Tamil Internet 2004 - Call for Papers

16 August 2004 - The seventh International Tamil Internet Conference ("Tamil Internet 2004"), to be held in Singapore on 11 and 12 December 2004, is now calling for papers to be submitted to the conference.

Tamil Internet 2004 is organised by the International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT) with the support of Singapore's Tamil Internet Steering Committee and other organisations. It will be held at the National University of Singapore premises.

A Conference Programme Committee (CPC) has been formed with Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram of Switzerland as the Chair, Mr. Arun Mahizhnan of Singapore as Vice-Chair and Mr. N. Maalan (India), Mr. A. Elangovan (India), Mr. D. Sivaraj (India), Dr. Vasu Renganathan (USA) as members), to deal with paper submission and scheduling of the conference content. Prof. V. Sankaranarayanan, Director of Tamil Virtual University, Chennai, has agreed to serve as Advisor to the CPC for Tamil Internet 2004.

In contrast to multi-hub, large audience format of earlier Tamil Internet Conferences (TICs), Tamil Internet 2004 will be an intensive, focused technical conference with only one session scheduled at a time. More time will be devoted to in-depth collective discussions (workshop style) than in formal presentations.

"Tamil IT for Tomorrow " has been chosen as the theme for the Tamil Internet 2004 conference. We invite technical papers on all topics relating Tamil Information Technology. The deadline for paper abstracts is 16 September and for the full paper, November 16. There will be a peer review of the submitted papers before acceptance. The abstract should be detailed enough for CPC to make a decision on acceptance. After the review, successful candidates will be informed before end September.

To assist the CPC select papers for formal presentations, please send us one or two pages (A4 size) of the abstract of your presentation by the above date. Papers may be presented in English, Tamil or bilingual (Tamil-English) format. As with the earlier TICs, all submissions must be in electronic form. For papers with content in Tamil or are bilingual, please use either TAB or TSCII (version 1.7) encoding. Characters that are not part of the encoding prescribed must be
included as images (jpg/gif). The outline/summary of your presentation should also include your full name, designation, address, email and contact numbers.

We assume that submission of a paper for possible presentation at Tamil Internet 2004 implies attendance at the conference and presentation in person by at least one author of the paper. The Singapore organizers have offered to provide free boarding and lodging, free conference registration to one author of each paper
accepted for oral presentation.

As in the past, papers presented in the conference will be archived, printed and distributed as INFITT sees fit and INFITT will retain the rights for these purposes.

We would appreciate very much if you take note of the deadlines and adhere to them:

Abstracts by 16 September
Full paper by 16 November

The following is a list of topics (not exhaustive) to be covered at the Tamil Internet 2004 Conference:

1. Tamil Character Encoding Standards
* Focus on 16bit schemes, status of Unicode, platform and application level support
* Issues on Collation, supporting a sort-order
* 8bit to 16bit Migration issues: conversion and coexistence of application and data
* Tamil99 keyboard for Unicode input

2. Multilingual Domain Names
* Discussion on multi-lingual domain names and email addresses with a focus on Tamil
* Technical sessions on architecture, dependencies, encoding and implementation issues
* General discussion on usage, take-up rate and INFITT's role in promoting usage

3. Tamil in Indic language cluster and multi-lingual environments
* Classification of scripts (Alphabetic, Ideographic and Syllabic) & multi-script/multilingual environments
* Co-existence with "Indic" family of scripts/languages - Operating Systems and
Application issues
* Co-existence with other syllabic and ideographic scripts, Chinese and Arabic in
particular

4. Tamil Optical Character Recognition, Machine Translation, Spell Checking and Speech Recognition
* Current initiatives and progress over the last 5 years
* "Red-flag" (problem) areas and bottle necks
* Technological and linguistic dependencies
* Parallel initiatives: compare and contrast development in other languages besides English
* Proposed solutions

5. Mobile and hand-held technologies
* Development tools and libraries for mobile and wireless devices: phones, PDAs etc.
* Issues with implementing Tamil at platform and application levels
* Tamil input standards for mobile phone keypads
* Hand-writing recognition (graffiti) - considerations for Tamil script
* Character encoding for internal representation and data exchange

6. Open source software and Tamil localisation
* Tamil open-source initiatives: Tamil-Linux, Tamil-OO.o, Tamil-Mozilla etc.
* Translation and localisation issues: glossary, locale settings (Tamil-India, Tamil-Sri Lanka, Tamil-Singapore, Tamil-Malaysia etc)
* Tools and technologies for localisation
* Future projects

7. Education Technology
* Compare and contrast use of technology in other language areas: English, Hindi, Sinhala, Chinese, Arabic, Malay, etc
* Identify requirements specific to Tamil
* Demonstrate existing applications and propose areas for improvements

8. Database driven applications
* General purpose business applications
* Tamil locale handling in 16bit enabled databases
* Implementing sort-order
* Application specific issues: Web (blogs, portals, ezines, messaging, ecommerce), Fat-Client (desktop centric)

9. E-Government
*Challenges and prospects for introducing E-Government
* Issues of privacy and security
* Issues of multilingualism
* Multilingual Archival Systems, Multilingual PDF forms creation and filling

Please send in the abstract of your presentation to the mailbox <ti2004-cpc@infitt.org> as soon as possible. We greatly look forward to your co-operation and active participation at the forthcoming Tamil Internet 2004 Conference.

Warm regards,
K. Kalyanasundaram
Chair, Conference Programme Committee
Tamil Internet 2004
http://www.infitt.org/ti2004/
Email: ti2004-cpc@infitt.org