LUMS Students of BS Computer Science Programme at SSE Muhammad Ahmad Bashir abd Muhammad Bilal Zafar, won first prize at Softec 2012 for their project title “Poor Man’s Reader”.
The winning project, which is also their Senior Year Project, has been developed under the supervision of Dr. Umar Saif at the Neighborhood for “Emerging-World” Technologist (NEWT) Lab, LUMS. The project aims at helping the poor and illiterate of the country to read the English, which it the official language of Pakistan.
While sharing details about how their system works, the winning team revealed that the proposed system can help the illetrate people understand English texts by using their cell phones.
A person can send the VGA (0.3 megapixel) quality image of an English text through Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) tot he system, which will call the user back immediately and play the Urdu translation of the text.
This way, a poor and illiterate person can also understand the English texts. The winning team further added that Poor Man’s Reader can easily be extended to other languages.
