Department of South Asia Studies Center for South

Department of South Asia Studies Center for South Asia Studies Languages taught Tamil Hindi Urdu Gujarati Bengali Punjabi Sanskrit Fields concentrated • Cultural history • Anthropology • Political studies • Religious studies • Art history • Health and medicine

INFITT International Forum for Information Technology Tamil Internet 2011 Conference (உலகத உததமம தம ழ த ழ ல மனறம ) ந டப DATES: 17 -19 JUNE 211 VENUE UNIV. OF PENNSYLVANIA, PHILADELPHIA, USA

INFITT - general INFITT acronym for INTERNATIONAL FORUM FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN TAMIL உததமம - உலகத தம ழ த ழ ல ந டப மனறம Non-profit NGO started in 2000 in Singapore Functions since 2000 as a NGO registered in California, USA Objective: to assist growth of Tamil Information Technology and Tamil Content on the Internet, serve as a « single reference » international liason body for Tamil Computing /Tamil IT/Tamil Internet Has a written Constitution defining its objectives, overall structure and operational procedures

INFITT - structure Membership drawn from all over the world, with major stakeholders coming from IN, SL, MY and SG (regions where Tamil enjoys special status as an official language) Membership open to anyone committed to « observe and support various articles of the INFITT Constitution » Three level structure: gross root membership (General Body/GB) elects 51 -member General Council/GC (weighted proportional representation of all Tamil speaking regions); GC in turns elects 7 -member Executive Committee EC. General Administration through Chair, Vice-Chair and Executive Director, all directly elected by the EC Discussions throughout the year via mailing lists

Tamil Internet Conferences • • Tamil Internet Conferences (“Tamil Internet”) are major annual technical conference, aimed to bring together members of academic community, software professionals, bloggers and Tamil portal site promoters and end-users working on Tamil computing /Tamil IT-ICT and Tamil Internet Provide an annual forum for all interested stake holders to present and review recent advances in various domains, to build collaborative networking and to identify areas which need immediate and long term solutions to advance the field Present USA conference “tenth” in the series; Previous conferences held at Singapore (1997), Chennai, India (1999), Singapore (2000), Kuala Lumpur, MY (2001), San Francisco, CA, USA (2002), Chennai, India (2003), Singapore, SG (2004), Koeln, Germany (2009), Coimbatore, India (2010) Since launch of INFITT in 2000, TIC series are being managed by INFITT.

Scope of Tamil Internet Conferences Presentation of research and development in various areas of Tamil computing, Tamil Internet in technical sessions (Conference Hub) Conference (duration 3 days) generally have 3 hubs: conference hub, exhibition hub (display of Tamil softwares and Tools) and Community Hub (Tamil IT related competitions, tutorial sessions, hands-on opportunities to learn and use advances in Tamil Computing Conference venue rotated globally, previous conferences held at India, Singapore, Malaysia, USA and Germany

Topics addressed at TICs Hardware, software development for implementation of Tamil Computing in all platforms Windows-Mac-Unix. Mobile (fonts, drivers, text editors, spell check, grammar check, search engines, . . ) and in Internet, ensuring errorfree exchange of information, accessible 24/7. Advanced applications such as text-to-speech synthesis, voice recognition, data mining of Tamil content in the Net, machine translation, Optical character /hand written text recognition, Natural Language Processing, Language corpus/corpus texts, . . Computer-aided teaching of Tamil online (web portals) and offline (multimedia-based softwares), Development of Tamil Content in the Net including Tamil Blogs and Tamil Wikipedia

Conference Program Committee Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram Switzerland – Chair Prof. N. Deivasundaram, India Prof. A. G. Ramakrishnan, India Mr. Manivannan , India Dr. Badri Seshadri, India Dr. Jean-Luc Chevillard, France Prof. C. R. Selvakumar, California Dr. Seetha Lakshmi, Singapore Mr. Siva Pillai, United Kingdom

Message from CPC Conf. Program Committee for TIC 2011 • Conf being organized at short (4 months notice). • Conf. will have three hubs: tech sessions (conf hub), Softwares display • • (exhibition hub) and a tirukku. Ra. L competition for children (community hub) CPC received 130+ abstracts for presentation from many countries across the globe => attests to the growing importance of this conf. series CPC selected about 55 papers for oral presentation; full version of these papers available in printed conference proceedings (papers to be made available online at infitt. org after the conference) Conf. participants/paper presenters come from 10 countries across the globe (IN, SL, SG, MY, UAE, FR, UK, CH, CA and USA) Majority of participants come from academic institutions (senior faculty to young research students), raising hopes for rapid advances in the technology areas through their involvement

Instuctions to Paper Presenters, Chairs Tight agenda spread over 3 days Most sessions single track, two talks as remote/video presentations to check their viability for use in future conferences Each paper is allocated 30 min, including 5 min reserved for Question-Answers involving the audience Unless there is a need to show some live demos involving special software, all authors are urged to copy their presentations to the conf. hall laptop well in advance (saves time for all) Each conf. participant will get a printed copy of the Conf. Book; extra copies can be ordered (500 Rs / 20 US$); PDF will be made available online after the conf.