Dr. U. B. Pavanaja holds Masters degree from Mysore University and PhD from Mumbai University. He was a scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, for about 15 years. He has done advanced research at Taiwan. He left BARC in 1997 and dedicated himself fully for the cause of Computer and Indian languages. He is currently heading his own venture called Vishva Kannada Softech.
He has to his credit many firsts, viz., first Kannada web-site, first Kannada online magazine, first Indian language (Kannada) web-site to receive Golden Web Award, first Indian language (Kannada) editor for Palm OS, first Indian language (Kannada) editor for WinCE device (HP Jornado 720), first Indian language version (Kannada) of universally popular Logo (programming language for children) software, etc. He was a member of the Technical Advisory Committee setup by Govt of Karnataka on Standardization of Kannada on Computers.
He started his career on computers from FORTRAN and then moved on to Pascal, C, BASIC, QuickBasic, Visual Basic, VB.Net, etc. His Smart Tag on converting some English banking terms into Hindi, developed using VB.Net, has won him the third prize in the All-India Smart Tag contest conducted by Microsoft India. He has attended and represented Indian languages in many Indian and International fora like Indic Font Workshop (Indic Computing Consortium, Bangalore, India), Unicode conference (Unicode Consortium, CA, USA), OpenType Font Seminar (Microsoft, Seattle, USA), etc.
He has been awarded the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of indic computing, especially Kannada. The MVP Award is given in recognition of a recipient’s technical expertise, spirit of community, and their willingness to help their peers by providing reliable and accurate answers to technical questions about Microsoft products & technologies.
He is quite well known in Indic computing arena. He is also popular as a writer of articles in Kannada about IT.
