About

Firoj Alam,

PhD Student, University of Trento, Trento, Italy.

Research Fellow,
CRBLP, BRAC University
66 Mohakhali C/A
Dhaka 1212
Bangladesh Tel: +880-2-8824051 Ext. 4023
e-mail: firojalam AT bracu DOT ac DOT bd, firojalam AT gmail DOT com

Education

PhD Student, University of Trento, Trento, Italy.
Supervisor: Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi, Fellow of IEEE. http://disi.unitn.it/~riccardi/page6/page6.html  

M.Sc. Computer Science (International Master in Human Language Technology and Interfaces), University of Trento, Trento, Italy.
• Internship: Named entities recognition on transcriptions, HLT unit, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) Supervisor: Bernardo Magnini

Graduate
Completed five graduate courses on NLP such as Phonetics & Phonology, Syntax & Morphology, Script Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing. These courses are admissible for graduate credit (15 credits). National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES), Summer 2006.

B.Sc. Computer Science & Engineering
(December 2006), BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
• Independent Study: Voice Creation for Speech Synthesis, Undergraduate (Computer Science and Engineering), Summer 2006 [paper will be available by e-mail]
Supervisor: Professor Mumit Khan
• Thesis: Text to Speech for Bangla Language using Festival, Undergraduate Thesis (Computer Science and Engineering), BRAC University, Spring 2006 [paper] [presentation]
Supervisor: Professor Mumit Khan

Research/Professional Experience

• Research Fellow, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing (CRBLP), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BRAC University, September 2010 to Present.
• Trainer, Unicode training, Access to Information (A2I) of Prime Minister Office. The training was organized by Ministry of Cabinet held at Ministry of Establishment and BBS. May-June, 2010. (Part time)
  
• Research Programmer, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing (CRBLP), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BRAC University, September 2006 to June 2010.

Research Area

• Speech Processing (Speech Synthesis, Speech Recognition)
• Acoustics Analysis on Bangla Phonetics & Phonology
• Unicode enable system.
• Corpus, Lexicon
• Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence)
• Localization, Internationalization

Research Projects

Major projects in which I am Involved:


•  Katha: Bangla Text To Speech [web version]
•  Pronunciation lexicon [web]
•  Speech corpus [web] 
•  Terminology translation [web]
•  CRBLPConverter [Download page]
•  Corpus Analysis & Corpus Collection.
•  Localized URL [Research]
•  CLDR (Common Local Data Repository): CLDR and collation data for Bengali (Bangladesh) submitted to CLDR. Worked with IBM. Data available in version 1.6. [download], 1.7.1 [download]
•  Bangla collation sequence. [download]

Publications

Conference Publications

• Bangla Text to Speech using Festival, Firoj Alam, S.M. Murtoza Habib and Mumit Khan, Conference on Human Language Technology for Development (HLTD 2011), Alexandria, Egypt, 02-05 May, 2011.
• Phonetically balanced Bangla speech corpus, S. M. Murtoza Habib, Firoj Alam, Rabia Sultana, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, and Mumit Khan, Conference on Human Language Technology for Development (HLTD 2011), Alexandria, Egypt, 02-05 May, 2011.
• Development of Annotated Bangla Speech Corpora, Firoj Alam, S. M. Murtoza Habib, Dil Afroza Sultana and Mumit Khan, Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced language (SLTU’10), vol 1, pp-35-41, Penang, Malasia, May 3 - 5, 2010.[paper] [presentation]
• Acoustic Analysis of Bangla Consonants, Firoj Alam , S. M. Murtoza Habib and Professor Mumit Khan, Proc. Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced language (SLTU’08), vol 1, page 108-113, Vietnam, May 5-7, 2008, .
  Link 1: [paper] [presentation] Link 2: [paper] [presentation]
• Text To Speech for Bangla Language using Festival, Firoj Alam, Promila Kanti Nath and Professor Mumit Khan, Proc. 1st Intl. Conf. on Digital Comm. and Computer Applications (DCCA 2007), vol 1, pp-853-859, Amman, Jordan, March 19-23, 2007.
  Link 1: [paper] Link 2: [paper]

Poster Publication

• Text Normalization system for Bangla, Firoj Alam , S. M. Murtoza Habib and Professor Mumit Khan, Proc. Conference on Language and Technology 2009 (CLT09), NUCES, Lahore, Pakistan, January 22-24, 2009. [Poster]

Technical papers

• Firoj Alam, Murtoza Habib, and Mumit Khan, Research Report on Bengali NLP Engine for TTS, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing, BRAC University, 2008. [paper]
• Firoj Alam, S.M. Murtoza Habib, Mumit Khan, Research Report on Acoustic Analysis of Bangla Vowel Inventory, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing, BRAC University, 2008. [paper]
• Firoj Alam, S. M. Murtoza Habib, Mumit Khan, Research Report on Text Normalization System for Bangla, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing, BRAC University, 2008. [paper]
• Firoj Alam, S.M. Murtoza Habib, Mumit Khan, Research Report on Acoustic Analysis of Bangla Consonants, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing, BRAC University, 2008. [paper]
• Firoj Alam, Murtoza Habib, Kamrul Hayder and Mumit Khan, Initial Translations of gTLDs and ccTLDs in Bengali, Center for Research on Bangla Language Processing, BRAC University, 2008. [paper]

