Artificial Intelligence or AI is the most talked and sought after topic of this decade and possibly the century. Use of machine learning/AI is making most of the ways of doing things exceptionally well in the past invalid in this new environment. At its peak we expect the traditional operations replaced with operations driven by speech recognition, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, analytics and machine learning in organizations. There will be new key roles emerging in facilitating machine learning (helping machines become intelligent) and analytics.

 Although there are different definitions and subdivisions within the field, to the extent of some calling it a misnomer term, as real AI is not there and whatever we do today is machine learning, the field is real and has been showing spectacular results to augment human intelligence. AI or machine learning has evolved on two fundamental principles viz. the ability for a machine to converse in natural language (the language you and I speak) and vision (ability of a machine to see and understand)

With a wave of artificial intelligence, there has come another wave, a wave of organizations trying to understand natural language and intent of customers or visual clues using deep neural network techniques. We are still far away from understanding “understanding” via machines but the steps towards those have started.

In this digital age we are also evidencing a marked shift in the consumer purchase cycle. From managing media and publishing – the key aspect of promoting mass consumption – marketers are shifting their attention to on-going customer experience, and customers wish to have experience in the language they are comfortable in. The word ‘convenience’ has assumed an all important role in not just discovering a service but also in delivering and managing.  Product life-cycles have become short, placing a very high demand on the traditional ways of creating and delivering products. More often than not the very nature of time required to release a product makes it obsolete or is unable to deliver the ROI.

This is where convenience attains the role of personalization and personalization needs language data and data inherently means patterns that a programmer must code for.

While these steps have moved the needle towards realization, a large population in India seems to be unaffected by this change. The “Siris”, “Cortanas” and the “Alexas” of the world have captured a global market by their limited natural language capabilities and building huge datasets of languages in their cloud, however about 85% of Indian population seems unaffected by this change. The reason is the language used viz. “English”. 

While we move towards the mid of 21st century, it is imperative that about 1/8th of the world population can converse with machines the way the rest of the world does, in its own dialect and in its own way, and this is the reason for me and my team in Makers Lab (R&D incubator of Tech Mahindra) researching upon one of the first communication languages spoken by man, “Sanskrit”. 

While we continue to research on Sanskrit, I also felt that there is a need that India codes in the language of choice and not necessarily English. I realized this while was mentoring a group of eclectic school students from the hinterland of Bilaspur (Chattisgarh). The intelligence level and passion to execute technology is remarkable amongst these students. What they lack is a seamless mechanism to translate English based programming/software codes in their local dialect so that they understand and respond to concepts better.

This led to me creating an editor of BHAML or Bharat mark-up Language editor .It’s an IDE or independent development editor, which can be downloaded by any student to code HTML in their language.

OBJECTIVE

Objective of this paper is to apprise the user of a execution in motion and also ask the community to participate in this initiative. The vision of this research is to ensure that 27 mother tongues and 1645 dialects spoken in India are also available to every Indian kid and prospective IT student so that they can seamlessly code (programmatically).

The objective is also to look through the lens of AI (artificial intelligence) and algorithms and see which one of them apply for a low code/no code condition

By definition Natural language processing (NLP) is used for communication between computers and human (natural) languages in the field of artificial intelligence, and linguistics. Being concerned with human-computer interaction, NLP works to enable computers to make sense of human language to make interactions with machinery and humans as user friendly as possible.

FUNDAMENTALS OF BHAML – Bharat Mark Up Language

Premise of invention

Language is the quintessential component that segregates us as a species from the rest. Language is communication and communication is what keeps the world going. Language and communication can also be broken in two steps

• Encoding of thoughts into a language for a speaker
•  Decoding and understanding what is spoken for a listener

Now, while the above is true, what makes language a difficult challenge is that while thoughts are a continuum, language contains discrete words or lexicons. This causes a bandwidth gap between the two. This gap increases if the language is alien to the mother tongue for a human being 

The above challenge is the premise of the invention. In India there is a vast percentage of people (60%) who understand but can barely converse in English. Even within the urban sectors, kids exploring the new age IT development or coding continue to be constrained from typing and understanding English concept. This is the origin of BHAML or Bharat Mark Up language which is the first in the series of work for Indian diaspora and kids. 

While it was developed keeping in the mind the no. of languages prevalent in India, it can applied to any language in any part of the world. For e.g. In New Zealand, there are different languages in addition to Maori where BHAML can be applied.

What makes BHAML unique? 

BHAML has the following components which make it unique

• Development of the HTML counter tags: This has never been done where HTML tags like <head>, <body> etc. are converted to the corresponding Language based tags. What we have done here is, converted these tags carefully into corresponding 10 languages for Indian subcontinent and Maori. These languages include Hindi, Marathi, Odia, Gujarati, Bangla, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam along with Maori. 
• An IDE (Independent development Editor) or an editor to enable kids or anyone to code HTML (as a start) in their native tongue and see the result. The editor also creates two files, one with a .BHAML extension (unique) and one with an .html extension. The .html file can be seen in the browser in the usual way. However in order to see a .bhaml file a browser extension is needed, which is currently in progress
•  A browser extension or a plug in to view .BHAML files (unique and never been done before). A group of interns are currently working to develop a browser extension and converting the current version of the application to an ‘electron’ code base.
•  Link for set up https://github.com/nickmalhotra/BHARAT_CODE/ . Please download Bhaml.exe and utilize to give us feedback. You can download and use this preliminary version
•  It is an open source project so the community can download and add as needed

Fig 1: BHAML Editor default with keyboard and tags

Fig 2: Languages utilized for BHAML

Fig 3: Every Language has its own keyboard and tags

Fig 4: Malayalam Editor 

COLLABORATION IS THE WAY FORWARD

We are collaborating with MIT ADT University in Loni Kalbhor Pune and Atal Incubation Centre (AIC) in MITADT in this effort to better the editor for kids. Students at MITADT are now working on creating a better version of the editor (offline and online) and enabling it on the cloud for anybody to use it. The BHAML was launched last month during the valedictory ceremony of SIP 3.0 (Student Innovation Program), where school students are encouraged to make innovative solutions for the society.

FUTURE WORK

With our initial research at Maker’s Lab Tech Mahindra, the results obtained are positive.  We have tried this editor with few kids and they seem excited. The idea here is to take it across the wide array of school kids in Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) with an algorithmic base for low code and no code.

We would also be working on other programming languages and paradigms like databases, interpreted languages like python, scripting languages like JavaScript before we apply this to the compiled languages.

CONCLUSION

Human beings evolved at a rapid pace because of the way they could communicate with each other and pass on ideas and messages. One of the core of India to succeed in the new world is to create ways and opportunities for its younger generation to utilize the language of their choice to program machines