Building संसाधनी (Saṃsādhanī) – A Sanskrit Computational Toolkit

Dr. Amba Kulkarni, the Founder-Head of the Department of Sanskrit Studies, University of Hyderabad, is a  Computational Linguist, engaged in showing the relevance of Indian Grammatical Tradition to the field of Computational Linguistics. Under her leadership, several computational tools for Sanskrit, including a prototype of the Sanskrit-Hindi Machine Translation system,  have been and are being developed. In 2015, she was awarded a 'Viśiṣṭa Sanskrit  Sevārati Sammāna' by the Central Sanskrit University (erstwhile Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan), for her contribution to the studies and research on Sanskrit-based knowledge system.  She was a Fellow at IIAS Shimla, a Visiting Faculty at IIT Ropar, at IIT Bhubaneswar, and at  EPHE, Paris. Recently she authored a book `Sanskrit parsing based on the theories of śādbabodha', published jointly by the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies Shimla and D K PrintWorld. See this link — https://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/faculty/amba/) — to know more about her research interests and to access the long and impressive list of papers she has authored (and more).

Megh Kalyanasundaram is an Indian citizen with close to nine years of lived experience in China, an alumnus of ISB and is currently Director Special Projects at INDICA. His post-graduate specialization in Strategy, Leadership and Marketing included a study of research methods. His professional experience includes stints as a Market Leader at a Global Fortune 50 firm, as Head of Business Development at a leading Indian talent development multinational and he has served a term on the Board of a Shanghai-based not-for-profit. His academic research interests and 20+ papers span some aspects of ancient Indian chronology, Indian Knowledge Systems, Landscape in Indic texts, Ancient Indian Jurisprudence, Ideas of India and Philosophy. For his creative contribution to the first edition of the International Day of Yoga, he was invited by the Permanent Mission of India in the United Nations to attend the inaugural event at the UN. Other professional and pro-bono pursuits have included building differentiated digital platforms for Indic texts targeted at specific learning and research needs and music. His research-based compositional Sanskrit album 'Bhārata and her Kāśmīra' has been listed by the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (IGNCA) while his subsequent album 'Indian Knowledge Systems and Yāskācārya's Nirukta' has recently been accepted for listing by the Vedic Heritage Portal. In 2022, Megh was invited by the National Museum Institute (NMI) to contribute content for multiple projects currently underway at NMI, including ones on Jammu Kashmir & Ladakh and Kedarnath.