Background
Ajit grew up in Chennai, India and showed an early aptitude for language and mathematics.
Ajit grew up in Chennai, India and showed an early aptitude for language and mathematics.
He"s also the inventor of, India"s first Augmentative and Alternative Communication device for children with disabilities. He is a TR35 awardee (2011) and an awardee of the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities by the President of India (2010). He went on to study electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras).
Ajit subsequently moved to the United States, working for several years at American Megatrends.
In February 2013, Ajit gave a TED talk on a new linguistic structure called, and an algorithm called the engine. was created in response to a need felt among children with complex communication needs to communicate in multiple languages. is a semantic map of pictures that represent words. These words are linked together in pairs of question/answer relationships, and have pictorial markers for tense, number et cetera applied on top of them.
The structure"s stated aim was to capture "meaning" rather than "surface form" of language, and then use a set of algorithms (the engine) to generate grammatical English out of lieutenant is language-independent, meaning it uses pictures of objects, actions, and even abstract ideas like the past tense, instead of English words like "I" or "eat". Some shown on the TED talk include a bowl of soup, a person talking, and a small clock with an arrow pointing backward to signify the past tense of a verb. was tested widely among children with special needs such as autism and language impairments, to teach them grammar.
lieutenant also saw use by children in the Deaf community to learn literacy—a task complicated by the unique grammatical structure of American Sign Language, which is very different from English.
Beyond applications in disability, the Indian government was in talks to license this program to use in some of its schools to teach English, through the Aakash tablet project In 2010, Ajit invented is an Alternative and augmentative communication device. lieutenant works by generating speech from limited muscle movements like that from the head or hand, and is used people with speech disorders such as cerebral palsy, autism, intellectual disability, and aphasia.