his Spotlight on Computing in Bangladesh article is the second publication of our “Spotlight on” series. Although perhaps less known, Bangladesh's ICT (information and communication technology) is advancing rapidly. The goal of this article is to showcase stories that provide insights into the rapid pace of digitization in Bangladesh, the growing digital economy, startup ecosystem, research in the field of computing, and some relevant government efforts. It is difficult to cover all the brilliant efforts and research in such a short article, however, we tried to pick a few to give a glimpse. We plan to follow up with more project highlights in future series.
We always want to improve our selection and curation process by including topics not covered in this shortlist. To that end, please send your feedback and suggestions to selects-feedback@acm.org! We look forward to your comments and guidance on how we can continue to improve ACM Selects together.
Read more about the ACM's ongoing efforts to provide resources for students and professionals through the ACM Learning Center.
IT/Software Industry & Startups
We witnessed a boom in startups in Bangladesh during the last 10 years. A number of them have been built from scratch to support the unique needs of the people of Bangladesh. Others have been created following the footsteps of startup/application ideas popular in the western world while adjusted to support socio-economic scenarios in Bangladesh. In the following, we highlighted a few of them.
Future Startup - information, knowledge, and insight about entrepreneurship, technology, and business in Bangladesh
Published in Future-startup.com, Last accessed on July 27th, 2021
“Future Startup publishes original articles on insights, analysis, and inspiration about the business, technology, and entrepreneurship in Bangladesh.”
The collection of articles covered by Future Startup talks about how different startups were created, their operations, and interviews of their founders in Bangladesh. We hope entrepreneurs and young professionals looking for ideas and motivations to create their own startup would find the following resource useful.
[Read more] How I Created This - Future Startup
bKash Bangladesh: A Fast Start for Mobile Financial Services
First published openknowledge.worldbank.org in July 2014
Bangladesh has made huge progress in mobile payment services in the last decade and bKash is one of the leading ones. bKash is a mobile payment service using which a person in any part of the country can pay another person safely and instantly using the mobile phone and without the internet. Unlike large mobile money businesses in other countries, bKash is not a mobile network operator and did not have an existing customer base to which it added mobile financial services. bKash acquired each client on its own.
[Read more] https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/20262, The Future Startup Dossier: bKash - Future Startup
Pathao - A ride-hailing startup in Bangladesh
First published in futurestartup.com on Mar 10, 2021
Although Pathao started in 2015, it is now one of the largest ride-hailing services in Bangladesh and it also offers other services such as Pathao Food, Pathao Parcel, Pathao Courier (B2B), Pathao Shop, Pathao Tong, and Pathao Pharma. “Pathao has raised a total of $12.8M in funding. Started with only 4 people, Pathao now is a company of more than 500 employees and considered one of the pioneers in Bangladesh's startup ecosystem.”
[Read More] The Future Startup Dossier: Pathao - Future Startup, The Story Behind Pathao’s Explosive Growth With Hussain M Elius, Founder and CEO, Pathao - Future Startup
Rokomari, Digital e-commerce for Books in Bangladesh
First published in futurestartup.com on Dec 7, 2020
There is a perception in the market that people don’t read books these days. It’s both true and false. For instance, Paradoxical Sajid by Arif Azad sold 175,000 copies at its launch although it was the first book of both the writer and the publisher.” E-commerce “Rokomari” grabbed the attention of the targeted audience and made this possible.
Rokomari came into being on 19th Jan’2012 as an online bookstore with a target to launch a minimum of 10,000 books. They had started with a team of 5-6 people with almost no back-end order management system. With the number of increasing orders, not only their business began to evolve from a fledgling tiny project to an organization, but also increased challenges pushed them to learn and adapt from their experience. Now they have reached such a position that they can cross the entire annual sales figure of 2012 in a day.
The most amazing part is, it is a 100% locally built and managed homegrown technology company with no external investment.
[Read More] How Rokomari Was Created - Future Startup
SureCash Pte Ltd, a mobile banking and payment operator in Bangladesh
First published in prnewswire.com on Apr 22, 2015
“SureCash operates the most advanced mobile banking and payment platform in the industry and allows anyone with a mobile phone to deposit cash, send money, make purchases, and pay bills. While most mobile financial service (MFS) deployments globally are single-bank models with limited scalability, SureCash's cutting-edge technology, and superior architecture allow it to integrate multiple banks into its platform, enabling the consumer a rich and flexible experience for all payment categories including retail payments, utility bills, school tuitions, salary disbursements, and many more.”
