Shyam Reyal

Mr. Shyam Reyal B.Sc. has been accepted for his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in the SACHI research group with Dr. Per Ola Kristensson. His research is mainly focussed on developing and evaluating innovative data entry methods for mobile devices, with a special focus on foreign language users.
A lot of the work done on text-entry research is focussed around the English language, and western-world alphabets. Shyam will evaluate whether or not, and if so up to what degree are those methods applicable to other languages. Here his main focus will be the Sinhalese language which falls into the Indo-Aryan family of languages. The sinhalese language consists of 60+ base characters, with each one having over 13 vowel variations. Shyam will be looking at methods of data entry into mobile devices, where space is relatively constrained, in terms of these large alphabets.