KARACHI: A Sri Lankan scholar on Friday said Moenjodaro’s script could be deciphered through computer technology.

“But it requires constant effort on the technological front to get us through,” said Dr Gihan Dias of the University of Moratuwa. He was speaking at the concluding session of a two-day international conference on computing and related technologies, organised by the Sindh Madressatul Islam University (SMIU) in collaboration with the Higher Education of Pakistan.

The moot was concluded after three memorandums of understanding (MoUs) were inked by the SMIU with two Romanian universities and a Nigerian college.He said human languages were complex and could not be completely understood by the technology, adding, computers needed to handle text, images, and speech etc.

“We need language resources as data of how our languages are used, linguistic resources, and how our languages work, is highly important.”

Sri Lankan scholar said Google, Bing etc. base their translation systems on huge quantities of data – billions of sentences – and Sinhala and Tamil, like other South Asian languages as Sindhi, Punjabi etc. being low-resourced languages did not have such large amounts of data; and it was difficult to find good parallel corpora.“Computers and mobile devices need to store data in our own languages, and also process them in sophisticated ways, for example, to provide an answer to a written or spoken question,” said Prof Dias.

Prof Dias said two years ago the University of Moratuwa started a project to translate between Sri Lanka’s two official languages – Sinhala and Tamil.

“It quickly became apparent that in order to develop a translation system, we first needed both language and linguistic resources.”Earlier, the SMIU’s vice chancellor, Dr Muhammad Ali Shaikh signed the MoUs with Dr Ramona Lile of the University of Arad, Dr Florin Popentiu of the University of Oradea and Dr Muahmmad Adamu Jebba of Niger College of Education, Minna, Nigeria.

Dr Shaikh thanked the international scholars who visited Pakistan and shared their knowledge with their counterparts and students in Pakistan.Dr Hla Myo Tun of Yangon Technological University, Myanmar, spoke over the implementation of distributed control systems for Rice Mill using C#. Dr Mansoor Ahmed Tahir of Iqra University presented his papers on avoiding broadcasts and loops in multipath topology.

Noman Islam of Iqra University presented a paper on 5G network.

Prof Manzoor Ahmed Hashmani of the University of Technology Petronas, Malaysia, said business intelligence and analytics were in high demand as organisations seek to use information assets to improve business outcomes, customer relationships, and operational efficiency.

Dr Amir Manzoor of Bahria University, Karachi, said Pakistani businesses, just like those in many other developing countries, lack e-CRM (customer relationship management) system.Dr Gabor Kiss of Obuda University, Hungary, discussed the possibilities of changing information security awareness of the students in the higher education.

Bilal Ameen of ILMA University Karachi spoke over international leading stock market under the umbrella of information technology and Syed Mohammad Faran of Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology presented paper on interior design e-commerce website.

Shahzeb Soomro of SZABIST, Larkana, presented his paper on the security of 5G technology. He said as growing number of cybercrimes had increased, the requirement of privacy and security mechanism got higher to prevent isolation of information by communication between multiple devices and appliances in the application of 5G.

Bilal Liaquat and Zarlish Khan Tanoli of Bahria University also spoke.

Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2017