The software and platform have been built from scratch in Bangladesh.
[Read more] Mobile Banking and Payment Operator SureCash Raises USD 7 Million Series B Investment (prnewswire.com), How SureCash Was Created - Future Startup, interview with the founder
Growth in Digitization and Government Initiatives
Bangla to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
First published in tbsnews.net on Feb 26, 2021
In order to make Bangla one of the leading languages in the world, the Information and Communication Technology Division has launched bangla.gov.bd – ভবিষ্যত প্রযুক্তির শুরু এখানেই, a technology platform for language technology and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as a trial version of Dhwani, software that converts Bangla to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)”. Within this project’s objectives, many services and resources of language technology (e.g., Speech to text translators, language to language translator, grammar correctors, sign language to text conversion, handwritten character recognition, sentiment analysis, Bangla brail, screen reader for blind people, dictionary, knowledge base and a search engine, and corpus) are being created, which should not only benefit Bangla-speaking people in the world but also members of minority ethnic groups and people with hearing difficulties.
[Read More] Website, application launched to enrich Bangla in ICT
Digitization in Agricultural Sector
First published in futurestartup.com on May 30, 2021
iFarmer’s Sofol app collects investments from retail investors and disburses them to farmers in the form of inputs such as seeds, livestock, fertilizers, and other farming essentials. “The company says it has since onboarded over 18000 farmers through Sofol. The app is part of iFarmer’s strategy to use human agents, mobile technology, and remote sensing to reduce the cost and complexity of working with smallholder farmers.” The Sofol app bridges the gap between farmers to the procurement of necessary tools for a successful farming process. “The app makes the work of iFarmer’s field facilitator easier. Field agents can collect and record data within a short time, verify National Id (NID) of farmers instantly — Sofol has the Government's Porichoy API integrated into it, save information for later follow-up, and onboard farmers on the go.”
[Read More] With Sofol App, iFarmer Aims to Digitize Agriculture and Empower Farmers
Bangabandhu Satellite (BS-1), First Geo Communications Satellite of Bangladesh
First Published in International Journal of Networks and Communications on Aug 2018
Bangladesh launched its first-ever satellite in May 2018 with a vision to open new possibilities in its telecommunication sector. Satellite networks will play a vital role in ensuring uninterrupted telecommunication services in Bangladesh by reducing its dependency on other nations even in emergency situations like natural disasters. It also supports profitable services, including direct-to-home (DTH) services, which can enable services like VSAT and connect people with high-speed broadband Internet in remote areas where cellular and fiber optic networks are not available. The satellite is expected to enable the nation to save approximately BDT1.08bn ($14m) spent on satellite rents a year. BTRC also plans to launch a follow-on series of BD-2 and BD-3 satellites in phases.
[Read More] Bangabandhu-1-bd-1-communication-satellite, http://article.sapub.org/10.5923.j.ijnc.20180805.01.html
Digitization in Healthcare
Daktar Bondhu, A Dhaka based health-Tech startup
First published in futurestartup.com on Jun 10, 2021
Daktar Bondhu currently offers video consultations with 60+ specialist doctors across 20+ departments which include mental health, dermatology, cardiology, etc., through its mobile app. After commercial launch in Oct’20, more than 3000+ doctor consultations and medicine orders were made via app in the last 8 months and numbers are increasing trend. “50% of paying customers are recurring monthly as the app can save them up to 15% of their healthcare expenditures each month as well as save time on visits to specialist doctors”. The team is working on building a personalized AI health assistant and a medical chatbot that will be able to analyze a patient’s symptoms and try to suggest a probable diagnosis and financially viable treatment plans automatically.
Daktar Bondhu is a portfolio startup of the IDEA project by the ICT division of the Govt of Bangladesh.
Maya -- an AI-Based Healthcare ecosystem to serve Bangla speaking population
First published in futurestartup.com on Feb 12, 2020
“Maya is a digital healthcare platform that provides an anonymous messaging service where users can post their physical health, mental health, psychosocial and legal questions.” It is dedicated to making it easier for women to get healthcare, especially for sensitive issues like reproductive and mental health.
Maya uses natural language processing and advanced machine learning for digital assistance which answers basic health-related questions and decides if users need to be routed to human experts. Users can ask their questions in Bangla, English, or Banglish and receive responses from experts in the same language in 50 topics with 95% accuracy. It has about 10 million unique users and currently counts more than 300 licensed healthcare providers on its platform.
