Punjabi University signs pact to develop software to detect plagiarism: The Tribune India

Tribune News Service

Patiala, August 5th

Punjabi University has signed a research cooperation agreement with a private company, Blue Aves E-Health Private Limited, to prepare a plagiarism detection tool for all Indian and foreign languages. The university is currently using “Ouriginal”, a tool provided by UGC and manufactured by a foreign company.

Officials linked to the project said the focus is on producing a make-in-India product that will meet the needs of researchers.

The MoU was signed by Vice Chancellor Prof Arvind and Harinder Pal, CEO of Blue Aves E-Health Private Limited. They said they had already received the necessary approvals from the Union Department of Electronics and Information Technology for the project.

The plagiarism detection tool for Indic language documents with a particular focus on Hindi and Punjabi known as “Shodh Mapak” was created back in 2019 by Prof. Vishal Goyal from University and Rajeev Puri from DAV College, Jalandhar with a grant of Rs 20 lakh from Ministry for electronics and information technology. The software uses texts from previously written theses, books and manuscripts to detect plagiarism.

Prof. Goyal from the Department of Computer Science said: “We analyzed other software available on the market and found that these could not identify plagiarism.”

University officials said the private company will handle marketing, commercialization and sales nationally and internationally. The university would only provide the company with space and technical support when needed, the officials added.

The university said the project’s intellectual property rights and product branding would be owned jointly by the university and the company.