Access to Sanskrit texts made easy IITH’s research to detect adulteration via smartphone

■ IIIT-H professor creates digital Sanskrit library, develops solution for sandhi

Professor Peter Scharf of the international faculty of the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) has created a digital Sanskrit Library at IIITH. Professor Scharf is a Sanskrit scholar, and Paninian grammar expert.

The digital library will make it easier for researchers to access original Sanskrit manuscripts, texts, and lexical resources.

Explaining the process, Prof Scharfe said, “The first project we had was to take digital texts and digital dictionaries and integrate them with linguistic software. This would help people read the texts more easily. If the sandhi (interword phonetic changes) in Sanskrit had been analysed, they could click on a word, and a morphological analyser would present the possible morphological analyses and corresponding stems, and you could click on the stem and look up the word in a digital dictionary."

He collaborated with Gerard Huet, a computer scientist in Paris, who was creating a Sanskrit parser at his Sanskrit Heritage site.

Prof Scharf was introduced to Sanskrit at the age of 15 when his brother returned from a teachertraining course in the Transcendental Meditation programme (TM) founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and taught his whole family to practise it. Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH)'s path-breaking research developed on smart phone-based sensors to detect adulteration in milk, is now published in the November 2018 issue of Food Analytical Methods journal.

The research was undertaken by a team led by Prof. Shiv Govind Singh, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Hyd. and comprising Dr. Soumya Jana and Dr. Siva Rama Krishna Vanjari, Associate Prof-essors in the Dept of Electrical Engineering, IIT Hyd. and others.

As a first step, the research team has developed a sensor-chip based method for measuring pH, an indicator to check acidity.

The researchers have used a process called 'electro-spinning' to produce paper-like material made of nano-sized fibres of nylon, loaded with a combination of three dyes. The paper is 'halochromic', that is, it changes colour in response to changes in acidity.

The researchers have developed a prototype smart phone-based algorithm, in which, the colours of the sensor strips after dipping in milk are captured using the camera of the phone, and the data is transformed into pH (acidity) ranges.