23 January 2002 - The Secretariat is pleased to inform that the next International Conference on Information Processing and Resources on the Internet ("Tamil Internet 2002") - 5th in the series - will be held in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA sometime during the month of August/Sept 2002.

Tamil Internet 2002 conference will be organized by the International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT) in close collaboration with Center for South Asia Studies and the Chair in Tamil Studies of the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

Mr. Mani Manivannan of Fremont, California has accepted the invitation from INFITT to be the Chair of the International Organising Committee (IOC). The North-American Chapter of INFITT (INFITT-NA) will play major role in the local organization of the conference, including planning of associated events.

A Conference Programme Committe (CPC), composed of representatives of INFITT and UC Berkeley Center for South Asia Studies is also being formed, with Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram of Lausanne, Switzerland as the Chair. The latter (CPC) will deal with paper submission and scheduling of the conference content (invited lectures and submitted papers). Further details on the conference content, exact dates and venue will be announced in due course.

We take this opportunity to invite 'technical' papers for presentation at TI-2002 on all topics relating Tamil with Computers and/or Internet, on or before 15 May 2002.

To assist the CPC select papers for oral and poster presentations, please send us one or two A4 size  outline/summary of your presentation by the above date. Papers may be presented in English, Tamil or bilingual (Tamil-English) format. As with the earlier Conferences, all submissions must be in electronic form. For papers with content in Tamil or bilingual, please use either TSCII (version 1.7) or TAB encoding. The outline/summary of your presentation should also include your full name, designation, address and contact numbers.

There will be a peer review of the submitted papers before acceptance. In view of our committed goal to raise the quality of the conference, a limited number of papers will be selected for oral presentation, possibly with a longer presentation time (30 mins or more).

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

• Authors whose papers have been selected for presentation at the conference will be informed by 31 May 2002. 

• Electronic versions of the accepted papers should reach the CPC on or before 30 June 2002 for them to appear in the official conference book.

The following is a short list of topics (by no means exhaustive) to be covered at the Tamil Internet 2002 Conference:

1.     Technology (Localisation/Tamil Enabling)

Implementation in different platforms: Windows, Unix/Linux, Unicode, MacOS, mobile platoforms (PalmOS), Java,... 

Search engines, text converters, translators and APIs for cross-platform data flow

OCR, voice recognition, speech synthesis, natural language processing,.. 

Java, Perl-script based tools for online Spell checker, dictionary,.(interactive usage of Tamil online/on Internet)

Dedicated software for word-processing, databases,... 

Tamil Domain Names (DNS)

• Digital collections of Tamil literary works,educational materials (e-books, CDs, cassettes/ tapes,...)
• Online Tamil dictionaries, lexicon, thesaurus, ...
• Machine Aided Translation

4.     Efforts Towards Eradicating Digital Divide

• Efforts in Tamilnadu, Malaysia (camUka maiyam,..)
• Role of TVU, regional chapters, ...

6.     E-Business and E-Governance

• Tamil portal sites, Tamil DNS, e-commerce,..

We greatly look forward to your co-operation and active participation at the forthcoming TI2002 conference.