By Cheong Suk-Wai, Senior Writer

COMPUTER scientist Anindya Datta's daughter Diya, 12, once asked him: 'What's a word for 'blue sky'?' That inspired him to create a program that would give her an answer.

It has resulted in his free-to-all online reverse dictionary Wordster (www.wordster.com), a preliminary version of which he launched last Christmas Day. The genius of Wordster - the name inspired by the social networking site Friendster and the Merriam-Webster dictionary - is that it can help its users identify words in different contexts and figure out that, say, 'a woman whose husband was killed in battle' is the same as 'war widow'.

Besides being a cyberspace thesaurus and guide on different ways to use a word, Wordster also helps people write better papers by weeding out, say, repeated words in text as well as showing them how other writers have used the same words or phrases. Wordster's users can also contribute their own thoughts on particular words on the website.

Professor Datta, 45, a don at the National University of Singapore (NUS), is also chairman of the Atlanta-registered company that owns Wordster. He knows only too well how fickle entrepreneurship can be. At 17, this native of Kolkata saw his family's fortune vanish after his father, a former salesman with Indian- based company Shaw Wallace, sunk all his savings and hocked the family home and jewels to start a yeast company. The business never rose.

Fortunately, young Anindya was brilliant enough to win scholarships to study at the Indian Institute of Technology and then the University of Maryland. Now a US citizen, he holds patents for various innovations, including Chutney, a program that helps websites run faster; Walking Stick, which eases the use of large-scale software systems; and, yes, Wordster.

Over strong coffee recently, he told The Straits Times why he has signed a three-year contract with NUS to develop his ideas here:

• Why did you move to Singapore?

   

  In the last 40 years or so, the United States has pretty much been the cradle of ideas. But it has become very difficult in the US for companies like Google or Yahoo (to grow) because there is a lot of research science that must happen before venture capitalists come in. You need research support and those at the forefront of such support, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), have had their funding severely eroded (after) President George W. Bush (took office)... NSF funding has been cut by about 50 per cent. Of course, the recent recession has also played a very significant role; all government budgets have shrunk.

   

• So even President Barack Obama can't offer change you can believe in?

   

  Exactly. What he's done is put money in health care because that's his big thing. But, overall, core science and technology funding in the US is not in very good shape - which of course has significant effects on the innovation of products that people can use.

   

• And that led you to settle in Singapore?

   

  Now, Singapore has a lot of other problems for innovation. It doesn't have the eco-system or infrastructure for it yet. But people like me can do without that because I'm experienced.

   

• I'm told that the eco-system does exist in NUS.

   

  There are very few other people like me here. In the US, we have coffee and exchange ideas. It would be cool for people in Singapore to know the kinds of innovations that could take place and hopefully spur others. So if people who read this article write to me and say, 'Hey, we'd love to meet up', I could help them, know more about their ideas and share some of my own.

   

• Sharing does not always come naturally here.

   

  What you've just said is profound and important. If there is no learning for learning's (sake), nothing good will ever come out of it. You know, the notion 'this guy is going to build a Google and become a billionaire' - it doesn't happen like that. One of my mentors said he has never seen an entrepreneur become rich by wanting to become rich. Billionaires become so because of their love of the work. The money is almost a by-product... A (true) entrepreneur will fail 90 times and try for the 91st time.

   

• And how many times have you failed?

   

  Countless times... I remember the days when I pitched to 1,000 companies and 50 bought my product. So I had 950 failures. It takes a special kind of person to be able to take that and go on. I clearly have enormous tolerance for putting my life and my family's lives on the line.

   

• How do you rate your chances of success in Singapore?

   

  My coming here was serendipity. I'd been working on better search functions for the past couple of years, and semantic search in particular, trying to get (computers) to understand the meanings of things. That is one of the well-known inadequacies of search engines. The other is that the search is done on a tiny fraction of the real number of documents out there.

   

• Why are search engines still so inefficient?

   

  The Internet boomed from 1994, with the (original) browser Netscape. At that time, everything on the Web was written in Hyper-Text Mark-up Language (HTML), which (yielded) static (webpages). But things started changing from 2001, when people were using technology like Java to post (dynamic) webpages, with which users could interact... The problem with Google and (other search engines) is that they were all created in the 1990s to search static pages.

   

• So why can't Google and its ilk fix it?

   

  It's a question of momentum, right? It's very difficult to stop a train going at 200 miles per hour and Google simply has at least a quarter of a billion people doing searches on it every day. The thing is, possibly the most common class of searches on the Web is people asking, 'Cheap tickets from Point A to Point B'. But because of the unavailability of deeper information, the response that you get to that search is (mostly) crap.

   

• Why do you think you can crack these problems here?

   

  My expertise is in taking massive amounts of data and processing it very quickly. But I know little about understanding language and NUS happens to have some of the best linguistics people in the world.

   

• What could Singapore do more of to attract entrepreneurs like you?

   

  Innovation is ideas plus execution. You cannot throw money to generate ideas, okay? And execution is people plus money. What Singapore has is at least a stated intent... (I'm told) the National Research Foundation here is pumping some $500 million to form incubators for early-stage companies. Singapore is willing to spend money. But what it lacks is people. (Also), Singapore is weak in venture capital but very good in research capital.

   

• So there's money here to start projects, but not to make them marketable?

   

  That's right... Singapore is good at funding pure, ground-level ideas. You can argue whether or not it has the right resources to judge whether ideas are good or bad. But there is a disconnect with things coming out...

   

• What's stopping more people like you from flocking here?

   

  That's a hard question. If you talk to people like me who are serial innovators, Singapore just doesn't come to mind. Why is Silicon Valley Silicon Valley? Seventy years ago, it had nothing but vineyards and Stanford University. Then, Messrs Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set up a company in their garage and Hewlett-Packard (HP) became big. And then five or six people left HP to form another company... and it goes on. But you simply cannot recall a cool, major company out of Singapore that really changed the way things worked. You need a Google, Skype or an Alibaba.com to come out of Singapore.

   

• Well, we now have you and Wordster.

   

  I'm going to be very sad if Wordster doesn't make it.

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