Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements taken from Shiva's Doctoral Thesis - "Attention-Feedback and Representations in OCR", June-2019, Dept. of EE, IISc:

In my life, my father, Shri H. M. Rame Gowda, has been a live example of the power of acknowledgement. Every time I topped my school or got 100/100 in mathematics, my father would share it with everyone around and would be so proud of me. Inspired by that I would study with even more joy. With his abundance of love & acknowledgement, what my father gifted me is an extraordinary education - I have had the opportunity to study in the best school in my place, the best pre-university college in Bangalore, the best engineering institute in Karnataka and now the best research institute in India. Thank you “appa” for this extraordinary life! Love you.

Lessons of integrity started early in childhood when my mother, Smt. Venkatamma, used to send me to market to buy groceries/vegetables, and I used to come back and promptly report the cost of each item and return back the exact change. Bed time stories my mother used to read out from Hindu Puranas and following her to various temples and seeing her immersed in Bhakti is something that my sister, Sujatha, and I cherish even now, and that has had profound impact on our character building. Being fully with me, for days and nights, each time I had fallen sick and was admitted to hospital, getting up at 1 am at night, heating food and serving it when I used to return late from years of leadership training and volunteering at Landmark, Amma, you dedicated your entire life for my well-being and health. Nothing can match the peace of sleeping on your lap. Thank you God for gifting me such extraordinary parents. Love you Amma.

Then came the blessed moment of life, when I got pulled into a context much beyond myself, the opportunity to be Prof. A. G. Ramakrishnan’s doctoral student and co-create the Gift of New Abilities project. It is inside of his unshakable context to make a difference and, listening to me as bigger than anything that I can imagine of myself, that I have found my true calling that has me play life fully. I bow down to you, sir. It is a blessing and a privilege that I have you as my guide in every aspect of my life. Sir, thank you for your listening, care, compassion, acceptance and enormous amount of time and attention that you have given me.

While I was engrossed with my research work, the most important person in my life, my ಪ್ರಿಯ ಸಖಿ /priya sakhi/, Bhargavi Shivakumar, had to miss spending time with me on most of the weekends and, she had to sideline her career ambitions to take care of our kids. Dear Bhargavi, all I can say at this point is that I love you, you cook great (the reason why I always stay healthy), you are my best friend, anytime I have had any dilemma, you have always listened to me and left me validated by making me right and that has been massive strength for me. I know you are the happiest person on the planet to see my Ph.D. getting done. Love you Bhargavi.

Thanks to the following key people, who contributed significantly to the development of our OCR and TTS: Srilakshmi Vakoda, Shanthi Devaraj, Saraswathi S., Shanthi R., Nethra Kulkarni & Shri Venkatesha Raasu for the passion and industriousness with which you collected and annotated the training and test datasets used in our Kannada & Tamil OCR and TTS; Madhavaraj A. & Rajarajan Palanimurugan for your prodigious talent, commitment and esteemed contributions to the OCR engine. Thanks also to our outstanding alumni: Kaushik Mahata, Jayavardhana Rama, B. Vijay Kumar & Aparna K. G. for creating the previous generation Tamil & Kannada OCR in our lab; Jayavardhana Rama, Lakshmish Kaushik, Muralishankar R. & Partha Sarathy K. for creating the previous generation Tamil & Kannada TTS. Thank you giants, your work gave us the confidence to take the next leap.

Another boost to the Gift of New Abilities project was the stream of extraordinary interns we got from R.V. College of Engineering (thanks to Dr. Shambhavi B. R., who was teaching there), and other premier engineering colleges across India. Thanks to the following interns, who contributed significantly to our work: Kanthashree M. S., Supritha B. R., Ashish V. Shenoy, Vignesh Raghavendra, Sachin Sharma, Sharath Prasanna & Sanath Upadhya for contributing to the development of Anagha - the OCR Performance Evaluator; Vinay B. S., Mahadevaswamy K. S., Ankita Malik, Vivek Tyagi, Suraj P. Kanavehalli, Shashank N. & Meghana J. R. for contributing to the development of ShriVeRa - the OCR GUI Frontend; Ravikiran S. Kalal, Vaishakh B. N. & Sandesh S. for integrating our TTS with screen readers (JAWS/NVDA) by writing SAPI wrapper & creating installer for Windows using Inno Setup; Satvik Neelakant, Shruthi Racha & Priya Sooryanarayan for creating the Indic Keyboards on Android; Abhinava Sadasivarao, Arun Sriraman, Akshay Rao, Revati Junnarkar, Sudarshan Rao B., Adithya Kumar K. S., Bhargav M. Rao & Rishab Mishra for creating the Indic Keyboards for Windows & Linux; Shreya R. Kamath & Sumana H. S. for creating the GUI for TTS Voice of Choice; Vartika Agrawal, Ramnath Shenoy & Yash Mehta for creating the Indic App capable of rendering indic text on old Android phones using Harfbuzz & Freetype; Vignesh Shankar & Sharan Prakash for starting the work on making our TTS available as a service on Android. Hats off to the zeal with which each of you pursued your projects, for your hard work and commitment, and for your enormous patience during those long times of uncertainty, when you were working on your projects. Thank you again for all your contributions.

Special thanks to my organizational guide Dr. Krishna Kummamuru for being generously available to me whenever I needed his help. In addition to learning technically, there has been so much of learning from him about how to be a dependable and contended human being, and I consider this as even more valuable learning experience as part of my Ph.D.

Thanks also to my beloved teachers: Smt. Suma Gurumurthy, Shri G. B. Honagangappa (GBH), Prof. P. S. Sastry, Prof. K. R. Ramakrishnan and Prof. T. V. Sreenivas, and the alumni of our lab - Dr. Thotreingam Kasar and Dr. Suresh Sundaram.

Finally, I bow down to leaders at Landmark Education and Sadhguru. It is indeed a blessing that I have had the opportunity to get trained at Landmark and Isha Yoga.