I am an Engineering graduate in Computer Science and Engineering. I graduated from Bharathidasan University, Trichurapalli(http://www.trichy.com), Tamilnadu.

I am basically from Tirupati (http://www.tirumala-tirupati.com/tirupati.php), the town of world's costliest God, lord Venkateswara, alias Balaji(http://www.tirumala.org/). My interests as a kid were automobiles. Driving is my passion and would love to drive any vehicle from a two wheeler to a 16 wheeler. I became passionate towards computers when my father used to be the language consultant for a Machine Translation Project called Anusaaraka (http://ltrc.iiit.net/~anusaaraka/). You can try this tool at http://ltrc.iiit.net/~anusaaraka/test_release.html .

My career started from Language Technologies Research Center, IIIT, Hyderabad in 2002. I joined as a project associate in the same Machine Translation Project for which my father was language consultant. I was involved in designing the user interface to display the translated output which is in Indian Languages. During this course, I learned about encoding schemes, font etc. It was a good learning experience and very few will get an opportunity to learn such a things. This is the place where I became aware about open source software and open source movement. Even though I was not totally clear about the movement, I always wanted to develop software tools that would benefit a larger group of audience and everything for free of cost.

I joined Servelots as an Indic Sarai(http://sarai.net) Fellow in 2004 with the objective of localizing Pantoto Communities Software. I am supported by Sarai for developing a tool set for support of Indian Languages on web applications [link to your proposal on the web]. This project was in collaboration with Surekha Sastry. These tools include typing tool on the web, conversion utilities between different encoding schemes, An Analyser for Indian Languages etc. The typing tool was developed as a Firefox extension and is being used and extended by many users. We have received a tremendous response and appreciation for the Indian Language typing tool.

Ever since I joined Servelots, I started working on Pantoto Community Software. I have had several learning experiences at Servelots from technical aspects to non-technical aspects. Since the Pantoto Communities Software was being used by NGO's working on different social aspects and since NGO's work with local people, it was a good place where the typing tool will find some scope. Many NGO's are now able to manage their information effectively using Pantoto Communities Software and using one software many common things can be achieved which will be extensively used in any type of NGO. Revamping of Pantoto Communities Software code gave me an opportunity to learn new technologies like
Hibernate, Jakarta-i18n library etc and I am happy that it is so easy and clear to understand and extend. I was also able help people to install the Pantoto Communities Software on windows platform. Troubleshooting errors for Pantoto installation on windows gave me an opportunity to gain a troubleshooting experience. It also helped me to sense the understanding of people's mind while they read the instructions and helped me to write the instructions with less confusion.

The Indic Project has been supported by Sarai, Delhi. Being a part of this project has given him an opportunity to contribute back to the open source community.

I have participated at several events related to Indian Language Computing/Support. I was a speaker at Foss.in/2005 event held in Bangalore in December '2005 and presented the Morphological Analyser for
Indian Languages, its need, its applications, technical details and an example on how to integrate it with any java based web application like Pantoto Communities Software.

My sincere acknowledgments to Anusaaraka Group, Sarai, Servelots, Users and Contributors of Indic IME Firefox Extension.