Professional Development/Summer Schools

• Participated in International Workshop on Spoken Language Prosody (IWSLPR-09) organized by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Kolkata, India, November 25 – 27, 2009.
• Attended 4th School of ADD (Asian Applied Natural Language Processing for Linguistics Diversity and Language Resource Development) organized by NECTEC Academy, 539/2 Mahanakorn Gypsum Building 21F, February 23 – 27, 2009.[Full financed by ADD]
• Attended Summer School on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text Mining held at IIT Kharagpur, June 24, 2008 to June 30, 2008.
  
• Attended 3rd School of ADD (Asian Applied Natural Language Processing for Linguistics Diversity and Language Resource Development) organized by TCL in Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology (SIIT), Pathumthani, Thailand, February 25, 2008 to March 2, 2008. [Full financed by ADD]
  
• Participated in Professional Skills Development program in BRAC University, organized by Career Services Office, BRAC University. [Spring 2006]

Workshop/Seminar/Conference Presentation

• Attended Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced language (SLTU’10), Penang, Malasia, May 3 - 5, 2010.
• Language resource technologies available in Bangla, Firoj Alam, Farhana Faruqe, ADD4, NECTEC Academy, 539/2 Mahanakorn Gypsum Building 21F, Bangkok, Thailand, February 27, 2009. [presentation]
• Attended Conference on Language and Technology 2009 (CLT09), National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan
  22-24 January, 2009.
• Text to Speech, Firoj Alam, Computational Linguistics in the Bangla Language: Current Situation and Future Prospects, Linguistic Society of Bangladesh, Dhaka University, September 14, 2008. [presentation]
• Acoustics Analysis of Bangla Phoneme Inventory, Firoj Alam, ADD3, Pathumthani, Thailand, March 2, 2008. [presentation]

Other Activities

• Member, ISCA
• Maintaining CRBLP Web.
• Volunteer of ISCA Student org.
• Commercially developed Credit Management System for a microfinance service company. The system is currently running in the market.
• Administrator of a Weekly News portal.

Tools

Tools I have developed:

• Diphone generation tool. [Source]
• Nonsense sentences generation tool for Bangla. [Source]
• Unicode to Text. [Source] [.Jar]
• Text to Unicode. [Source] [.Jar]
• IPA transcriptor system. [Source] [.Jar]
• G2P Conversion system. [Source] [.Jar]
• Generate Praat Script from Praat TextGrid.[NetBeans]

How to's??

How to write Ref for ICASSP, TALIP?
How to HSQL? Netbeans Example
How to DSpace [DRAFT]?
How to JKimmo in Netbeans??
How to mysql, python and unicode?

[Blog]

In the news

• See Prothom-alo. On 17th September 2010. link Prothom-alo [pdf].
• See Prothom-alo and Daily Star. On 2nd September 2010. link Prothom-alo [pdf] The daily Star [pdf].
• See Prothom-alo- On 9th march 2009. [Prothom-alo pdf]
• IT Zone, an IT related weekly program of “ATN Bangla”, aired on 4th March 2009 which focused CRBLP launching ceremony of BanglaOCR and Bangla Text To Speech. The program included an interview of Dr. Mumit Khan, Head, CRBLP; and Firoj Alam, developer of “Katha: Bangla Text To Speech”.
• In February 2007, two monthly tech news magazines, The Monthly Computer Jagat and The C-News, covered activities of CRBLP on Bangla language processing. [C-News scanned copy] [Computer Jagat scanned copy] 
  
• On December 1, 2006, Prothom-Alo, the most widely read Bangla newspaper, published a news item on the localization efforts of Windows Vista by CRBLP. It appeared as the main article in the "projonmo.com" section, a weekly IT section in the newspaper. [web] [scanned copy] 
  
• Protidin Computer, an IT related weekly program of Bangladesh Television (BTV), aired a program focused on the activities of CRBLP. The program included an interview of Dr. Mumit Khan, Head, CRBLP; a demonstration of a few demo softwares developed in CRBLP, e.g. Bangla spelling checker (Naushad UzZaman), Bangla search engine (Hammad Ali), Bangla pronunciation generator (Ayesha Binte Mosaddeque), Bangla morphological analyzer (Md. Zahurul Islam) & Bangla OCR (Md. Abul Hasnat and S. M. Murtoza Habib) and covered the interviews of Md. Abul Hasnat, S. M. Murtoza Habib & Firoj Alam on their experience of the PAN Localization Summer School (held in Pakistan), August 2006. [part1] [part2]