The city-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has come up with a tool that can help in detecting the problem of data duplication where a single individual is issued more than one copy of a document. The tool is currently being used in Aadhaar Unique Identification Number project. The tool,Namescape,was invented by GIST research Lab of C-DAC and can help in detecting names which can be spelling variants or sound-alikes. The areas in which the tool can be used,according to the team at C-DAC,are public distribution system,election commission,I-T department,passport and visa offices,banks,insurance and credit card companies and mobile phone providers. Mahesh Kulkarni,in-charge of the project said,Namescape can handle a large number of cases and find different names and address variants. Different spellings of a given name,such as Chaudhary which can be spelled in 68 different manners can be found easily. Regional spellings like Jyoti and Jyothi are also identified. This is especially useful in projects like Aadhaar. The tool was announced to mark C-DACs 24th Foundation Day on April 4. Apart from Namescape,the centre has developed another tool that can help in rapid identification of the causes of an epidemic. This will help speed up development of vaccines by about 20 times. The tool TaxoGrid is a unique phylogeny pipeline over a grid. Phylogeny is the study of origin and evolution of organisms, said Rajendra Joshi,a member of the project team. On the foundation day,Padma Shri Prof N Balakrishnan,IISc,will deliver the lecture and R Chandrashekhar IAS,Secretary,Department of Information Technology,will be the chief guest. Dr Virendrakumar C Bhavsar,faculty of computer science,University of New Brunswick Fredericton,NB,Canada will be the guest of honour.
