interface to be able to record the student queries and deliver answers using a featured phone in audio form. The platform is designed to have recording in vernacular language, auto-translating it into English and delivering the response in local language.
The NEP project: Automated attendance algorithm using CV
The sudden shift to online education due to the pandemic has led to widespread learning gaps in the student population, increasing the need for individualistic attention to student learning as we transition back to physical classrooms. The current work proposes a framework for accurate, low-cost, and scalable computer vision-based attendance tracking in physical classroom environment to tackle this problem. The automated attendance system uses the existing work on computer vision based “Face Recognition” python library. The input is a real-time image of students in a classroom, the output is the student’s attendance.
Digitizing Handwritten School Registers
Every educational Institute needs some kind of formatted attendance or marksheet. So our project makes this work simpler by transforming printed or handwritten documents to a table or excel sheet and storing them into the database. In our project the user just needs to scan the image which has handwritten tables which is converted to a digitized tabular format after passing through a series of algorithms. The end goal is to increase student-based outcomes by reducing extra administrative workload on teachers by Technological Interventions.
Teaching assistance tool for learning English Language
The platform has been developed for making the process of teaching word pronunciations and sentence formation easier. It also includes other features like planning of future lessons , showing visual reports of how the students are performing , planning of assessments for the students and the evaluation of said assessments using an ASR model.