INFITT

1
INFITT Press ReleaseTamil Internet
2011Conference

• Dates 17-19 June 211
• Venue
• Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

2
INFITT - general

• INFITT acronym for INTERNATIONAL FORUM FOR
  INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN TAMIL
• ??????? - ????? ????? ????? ?????? ????? ??????
• 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

3
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

4
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.

5
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

6
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 error-free
  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

7
Message from CPCConf. Program Committee for TIC
2011

• Conf being organized at short (4 months notice).
• Conf. will have three hubs tech sessions (conf
  hub), Software display (exhibition hub) and a
  tirukkuRaL competition for children (community
  hub)
• CPC received 130 abstracts for presentation from
  many countries across the globe gt 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

8
Instructions 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.

9
Inagural Session 17 June 2011 (09.30 10.30)
09.30- 09.35 Invocation Prayer Tamil School Students
09.35 09.40 Welcome LOC Co-Chair Dr. Vasu Renganathan
09.40 09.45 Messages CPC Chair Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram
09.45 09.50 Messages - IOC Chair Mr. V.M.S. Kaviarasan
09.50 10.00 Welcome LOC Co-Chair Prof. H.S. Schiffman
10.00 10.10 Welcom Chair SAS Prof. Daud Ali
10.10 10.30 Inagural Talk Prof. M. Anandakrishnan

10
Inaugural session 17 June

• Inaugural function featured Prof. Daud Ali, Prof.
  Harold Schiffman (senior faculties of the local
  host, viz., South Asian Studies (SAS) Dept of the
  Univ. of Pennsylvania), Dr. Vasu Renganathan,
  Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram and Mr. VMS Kaviarasan
  (Chairs of the Local Org. Committee LOC, Conf.
  Program Committee and International Org.
  Committee respectively) and Prof. M.
  Anandakrishnan (former Chair of INFITT)
• Welcoming the conf. participants, Dr. Vasu
  Renganathan pointed out that the local host (SAS
  of Upenn) is one of the premier Institution in
  the US engaged in teaching, research in several
  Indian languages including Tamil for over 65
  years (since 1948!)

11
Inaugural session 17 June

• In his welcome speech, Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram
  pointed out that, in spite of far-off location of
  the conf. venue (gt10000 km), INFITT received over
  130 abstracts across the globe, pointing out to
  the growing interest of Tamil Diaspora in this
  conference series. 55 papers were accepted for
  oral presentation at the conference.
• TI2011 is truly an international meet given
  that participants come from 10 different
  countries (India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia,
  UK, France, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates,
  Canada and USA).
• TI2011 feature three components a conf. hub
  (technical sessions), exhibition hub (display of
  Tamil Softwares) and a community hub (featuring a
  competition on tirukkuRaL on Saturday)

12
Inaugural session 17 June

• The number of participants at the conf. is
  expected to be around 60, with over two-third
  coming from various academic institutions across
  the globe
• In his inaugural address, Prof. M.
  Anandakrishnan expressed his pleasure in noting
  that, in spite of several ups and downs during
  the past 11 years, INFITT continues one of its
  key role in organizing this important conference
  series. He emphasized the need for more number
  of youths with background in Information
  Technology and Tamil to join INFITT to take this
  organization to the future.
• Large scale participation by academic community
  members attest to the growing interests younger
  students and researchers take in the development
  of Tamil computing.

13
Inaugural session 17 June

• Prof MA urged that INFITT should make an effort
  to become a truly professional body in the field
  of Tamil computing, by taking steps such as
  promoting technical workshops for young students
  and peer-review screening of the conf.
  proceedings.

14
Tech. Session 1 17 June 2011 (11.00 12.00)
11.00 11.30 Tamil A family of Languages Prof. Harold S. Schiffman (U Penn)
11.30 12.00 Tamil Inscriptions History and Culture Prof. Daud Ali (U Penn)
15
Tech Session I / 17 June

• TI2011 started technical sessions with a talk by
  Prof. Hal Schiffman of the Univ. of Pennsylvania,
  former Director of Penn Language Center. Prof.
  Schiffman taught Tamil to the American students
  for over 35 years and engaged in research on
  Tamil Linguistics, particularly on the diglossic
  nature of the Tamil Language
• In his talk, Prof. Schiffman pointed out the rich
  and diverse forms of spoken Tamil seen within
  India and outside for many centuries, a fact that
  permits Tamil to be construed as a family of
  languages.
• Prof. Schiffman urged that teaching of spoken
  Tamil /pEccu tamiz should be encouraged (and not
  discouraged as is now in many places).

