If you've ever typed "ami banglay likhi" and watched it turn into "আমি বাংলায় লিখি," you've used Avro Keyboard. And one of the people behind it sat in classrooms at EWU.
Avro Keyboard was born on March 26, 2003, Bangladesh's Independence Day, created by Mehdi Hasan Khan, then a higher-secondary student who had stumbled upon a Unicode-based Bangla website at a book fair and decided Bangla typing deserved better. What he built became the first free, open-source, Unicode-compliant Bangla keyboard software for Windows, guided by a simple motto: "Let language be free."
Its phonetic typing system was the real breakthrough. Instead of memorizing complex key layouts, anyone could type Bangla using familiar English letters. Typing "ami banglay gan gai" became "আমি বাংলায় গান গাই" instantly. That single idea made Bangla typing accessible to millions who had never touched a Bangla keyboard layout before. Today, Avro is so deeply embedded in Bangla computing that Wikipedia uses it as its default in-browser Bengali input system, and Microsoft has certified it as a recognized input method.
As the project grew, Mehdi was joined by a small team of developers from OmicronLab, including Rifat Nabi, an alumnus of EWU's Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
In February 2025, the Bangladesh government announced the Ekushey Padak, the country's second-highest civilian award, for Mehdi Hasan Khan's contribution to Bangla computing. But Mehdi made a choice that says a lot about the team itself. He insisted the award not be his alone, and that his co-developers, Rifat Nabi, Tanbin Islam Siam, and Shabab Mustafa, be honored alongside him. The government agreed, and all four received the Ekushey Padak 2025 together.
Shortly after, on February 20, 2025, EWU's Department of CSE held a felicitation ceremony at the Manzur Elahi Auditorium to honor its alumnus. Prof. Dr. Mohammed Farashuddin, EWU's Chief Advisor and former Governor of Bangladesh Bank, attended as Chief Guest, with the event presided over by Pro-Vice Chancellor Prof. Dr. M. Ashik Mosaddik. Rifat Nabi was presented with a laptop as a token of appreciation, and in his speech, he shared that his enthusiasm for programming genuinely flourished after enrolling at EWU, a passion that eventually led him to the Avro team.
Today, Rifat Nabi works as a software developer at Atlassian, based in Sydney, Australia, continuing a career that started with a piece of software now used daily by a huge share of Bangladesh's online population. So the next time you type in Bangla without thinking twice about how, remember, part of that story passed through EWU.
