AICTE recognises IIT Bombay’s UDAAN project for translation of technical books

NEW DELHI: All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) on Wednesday said that it acknowledges the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay’s UDAAN project for technical book writing scheme.

IIT Bombay’s UDAAN project is led by IITB professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan and aims to provide a novel end-to-end machine translation framework that includes extensive use of lexical resources and a post-editing platform.

“UDAAN Team helped immensely in speeding up the process of translation of technical books. The strong foundation of their data-efficient machine learning approaches organized at decile.org synchronize and support this platform,” the AICTE said in a statement.

"The project is based on continuous research work resulting in faster turn-around time for correcting errors and fine-tuning the translation models in a low-resource setting," the council said.

“IIT Bombay is sincerely trying to continuously upgrade and upkeep UDAAN platform based on valuable inputs from AICTE, coordinators and translators/reviewers for translation work of technical books into different Indian regional languages,” it added.

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AICTE has earmarked a budget of Rs 18.6 crores for developing the second-year course material in English and its translation into 12 Indian languages. In September 2021, the AICTE informed that 226 authors reviewed and translated 218 engineering books for first-year students of undergraduate and diploma programmes.

Last month, the University Grants Commission (UGC) chairman M Jagadesh Kumar launched the Engineering Book Discussion calendar in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020’s vision to make technical education accessible in Indian languages. The first series of the discussions kicked off on November 29 and will go on till January 31, 2023.