Shiva Kumar and Prof. A G Ramakrishnan have developed high accuracy Optical Character Recognizers (OCR) for Kannada and Tamil languages that convert scanned pages of a printed document/book into e-text. In addition, they have developed an intuitive GUI called Print-to-Braille tool that enables even non-technical people to quickly use their OCR and make corrections to the mistakes, if any, in the text output by the OCR. By using their OCR along with the Print to Braille tool, the family members or friends of visually challenged people are able to scan any printed book/document and convert it into Unicode text within a short span of time. The visually challenged person can listen to that e-text through any Text to speech (TTS) synthesis software. The e-text can also be converted into Braille codes and printed using a Braille embosser.

Three scientists from IISc have been conferred the prestigious Young Scientist Medal from the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) and three others have been newly inducted into the Academy, at a joyous open-to-all ceremony at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa.