Birendra Keshari

    
MSc Computer Science Candidate
The University of Western Ontario
London, ON, N6A 5B7, Canada
Tel(Home): +1 (519)-639-9594
Tel(Office): +1 (519)-661-2111 (ext. 83741)
Middlesex College Building, MC327


I am a member of Pen Math research group at ORCCA (Ontario Research Centre for Computer Algebra) at UWO. I am doing my thesis on  Techniques for Transformation and Exchange of Standardized Digital Ink  with Prof. Stephen M. Watt . My research interest lies in the areas of Pen Based Computing and AI (Machine Learning, CV & NLP). At present, I am working on a collaborative inking application (for heterogeneous devices) using W3C InkML standards and mathematical symbol recognition. Please click here  for the latest public InkML specification.
Teaching Assistant For:

FALL 2007
CS025 - Computer Fundamentals II (Java)
Consulting Hours:
Room MC4
11:30 am - 12:30 pm every Monday and Friday
4:40 pm - 5:30 pm every Wednesday

WINTER 2007
CS031b/032b
Consulting Hours:
Room MC8
4:30 pm -5:30 pm every Thursday

FALL 2006
CS026a - Computer Fundamentals I (Java)
Consulting Hours:
Room MC325
1:30 pm - 3:30 pm every Thursday

Publications:

At UWO (Refereed):

  • Birendra Keshari and Stephen M. Watt, Online Mathematical Symbol Recognition using SVMs with Features from Functional Approximation. Proceedings of Mathematical User-Interfaces Workshop 2008, (MathUI 08), July 27 2008, Birmingham, UK.
  • Birendra Keshari, Sriganesh Madhvanath, Manoj Prasad A, Muthuselvum Selvaraj, and Stephen M. Watt. Sharing Digital Ink in Heterogeneous Collaborative Environments. Proceedings of International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), Montreal, Canada, 2008 (IEEE Computer Society, to appear).
  • Birendra Keshari and Stephen M. Watt. Streaming-Archival InkML Conversion . Proceedings of International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, (ICDAR), September 23-26 2007, Curitiba, Brazil, IEEE Computer Society. (pdf)
  • Birendra Keshari and Stephen M. Watt. Hybrid Mathematical Symbol Recognition Using Support Vector Machines . Proceedings of International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, (ICDAR), September 23-26 2007, Curitiba, Brazil, IEEE Computer Society. (pdf)
  • Birendra Keshari and Stephen M. Watt. JGen: A Tool for Writing Generators in Java . [Accepted for Student Research Competition at 2007 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, UofC at San Diego].

At Kathmandu University (Refereed):

  • Yogendra P. Yadava, Govinda Raj Bhattarai, Sanat Kumar Bista, Birendra Keshari and Jagannath Bhatta. 2005. Envisioning Machine Translation for the New Millennium: Outlines of Preliminary Steps in Nepal. Contemporary Issues in Nepalese Linguistics, ed. by Yogendra P. Yadava et al., pages 429-443, Kathmandu: Linguistics Society of Nepal.
  • Birendra Keshari and Sanat Kumar Bista. 2005. UNL Nepali Deconverter. Proceedings of CALIBER 2005, Februay 2-4, Kochi, India.
  • Birendra Keshari, Jagannath Bhatta and Sanat Kumar Bista. 2005. Nepali Part-of-Speech Guesser and its Application in Lexicon Building. Proceedings of International Conference on Natural Language Processing-ICON 2005, IIT Kanpur, India.
  • Birendra Keshari, Jagannath Bhatta and Sanat Kumar Bista. 2005. Handling Honorification in Dobhase:Online English-to-Nepali Machine Translation System. Proceedings of Third International Conference on Innovative Applications of Information Technology for the Developing World (AACC - 2005), Kathmandu, Nepal.

Others:

  • Birendra Keshari and Stephen M. Watt. Online Mathematical Symbol Recognition Using SVMs with Features Obtained by Function Approximation. ORCCA Joint Lab Meeting, Feb 8, 2008, MapleSoft, Waterloo. (Poster)
  • Birendra Keshari and Stephen M. Watt. A Hybrid Approach to Mathematical Symbol Recognition . ORCCA Joint Lab Meeting, Feb 9, 2007,UWO, London. (Poster)
  • Bhim Prasad Upadhyaya, Birendra Keshari and Sanat Kumar Bista. 2005. Morphological Analyser for Nepali Language. Research KU-CSE-1-2005, Dept. of CSE, Kathmandu University, Kathmandu, January. (Technical Report)

Software/Tools:

Professional Experiences:

Most recently (summer 2007), I had a great oppurtunity to do an internship at HP Labs at Bangalore, India  under Sr. research scientist Dr. Sriganesh Madhvanath. I worked on a multi-user collaborative inking (white board sharing) project that used InkML as a means to exchange digital ink in various formats (from various ink sources). I designed and developed Smack extension for InkML, a generic cross-platform api to capture and render digital ink and a major portion of the client application. I was also involved in designing an efficient protocol for the ink exchange.

After completing my Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering and before joining UWO, I was with Information and Language Processing Research Lab, Kathmandu University and DASS Pvt. Ltd (a software company) for 2 years.

  • I worked as a system analyst for the project Dobhase: an on-line English to Nepali Machine Translation system at Information and Language Processing Research Lab, Kathmandu University. It was funded by PAN Asia ICT R&D grant. My responsibilities included designing the system and also coding major portion of it. The system is rule based with morphological analyzers/generators, pos tagger, pos disambiguation, syntax analyzer/generator, transfer rules as the major components. (Prolog, C/C++)
  • I worked as a Software Engineer (Part Time) at DASS Pvt. Ltd, Kathmandu, Nepal to develop a complete database software called TourControl for tour operators and travel agencies. (C#, MS SQL)
  • I developed font converters, LexTool (a lexicon maintenance tool) and transliteration tool (for Nepali) while working as a Research Assistant at Information and Language Processing Research Lab, Kathmandu University. (Java, C++)
Skills:

  • Programming Languages
    Expert: Java, C/C++, C#, Prolog
    Basic Familiarity: Python, Perl, PHP, Java Script, Shell Scripting, Lisp
  • Software:
    CVS, MS Visual Studio, Rational Rose, MS Office, Latex
  • API:
    J2ME, JDBC, JUnit, NUnit,  VCL, Socket, QT, Swing, .NET, ADO .NET, OpenGL
  • DBMS:
    MSSQL, mysql, MSAcess
  • OS:
    Linux, Windows
Some useful Links:

  • InkML Ink Markup Language
  • libsvm A library/tool for Support Vector Machines
  • ORCCA Ontario Research Centre for Computer Algebra 
  • Max-Flow/Min-Cut A C++ library to compute minimum cost cut (A technique that has cool applications in image processing and computer vision)
  • OpenCV A computer vision library
  • Dobhase English to Nepali Machine Translation System developed at Kathmandu University