I was fascinated by computers from my childhood. I used to cut out laptop/desktop Ads from newspapers and dream about them.

• I touched a computer keyboard for the first time at my school in Bhuban, a village in Odisha, India in 2003.

• I was in class 8 and was the first student in the school to roll up for the program, my roll number was 001.

• You may read further on my journey with the Internet over this Twitter thread.

• I have completed my B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from ITER, Bhubaneswar, Odisha.

• After getting trained with the Hawaa Paani of Mumbai for three years, in 2015, I moved to Bengaluru, the IT hub of India.

• The lack of online content on Indic languages especially a low-resource language like Odia made me start my entry into the Open-source world back in 2018.

• Currently, I have been working as a tech lead in Freshworks.

• Earlier I had worked on:

  • Existing Odia language progress
  • MTEnglish2Odia - 40k+ crowdsourced English-Odia parallel sentence pairs.
  • Odia Monolingual news corpus
  • English-Odia word pairs
  • Odia structured dictionary
  • Odia person names

While doing all these works I have developed a good amount of network of Odia volunteers who have developed datasets for the betterment of the community. I will be forever in debt to them for their service in helping prepare these datasets.

• Currently, I have been working on:

  • OpenOdia - Open Source Odia, an amalgamation of all basic NLProc tools for the Odia language.
  • Improving OCR in Odia language
  • Validating and adding audio for Speech2Text and Text2Speech in Odia language.
  • Extracting Odia language content for text, audio, and images.

• Your sponsorship will help:

  • Adding new features and maintaining the OpenOdia Python library.
  • the community to prepare datasets in a sustainable manner.
  • start working on the projects for Odia language.
  • Motivate me to help others in a sustainable way.

Thank you 🙏🏼