Maya announced on 10th Feb’2021 that it raised $2.2 million in seed funding, the highest-ever by a Bangladeshi health-tech company that will facilitate new products on Maya’s platform and helps it expand internationally.
[Read More] https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/08/bangladesh-based-maya-a-startup-focused-on-accessible-healthcare-raises-2-2-million-seed-round/, Maya-futureStartup
Dakter Bari: Introducing Intermediary to Ensure Healthcare Services to Extremely Impoverished People
First published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer InteractionVol. 5, No. CSCW1 on 22 April 2021
Bangladesh has a significant number of people dependent on alms for daily survival. These people are deprived of even basic healthcare. Their extreme levels of poverty, coupled with low literacy skills, and complete lack of access to technology mean that they are unaware of existing low-cost/free healthcare services (as arranged by local hospitals) available for them. A research study addresses this gap using a solution called Dakter Bari (a term in Bengali that translates to "Doctor's Home'' in English), which is contextually tailored to enable healthcare access to impoverished people. This study creates a pathway for availing lower-cost healthcare solutions using intermediaries for information dissemination. These intermediaries are small businesses that impoverished people visit often. Preliminary analysis on usage of the system developed through this study is presented through a system in operation over six months. This study connects its findings to the broader interests of the research community around contextualized intermediation, inclusive healthcare, and sustainability of deployed systems.
[Read More] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449118
Academic Research
A Benchmark Study on Machine Learning Methods using Several Feature Extraction Techniques for News Genre Detection from Bangla News Articles & Titles
First Published in 7th International Conference on Networking, Systems, and Security on 22 December 2020
This research study presents a comparative analysis of different machine learning techniques for detecting news genres in Bangla. The study implements the categorization methods for both news article and news title classifications against ten mutually exclusive news genres. It concludes that ‘Bidirectional LSTM’ with ‘Word2vec’ feature extraction technique using ‘Skip-gram’ method is the most robust method for both classifications, compared to other models.
[Read More] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3428363.3428373
MultiResUNet: Rethinking the U-Net Architecture for Multimodal Biomedical Image Segmentation
First Published in Neural Networks Volume 121, on 04 September 2019
Despite outstanding overall performance in segmenting multimodal medical images, a research study finds that the most prominent and the most popular architecture, the U-Net architecture, seems to be lacking in certain aspects. Therefore, the study proposes some modifications to improve upon the already state-of-the-art UNet model. The study further develops a novel architecture called MultiResUNet as the potential successor to the successful U-Net architecture.
[Read More] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608019302503
SAINT: self-attention augmented inception-inside-inception network improves protein secondary structure prediction
First Published in Bioinformatics on 1 September 2020
A research study presents SAINT, a highly accurate method for the prediction of 8-class (Q8) resolution of secondary structure (SS) of proteins. It incorporates a self-attention mechanism (a concept from NLP) with the Deep Inception-Inside-Inception network for capturing both the short- and long-range interactions among the amino acid residues. “SAINT offers a more interpretable framework than the typical black-box deep neural network methods.”
[Read More] https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa531
Crowd-enabled Processing of Trustworthy, Privacy-Enhanced and Personalised Location-Based Services with Quality Guarantee
First Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies on 27 December 2018
A research study presents an approach for enabling trustworthy, privacy-enhanced, and personalized location-based services (LBSs) to find nearby points of interest such as restaurants, hospitals, etc., in a crowdsourced manner. The approach selects knowledgeable group members for processing LBSs, and thereby, increases the accuracy and the confidence level of the query answers. It develops algorithms to process LBSs in real-time and enhance privacy.
[Read More] https://doi.org/10.1145/3287045
Furthering Technology Education
Revolution in Digital Learning
First published in futurestartup.com on Jan 12, 2021
“Bohubrihi is Bangladesh’s leading educational platform for online courses and professional training, that enables you to develop skills that are necessary to thrive not only in your career but in your life as well.”
“The platform currently has more than 60,000 students and a portfolio of beyond 50 courses – ranging from Digital Marketing to learning Python and JavaScript. The courses are categorized into three distinctive domains – Technology (Software engineering, data science), Business (Digital marketing, Microsoft Excel), and Exam Preparation (IELTS, GRE). Operated by a team of 15 people, Bohubrihi is set to accelerate with its current 25% month-on-month growth.”
[Read More] Bohubrihi Seeks to Collaborate with Experts and Trainers to Create High-Quality Online Courses on Business and Technology, BOHUBRIHI: Online Courses & Professional Training in Bangladesh