16
Tech session 1 / 17 June

• Prof. Schiffman pointed out his Tamil group with
  the active participation of his faculty member Dr
  Vasu Renganathan, Univ of Pennsylvania has built
  a top class online Portal for the teaching of
  Tamil . Penn Tamil Web uses all modern multimedia
  tools with pedagogically sound Tamil lessons in
  an integrated manner and the website has been
  very popular with a high rating.
• Prof. Schiffman also announced the publication of
  a comprehensive Tamil-English verb Dictionary,
  fruit of his 35 years of research in Tamil
  Linguistics. The dictionary is available through
  the Linguistic Data Consortium LDC of U Penn.
  Conference participants were given a free CD copy
  of this important e-resource for Tamil.

17
Tech session I / 17 June 2011

• The second talk was given by Prof. Daud Ali
  (Chair of South Asia Studies at U Penn), a
  professor who has a long standing research
  interests in South Indian History as deciphered
  through thousands of Inscriptions (on stones,
  copper plates and clay pottery) available in many
  places of India, spanning over two thousand
  years.
• In his talk Prof. Daud Ali explained the
  advantages of having a fully searchable digital
  version of the South Indian Inscriptions. Only a
  small percentage (ca 2000 out of 15000 estampage
  copies of the recorded inscriptions) have ever
  been published in print form.

18
Tech Session 1 / 17 June

• Prof Daud Ali pointed out that study of
  inscriptions permit establishment of historical
  facts on areas such as dynasty history and
  etymological aspects of Tamil language (how the
  language usage has evolved over thousands of
  years). His own research focus on mediaeval
  period of South Indian History (2000 years)
• Access to the South Indian Historical resources
  still is a major problem. Historians like him
  have to go to archive collections in places like
  Mysore in India to examine them. Pointing out
  some of the difficulties, Prof Ali appealed for
  global scale collaboration of various academic
  and Govt. institutions within India such as
  Archeological survey of India (ASI)

19
Tech. Session 2 17 June 2011 (13.00 15.00)
13.00 13.45 Tamil Online Handwriting Recognition / Segmentation of Handwritten words Prof. A.G. Ramakrishnan (IISc, Bangalore, India)
13.45 14.30 Kuralagam (search Engine for Thirukkural) /Popularity based Search Model for Tamil Word Games Prof. T.V. Geetha (Anna Univ. Chennai, Guindy)
14.30 15.00 Teaching Learning ethical literature through multimedia Dr. V.M.S. Andavar (Pachaiyappas College, Chennai, India)
20
Tech Session 2 / 17 June

• Session 2 started with a video conference
  presentation of the paper of Prof AG Ramakrishnan
  of Indian Inst. of Science, Bangalore, India.
  Ramakrishnan presented his paper sitting in his
  lab. at Bangalore. It was the maiden effort on
  the part of the conference organizers to use
  modern remote presentation options to feature
  speakers who could not make the trip to the US.
• In his talk, Prof Ramakrishnan outlined how some
  his research efforts in the area of Tamil and
  Kannada character recognition of printed,
  handwritten texts along with text-to-speech
  synthesis of machine-readable texts has enabled
  thousands of physically handicapped persons
  access specially designed digital library
  collections and even normal tasks such as
  accessing emails on computers.

21
Tech session 2 / 17 June

• In her talk Prof TV Geetha of Anna University
  Chennai, India gave an overview of various Tamil
  Computing related research efforts undertaken at
  TACOLA (Tamil computing Laboratories) of the Anna
  Univ. a joint initiative involving two other
  faculty Prof. Ranjani Parthasarathy and Madhan
  Karky.
• Prof Geetha pointed out that the initiative of
  TACOLA in offering summer internship
  (opportunities for young students to take up a
  short 2-3 month research projects in Tamil
  IT/computing areas) is receiving tremendous
  support. With the signing of 120 students
  signing up for this year, future looks bright
  for young students and faculty contributing more
  to Tamil computing and Tamil internet research.

