National Centre for Software Technology

National Centre for Software Technology (NCST (http://www.ncst.ernet.in/)), now known as the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Mumbai (C-DAC, Mumbai [1] (http://www.ncst.ernet.in)), is a Research and Development organization under the Department of Information Technology (formerly Department of Electronics), Government of India.

NCST was established in the year 1985 as the National Laboratory for Research & Development in Software Technology. NCST was one of the eight nodes of the Education and Research Network ( ERNET [2] (http://www.ernet.in)) project aimed at creating expertise R&D and education in the area of networking and Internet in India.

NCST has its offices at Mumbai (Juhu, Nariman Point, and Kharghar) and Bangalore (Electronics City and Visvesvaraya Centre).

Research areas at NCST include Cryptography, Database Design and Performance, 3D Graphics, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing and Online Learning related Technologies (like Intelligent Tutoring Systems).

Current Activities/Projects

• OpenOffice.org: internationalization and localization for languages like Hindi -- for the Windows and Linux platforms.
• NCST manages registration of web domain names that come under '.in' - the top-level domain for India.
• IndiX: A modified X server for rendering Indian Language fonts
• MaTra: A English-Hindi Human-Aided Machine Translation System
• Glib: A graphics library
• drishtikaran: A document visualisation system
• Veda: An online testing system
• Vyasa: A generative testing system

Achievements

• established the first international Internet gateway into India
• Vartalaap, a Unicode IRC Server
• enabled rendering of Devanagari and other Indian scripts at the OS level in Microsoft Windows 2000/XP.

Notable ex-NCSTians

• Dr. Srinivasan Ramani, founder NCST; Director, HP Labs India; Advisor to UN on Information and Communication Technologies
• Prof. Sudhir P. Mudur, co-founder NCST; Professor, Computer Science Dept., Concordia University
• P. Sadanandan, co-founder NCST
• S.D. Shibulal, co-founder Infosys Technologies
• Vijayraman, director Persistent Systems

External Links

• Official website of the Mumbai headquarters. (http://www.ncst.ernet.in/)
• Official website of the Bangalore branch. (http://ncb.ernet.in/)
• NCST Alumni Association on the web. (http://www.ncst.info/community/)
• NCST Alumni e-mail group. (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NCST/)
• Internationalization and Localization of OpenOffice.org - The Indian Perspective (http://marketing.openoffice.org/conference/thurs_BOF.html)
• Indix (http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/)