Madhan Karky

Madhan Karky Vairamuthu is an Indian lyricist, screenwriter, research associate, software engineer, and entrepreneur.

A holder of a doctorate in computer science from the University of Queensland, Karky began his professional career as an assistant professor at the College of Engineering, Guindy, and soon after ventured into the Tamil film industry, working as a lyricist and dialogue writer.

He began his undergraduate education in the field of Computer engineering in the year 1997.

While in Ceg, as part of his final year project, Karky developed a program called the Tamil Voice Engine, under the supervision of Professor T.V. Geetha.

The goal of the project was construction of a text to speech engine for the Tamil language.

The research paper on the project was officially selected at the Tamil Internet Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Other projects during his tenure include the Name Generator, which was part of his course on Creativity, Innovation and New Product Development (the objective being to generate random names that are pronounceable with respect to Indian phonetics) and Compiler Design, for which a high level programming language was conceived, with the goal of proper specification and interpretation of lexical rules and grammar rules.

For Chennai Kavigal, he created a Spell Checker for a Tamil Word Processor.

The project involved a lot of Natural Language Processing elements, based on a root dictionary built as a part of the morphological analyzer for the Tamil Language.

The endgame being determining the correctness of words.

Following the completion of his bachelor's degree in 2001, Karky began his master's degree at the University of Queensland in the year 2003.

In that particular stint, he developed a project based on the theory of computation and strong mathematics (under the supervision of Dr. George Havas).

It aimed at analyzing an existing algorithm of reducing any kind of matrix format to a standard format called 'Hermite Normal form', which is a unit upper triangular matrix.

Some of his other projects during this course include the Disciplined Software Process Project (whose objective was to introduce and practice the software development process for individuals called Personal Software Process), the On-Line Art Store Website (which involved the creation of a website that trades paintings through the Internet) and the Text Based Voice Chat (for which a Proxy Voice Chat system was designed and developed in Visual Basic that incorporated the predominant computing aspects).

In addition to his academics, Karky also served as Academic tutor at the university.

He conducted class room tutorials and laboratory sessions on subjects such as Relational Database Systems and Programming Languages.

As part of his PhD program on information technology, he developed a Java-based simulation platform called SENSE (Simulated Environment of Networked Sensor Experiments), to test different heuristics.

This project was done under the guidance of Dr. Maria Orlowska and Dr. Shazia Sadiq.

His thesis is titled "Design considerations for query dissemination in wireless sensor networks".

Upon his return to India following the completion of his post-graduation, Karky returned to Ceg Anna University in December 2007.

He was a Senior Research Fellow for the next six months, managing research projects as well as multiple student projects at an undergrad and postgrad levels.

In addition to those, he handled courses and labs for students who pursued their master's degrees.

He also served as a Project Scientist between July 2008 and July 2009, managing projects of research groups as well as ME & MBA students.

Karky's been married to Nandini Eswaramoorthy, a fellow alum at Anna University, since June 22, 2008.

Nandini Karky now works in the Tamil film industry as a subtitler for feature films and documentaries.

Karky had approached the director in 2008 with some of the songs he had written, and was brought him on board to help with the dialogues of the film, especially assisting with technical terminology.

He stated that there were three sets of dialogues written for almost every scene of the film; one by Shankar, one by Karky, and the other by the late Sujatha, a frequent collaborator with the director who had died during the early stages of the film's pre-production.

Starting from August 2009, he began his role as an assistant professor.

He lectured Computer Science students who were pursuing their Bachelors and master's degrees as well as coordinated the Tamil Computing Lab at the university.

He also served as counsellor for NRI and foreign national students, as well as the Staff treasurer of Computer Science Engineering Association.

Some of the subjects he taught include Advanced Databases, Ethics for Engineers, Principles of Programming Languages, Environmental Science and Tamil Computing (for PhD students).

They have a son named Haiku Karky, who was born in 2009.

During his teaching stint at Anna University, Karky also began his career in the Tamil film industry with the science-fiction film Enthiran (2010), the magnum opus of director Shankar.

He resigned from his teaching profession in early 2013 and began working full-time in the film industry, while also launching the Karky Research Foundation (KaReFo), an educational research organization which primarily focuses on language computing and language literacy.

He also founded the Mellinam Education, which develops educational games and story books designed to propagate learning among children, and DooPaaDoo, an online music platform which promotes independent music and serves a distributor for film soundtracks.

Karky is the eldest son of seven-times National Award winning lyricist Vairamuthu and Ponmani, a Tamil scholar and veteran professor at the Meenakshi College for Women.

He has a younger brother, Kabilan, who is a novelist and also works as a lyricist and dialogue writer for Tamil films.

He grew up in Chennai and was educated at the Loyala Matriculation School in Kodambakkam.

By his own admission, he was not a good student, excelling primarily only in Tamil and English.

During his time in high school, he gained an interest in computer science He got admission in College of Engineering, Guindy which is affiliated with the Anna University.