22
Tech Session 2 / 17 June

• As part of her presentation, Prof. Geetha
  demonstrated some of the software tools that have
  been developed at Anna Univ laboratories. Live
  demos were shown for an online dictionary tool
  called AGARAADI and a search tool for tirukkuRaL
  called kuRaLakam. There were many live
  interactions and querying of these online tools
  by the conference participants. Brief demo. was
  also shown on a tool CURUKKUPPAI for compaction
  /shortening of long sentences for use in portable
  media such as mobile phones.
• In the third talk of the session, Dr Va.Mu.Se
  Andavar (a Tamil professor from Pachaiyappas
  college, Chennai) talked about how multimedia
  tools can be effectively used to teach Tamil
  works such as tirukkuRaL, nannool and other works
  of cangkam period. Here is one area where Tamil
  professors (with limited computer expertise) can
  work together with IT Professors (lacking in
  depth linguistic expertise) to develop tools for
  a newer version of teaching Tamil works,
  something usable for people of all age groups.
  

23
Tech Session 3 / 17 June

• Session 3 of the afternoon started with a talk by
  Dr. Denise DePriso of the Linguistic Data
  Consortium LDC of the U Penn. LDC is one of the
  key local U Penn host unit supporting TI2011.
• Dr Denise gave an overview of the structure and
  various activities of the LDC. LDC is a major
  US-universities led initiative to collect and
  provide an online corpora linguistic data
  collections in various world languages. Digital
  Data is being collected in many areas (from areas
  of Natural language processing, social history to
  medicine).
• Tamil and Hindi are two Indic languages which
  have important data collections. One notable item
  in Tamil is the Tamil-English bilingual Verb
  Dictionary developed by Prof. Hal Schiffman of
  the Univ. of Pennsylvania.
• Dr. DePriso pointed out that opportunities exist
  for Indian Institutions to place their digital
  resources in LDC in a win-win deal for an
  non-exclusive distribution, given the larger
  global reach of LDC

24
Tech session 3 /17 June

• Second talk was given by a young IT entrepreneur
  Mr. Saravanan Kannan engaged in the development
  of software for teaching of Tamil language to
  young children growing outside India (north
  America in particular). Tamil Digest.com (one of
  the sponsors) has published a series of 16
  multi-media based Tamil course lessons at
  beginner and intermediate learning levels.
• The third talk of session 3 featured another
  Professor of the Univ. of Pennsylvania who is
  making great advances in developing novel
  approaches to teach online courses. Prof. Ed
  Dixon explained in great detail how he teaches a
  small group of 8-10 students placed in various
  cities within and outside USA collectively in an
  online based summer course first course in
  German.
• Prof. Dixon explained how development of a good
  online course is a challenging task both for the
  faculty and the students as well. The course
  involve regular meeting of students with the
  professor for online sessions to learn the German
  language.

25
Tech Session 3 / 17 June

• Online course sessions of Dixon involve in
  addition to live interaction with the teacher,
  chat session amongst the students and instant
  exchanges in social forums like Facebook.
• Days programs ended with an excellent vocal
  concert (a hybrid of Indian classical music
  supported by western playback support) presented
  by a U Penn student group called Penn Sargam
  followed by excellent South Indian Dinner !

26
Tech. Session 4A 18 June 2011 (09.00 10.45)
09.00 09.45 Tamil Video Retrieval and Tamil Document Summarization Prof. T. Mala (Anna Univ. Chennai, Guindy)
09.45 10.15 On Emotion Detection from Tamil Text Ms. Giruba Beulah (Anna Univ.- Chennai, Guindy)
10.15 10.45 ???? ????? ??????? ???????? Dr. M. Elangovan (Govt. Arts College, Puducherry, India)
27
Tech. Session 4B 18 June 2011 (09.00 10.45)
09.00 09.45 ??????????????? ??????? ?????????? ???????? Mr. S. Ilangkumaran (Sultan Idris Educational Univ., KL, Malaysia)
09.45 10.15 ?????????? ????? ???????????? ?????? ??????? Dr. L. Sundaram (SRM University, Chennai, India)
10.15 10.45 A package for Learning Negation in Tamil Prof. G. Singaravelu (Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, India
28
Tech. Session 5A 18 June 2011 (11.00 13.00)
11.00 11.30 Mapping Language change in Tamil Corpus and Computer Database Making Dr. A. Murugaiyan (EPHE. UMR, Paris, France)
11.30 12.00 Language Ideology and Technology Prof. E. Annamalai (Univ Chicago, IL, USA)
12.00 12.30 Tamil Literature from Sangam Period to Modern Period Dr. Vasu Renganathan (Univ Pennsylvania, PA, USA)
12.30 13.00 ????????? ????? ??????? ???????????? Prof. Radha Chellappan (Bharathidasan Univ, Trichi, India)