New Delhi, April 25, 2005

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) announced the launch of seven new products at the Electronics and Information Technology Exposition (ELITEX) '2005 organized by the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi during April 25-26, 2005. The seven products, namely GSM based Multilingual Display System, Print Document Security Toolkit, eSikshak, End System Security Solution, Bangla Katha Bhandar, Watermarking Digital Audio Tool and N@G were launched by Thiru Dayanidhi Maran, Hon'ble Minister for Communications & Information Technology, Government of India. Thiru Maran also visited the C-DAC stall and evinced keen interest in the displayed products and solutions.

The GSM based Multilingual Display System scores over other available systems by accepting and displaying information in the local / regional language. It uses the GSM network (wireless) for such information exchange, eliminating the need for physical wires running between the information server & the display unit. The unit is Unicode compliant & is capable of rendering the Indian languages on the LED display, with the help of a built-in Indian language engine. It also offers built-in features such as text scrolling, crawling, flashing, reverse and so on. The information to the display unit can be sent either through the central server (for sending text to multiple units) or through a cellular phone (handset).

The Print Document Security Toolkit called C-DAC-Shield deals with securing a document by restricting its reproduction/duplicity. The basic premise of the toolkit is that the photocopied / duplicated document is identifiable. It exploits the difference by which a human eye and a machine (photocopier, scanner or even digital camera) looks at an object. This is achieved by putting a special text along with the pattern in the background that is almost invisible to the naked eye, however if the document is photocopied, then the special text (e.g. Photocopy or Duplicate) will be visible on the photocopied document. C-DAC-Shield also provides an option to the user to hide the desired text in the background, and the resulting document is generated transparently to the user. It offers security to a paper document both in terms of the paper and the data, and is a cost effective solution using low cost office equipments for the creation and verification of documents. The toolkit can also be used to secure existing documents.

Sponsored by the elearning group of the DIT, eSikshak is a low cost and browser independent eLearning environment that removes the barriers of distance and time, and provides greater flexibility to enable learners to learn at their own pace. Developed using Java Technology, eSikshak offers built-in Indian language support and allows users to create multiple courses and deliver the course content with features such as Online Registration, Assessment, and Communication tools such as mail, bulletin board, chat and whiteboard to make the learning environment effective.

C-DAC's End System Security Solution addresses the issues of securing end systems, as they remain the weakest links despite the availability of complex and expensive perimeter security solutions. C-DAC has developed a Transparent Security Solution (TSS) to provide confidentiality, integrity, authenticity as well as network access control, which are all integrated into a single solution, working transparent to the applications. This solution has been developed for both Windows and Linux operating systems. The solution monitors every TCP communication and based on the security policies applies various security mechanisms. It also comes with a centralized administration console to assist the administrators in defining the security policies with ease and efficiency.

India being a multilingual country, there is a tremendous research potential for the development of Speech technology in different Indian languages to benefit the masses for taking advantage of Information Technology. C-DAC's Bangla Katha Bhandar is a collection of Annotated Speech Corpora for Bangla The annotated speech corpora gains importance as the development of Speech Technology and Acoustic Phonetics Research of different languages demands large speech databases. While corpora of written text exist in most of the regional languages, unfortunately none of these exist in spoken versions of these languages. The absence of standard speech corpora in regional languages is one of the major retarding factors behind the lack of adequate progress in development and evaluation of automatic speech processing research, particularly related to man-machine-man interaction, in the past.

The issue of Digital Rights Management is also addressed by C-DAC with the Watermarking Digital Audio Tool. The Watermarking Digital Audio Tool constitutes a complementary pair of computer based software applications called Watermark Embedder and Watermark Detector. The Watermark Embedder is intended for imperceptibly embedding a watermark representing copyright information into a digital audio signal. The Watermark Detector verifies the presence of the watermark whenever the copyright of a particular audio concert is in question. The tool incorporates complex signal processing algorithms making it highly effective in protecting the ownership of audio programmes brought out for commercial distribution.

C-DAC's "Network@Guard" is a Hybrid Intrusion Detection System encompassing network and host sensor for detection and IDS server for management. The N@G's signatures are compliant with the standard CVE signature, a common agreed standard by security vendors across the world and also follows the IDMEF (Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format), which is an evolving standard by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).

Commenting on the launch, Mr. S. Ramakrishnan said that this was "a momentous journey for C-DAC, to see its products launched at one of the country's largest IT platforms and signals a new chapter in the coming of age for C-DAC".

C-DAC is also showcasing several other products such as Indix, Janabharati, Black Box for Automobiles, Area Traffic Control System, Digital Hearing Aid, Smart card based Attendance Management, Smart Card Based Portable Reader, Tetra Based Station, Tetra Hand Held Radio, Ayusoft, Jatan, HIS, Diamond, Akshaya, ICDS, Smart Palika, eUniversity, Translation Support System and so on, drawn from its centres at Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Mohali, Noida, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram.

This year, the theme of the exposition is "ICT Technology for Grassroot Applications".

Click here to send an eMail