Southern States - Tamil Nadu

Tamil Internet meet in California from Sept. 27

By K. Ramachandran

CHENNAI May 16. Tamil Internet 2002 (TI2002), a conference and exhibition on computing developments in Tamil, will be held at Foster City, California, from September 27 to 29.

Centered on ``Bridging The Digital Divide'', TI2002 will focus on technical, professional and business issues related to Tamil Internet and computing, according to the Indian coordinator of the conference, M. Anto Peter.

It will have three components: technical conference, exhibition and community events. The technical conference will consist of keynote lectures and paper presentations on digital Tamil archives, eradication of the `digital divide', open source Development for Tamil, web-and multimedia-assisted learning of Tamil, E-business and E-governance, says M Anandakrishnan, Chair of the International Forum For Information Technology In Tamil (INFITT), which organises the annual conference.

Tamil, spoken by over 75 million people worldwide, has been a pioneer among Indic languages in technology implementation and development of digital, multimedia resources and information interchange through the Internet.

The Tamil Internet 2002 is the fifth in the conference series. It was held in Singapore in 1997 and 2000, in Chennai in 1999 and in 2001 in Kuala Lumpur.

The exhibition part, open to the public, will feature Tamil hardware and software products of leading vendors, besides products in other Indian languages.

The community event will focus on four specific groups using Tamil language in the United States. It will have facilities for children to learn to use the digital resources to improve their Tamil language skills.

The youth will learn to use the online resources to know their Tamil heritage and contribute their skills to help bridge the digital divide. The elder Tamil Americans will learn to use computers and be able to communicate with other Tamils.

``In organising TI2002, we address the need for handling Tamil-related communication in a native way with Tamil scripts, sophisticated application software and information exchange through Internet'', said Prof. Anandakrishnan.

He pointed to the close collaboration of the Center for South Asia Studies and the Chair in Tamil Studies of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-sponsor of the conference.

More details will be available at INFITT's website, http://www.infitt.org.

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