Hyderabad, March 29: The 20 {+t} {+h} international World Wide Web conference began here on Monday bringing together researchers, technologists, practitioners, and other experts from 50 countries. With the theme ‘Web for all’, the conference would discuss the web’s future direction and help it become all-inclusive.
Being jointly hosted by the International Institutes of Information Technology Bangalore and Hyderabad and the Institute of Information Technology, Mumbai, over 700 delegates were attending the five-day event.
Referring to the theme ‘Web for all’ at a press conference here, Prof. Sadagopan, Director, IIIT, Bangalore, said the objective was to ensure that it reached out to each and every category in the world. Prof. Krithi, Chair Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay, said a number of activities were happening in the application domain and work was on to make the web accessible, among others, to non-English speaking people and to those with disabilities.
Research-oriented
Mary Ellen Zurko, Lotus Live Security Architect at IBM, said the conference was mainly research-oriented and would also focus on how to improve the web.
Besides talks and several world-class research presentations, the conference would have three key-note speeches by former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam , WWW inventor and director, World Wide Web Consortium, Tim Berners-Lee and Christos H. Papadimitriou, the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley.
An industry panel discussion on “A universal, inclusive WWW–the next frontier” featuring Infosys CEO and MD Kris Gopalakrishnan, Ravi Shanker, Joint Secretary and CEO NIXI ( National Internet Exchange of India), and Deepak Patak from IIIT Mumbai, would be held on March 29. The technical programme includes posters, demo sessions, tutorials, workshops, Ph.D symposium and exhibitions.
–Agencies