As mentioned in the previous post, I attended the W3C India Office opening event and a conference on Internationalization and Standardization associated with this event, which was organized by the Technology Development in Indian Language (TDIL) of the Department of Information Technology, GOI on 6th and 7th of May , 2010. While the opening of the India office was an occasion for which several folks from W3C, including the newly appointed CEO Dr. Jeffery Jaffe came to India, the focus of the event was primarily on the standardization and internationalization of the standards pertaining to web, mobile telephony as well as Indian language computing. Details of this conference and event are available at the
W3C India site. What follows is a quick review of the two day proceedings of the conference.
The first day saw several star speakers in the opening session including S. Ramadorai (TCS); Rajendra Pawar (NIIT, and NASSCOM Chairman); Dr. Raghuram Krishnapuram (IBM Research), R. Chandrashekhar (Secretary of DCIT), Swaranlata (Country Manager , W3C India office), Dr. Jeffery Jaffe (W3C) and N. Ravi Shanker (Joint Secretary. DCIT). The speakers essentially focused on wide spread nature of the world wide web, further expansion of the mobile telephony and the eventual merging of the two. This was presented in order to accentuate the need for web standards and standards for mobile telephony as well as mobile web access. Most speakers talked about the impact of such standards on India in view of the more than 450 million subscribers of mobile phones in India. The government representatives on the panel also highlighted the massive initiative of the Government of India to enable public oriented information and services to be available in the 22 official languages of India. The task was considered to be mammoth since the Indian languages have complexities of scripts and phonetics as well as rendering challenges in some browsers. Adoption of standards for computing in Indian languages was posited as a means to solve some of the problems. The opening of W3C's India office was observed as a small step in this direction and the panelists invoked all the men and women from industry, academia and the government departments present at the conference to provide support for taking the next steps in that direction. A link to Dr. Jeffery Jaffe's presentation is available on the
W3C website.
This was followed by the formal inauguration of the India office of W3C by Mr. Sachin Pilot, the Minister of State for Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
The subsequent sessions were primarily technical in nature (see the agenda for details of the sessions on the link given above) and focused on several aspects of the web standards and mobile standards. Several interesting presentations were made by academic as well as industry speakers. Many of them continued to focus on the challenges in India languages and a variety of work being done in academia as well as industry. Presentations from W3C, TDIL, and Google were really informative and highlighted the nuances in Indian language computing. The session on mobile web access was one of the most popular sessions and was packed with data on mobile penetration, internet ready mobile devices, extent of mobile web access, challenges in mobile accessibility even for existing English language websites, mobile devices for masses, special attention on voice based access of websites and so on. See an interesting presentation by Phil Archer on
this site.
Another very interesting session was on Semantic Web and Architecture for the same. Some of the fundamental challenges were very well highlighted in a presentation by Klaus Birkenbihl of the W3C which is, luckily, available at
this site.
Day two started with a session on Human Machine Interface. Although I was keen on attending this session, due to some logistics problem, I could not reach the venue in time and therefore could manage to hear only the closing comments on this session.
The next session on day two was the session in which Infosys participated, and I presented a very generic view on Mobile Web Accessibility. Since a lot had been said on the previous day about both web as well as mobile access of web, I decided to tone down my presentation (which was anyway limited to 8 min) to focus on the issues of accessibility only. I highlighted challenges in web accessibility; access on mobile devices as well as challenges with the users of mobile devices. Others on the panel were Dr. Neeta Verma of the NIC, who headed the team responsible for devising the GOI web accessibility standards including the adoption of ISO 23026 and WCAG 2.0; Sachin Kelkar from Intel who made an excellent presentation on a rural web accessibility prototype based on limited GUI and voice activation called Darpan; Srinivasu from Yahoo! who was optimistic as usual about the simplicity with which accessibility can be incorporated in the websites as well as other software applications if they were just written as per the standards; Dr. Om Deshmukh, who presented a voice enable web interaction prototype; and Shilpi Kapoor who exhorted the audience to first believe that accessibility is not only good for the differently able but also for all of us. She cited examples of several keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+S which we use every day, inspite of the popular office suite being totally GUI based.
The subsequent session, which had got delayed by almost an hour, had several speaker focus on the issues with respect to offering of services on the web. Some also highlighted the challenges in e-governance as well as intellectual property rights. But the attraction of this session was a short video played by a young Sanjay Vijaykumar, co-founder and CEO of
Mobme Wireless Solutions, a Kerala based organization offering various mobile based value added services. The video talked about how the common mobile phone can be used to provide simple information in far reaching places. Information such as availability of fish in a particular area in the sea; the pricing of fish in various landing locations; government schemes applicable for fisherman and their dependants, weather warnings and so on. The less than 3 minute video evoked a thunderous applause from the crowd and almost everyone wanted to meet and talk to Sanjay. Unfortunately the video is not yet available on YouTube.
The final session was an open house discussion on standardization and took up questions posted by audience as well as panelists during the preceding sessions. The convener of this conference, the W3C and TDIL once again appealed for cooperation and support from the industry and academia for taking the cause of India Language computing ahead.
It was indeed a great learning experience as well as an opportunity to get to know so many interesting people working on a variety of fascinating problems related with computing in India Languages.
