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Hyderabad: Did you
know that less than 10 percent of the Indian population uses the
world wide web? Or that the next billion users of the internet will
come from emerging markets like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and
Russia?
The future of the web will be under discussion at the 20th
international World Wide Web Conference (WWW2011) here, a
prestigious event that India, with one of the world's fastest
growing population of internet users, will host for the first time.
Beginning March 28, it will be attended by 800 delegates from 49
countries.
"The conference will debate the future of the Web, which is
important for India," S. Sadagopan, director of the International
Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Bangalore, told IANS.
"It is more relevant for India, especially in the context of high
mobile penetration among the younger generation, improving literacy
levels, large young and English-speaking population."
IIIT, Bangalore, in cooperation with the IIIT, Hyderabad, and the
Institute of Information Technology, Bombay (Mumbai) , is hosting
the event.
The five-day meet has the theme "web for all". It will debate
technical challenges in overcoming the digital divide and ways to
bring the web to underserved populations. The event will be
addressed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the WWW Conference director and
inventor of the web. It will also have research papers that can
shape the web of tomorrow.
World wide web currently has two billion users. However, of the 4.8
billion people living in Asia and Africa, only one in five has
access to the web. In India, for instance, the 100 million web users
constitute less than 10 percent of the total population of 1.2
billion.
The event will discuss challenges like developing content in local
languages, poor PC penetration and lack of infrastructure to connect
the next billion users.
WWW2011 will discuss, debate and help set the future direction of
the Web. It will focus on the regional and global impact of
expanding open Web platform for application development.
Tim Berners-Lee will deliver a visionary keynote address on
"designing the web for an open society".
With the social media witnessing explosive growth, there will also
be a panel discussion on "Social media: source of information or
bunch of noise?".
According to conference organizers, Wikipedia has over 3.5 million
pages with descriptions of entities. Flickr members have uploaded
over five billion photos, YouTube has 35 hours of videos uploaded to
the site each minute, and Twitter users generate 65 million tweets a
day.
Is there useful information in social media like tweets, how to sift
through the vast amounts of social media and filter out the
spam/offensive content are some of the questions the participants
will debate.
The participants include chief information officers, IT directors
and decision-makers from the public and private sector and
researchers, technologists and developers from institutions and
technology-driven businesses.
There will be 81 technical papers, 90 posters, 25 demos, 12
tutorials, nine workshops and a PhD Symposium.
"It is a research conference. It brings out best of the research in
the world," said Sadagopan. Referring to the quality of research, he
said 80 best papers were selected from almost 700 papers submitted
from around the world.
The accepted papers have been put into various categories like
search, local language content, access, privacy, avoiding
pornography, data mining.
These research papers shape the Web of tomorrow. Technologies and
scientific innovations come from such a research.
"Many technologies which we take for granted today in fact came from
award- winning papers of yesterday."
(Mohammed Shafeeq
can be contacted at m.shafeeq@ians.in)
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