[Indic-computing-devel] Invitation for Indic Computing Workshop

[Ashish K. <as...@mi...>]

Dear Friends,

The Indic Computing Group is organising a two day workshop in
Bangalore on September 15-16, 2002. The main purpose of this workshop is to
build a community of people working in the space of developing local
language development tools, applications, and content, to better coordinate
their ideas and approaches towards the future of indic-computing.

By building a community of practitioners, developers, linguistic experts and
organizers, we hope to share ideas and experiences, facilitate broad
discussion about the issues involved and discuss future directions for the
field.  We also hope that this broad coalition would enable more broad-based
and active participation in international standards processes and forums,
such as the Unicode Consortium and W3C.

At the end of the meeting, we hope to have assembled a community of
technically informed and motivated people to organize and lead the
indic-computing development effort into the future.  The leadership of this
community should be individual driven, technically motivated, and entrenched
with youth, vitality and a progressive vision. We hope that you will join us
and contribute to taking this effort forward.

A draft agenda is enclosed with this mail for your perusal. Details about
the
schedule, venue etc. would be conveyed to the participants soon.

Please get in touch with me or any of the following people if you are
interested
to participate and contribute to this workshop .

Tapan Parikh - ta...@ya...
Venky Hariharan - ve...@vs...
Joseph Koshy - ko...@hp...

Warm regards,

Ashish Kotamkar

------------------------------------------------------------
DRAFT AGENDA

DAY 1

1) Experiences of Practitioners  - Discuss people's experiences with using
local language technologies, particularly highlighting gaps in the
technology and
the particular reasons certain technology decisions were made.  Include
NGOs, development organizations, schools, government offices, etc.

2) Encodings - Discuss various encoding options, their strengths and
weaknesses, and OS and application-level support for local language
computing in each.  Also
discuss the process by which each standard evolves.

3) Display Technologies - Discuss various font technologies, their relative
merits, and also OS and application-level support for their display and
rendering.

4) Input Methods- Discuss various types of input methods, their advantages,
prospective users, and software / driver support.

DAY 2

5) Linguistics - Presentation by groups studying language representation
from a linguistic perspective.  Discuss the linguistic issues and problems
with
current encoding systems, fonts and rendering methodologies, and ways these
problems can and have been redressed, either by participation in standards
amendment
procedures, or via other avenues.

6) Tools - Discuss various local language toolkits and APIs, the
functionality they provide, and the appropriate ways for those technologies
to be included in
the future from an application and OS perspective.

7) Organization and Capacity Building - Discuss various ways people have
tried to organize this process before, and how we can all work together to
consolidate these efforts to build a common platform for discussion and
policy.

8) Future Directions - Discuss future research directions for indic-language
computing, including speech generation and recognition, machine translation,
multi-lingual data retrieval, and other promising research avenues.

-x-