LLC-2008, 25 - 27 March 2008

VENUE:

a. For Seminar:

Mahanadi Niwas Auditorium Nalco Nagar Chandrashekharpur, Bhubaneswar, Orissa

Contact: Mr. Ambika Pati. (+91-9437034652)

b. For Workshop:

Interscience Institute of Management & Technology, Kantabada, Bhubaneswar, Orissa

Contact: Mr. Srikanta Patnaik. (+91-9853354697)

Background

Information and knowledge are considered to be the key factors for development of a society. Unfortunately, only a tiny portion of Indian population is truly informed and knowledgeable. More than ninety percent of the Indian Population do not know English and hence are not able to take the advantage of Information Revolution. Technology has made the mode of communication faster and cheaper. If this has to be made available and accessible to everyone we have to consider the language of the users. Language layer needs to be built up so that a communication medium having advantages of both language and computer is available to people. In other words, Language Technology, as a key component in human-computer interfaces, can increase the chances for non-technical people to quickly and successfully interact with computers.

BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solutions) is a GNU/Linux distribution developed by C-DAC with support from NRCFOSS at Chennai for enhancing the use of Free/Open Source Software in the country. Made specifically for the Indian environment and localized in the respective regional languages, it is a Govt. of India's initiative towards equipping common people with the benefits of computer technology as a free & opensource operating system. Currently BOSS can process 9 Indian languages- Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu in various text editors such as gedit, Open-Office, Abi-Word, Yudit. Oriya could successfully be added to the list if adequate initiatives are taken especially by the people in Orissa

Objectives

• To initiate R & D work towards building Indian Language Platform on computers so that Indian Language Computing is as easy as English.
• To present state-of-art Indian Language enabling on computers. Language enabling means ability to read, write and print in a particular language, using particular script.
• To channelise energy towards creating repositories of Oriya Language resources.
• To work towards a framework for building multi-language electronic dictionaries/lexical databases which will help quick translations from one Indian language to another.
• To show that easy and affordable computing is possible for local languages.
• To motivate linguists, language experts, persons from humanities and other disciplines towards using and supporting this all powerful and flexible medium.
• Give a boost to develop creative contents in audio-visual mode in local languages.
• Create special interest groups and structures for fulfilling the dream of “language literate computers" and chalk out an action plan for Oriya.