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| Kathmandu, Saturday May 24, 2003 Jestha 10, 2060. |
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Crown Prince inaugurates info-tech
conference
Post Report
KATHMANDU, May 23 : His Royal Highness Crown Prince Paras Bir
Bikram Shah Dev inaugurated an international conference on " Information Technology:
Prospects and Challenges in the 21st Century (ITPC- 2003)" here today. The conference
is expected to promote the domain of information technology in the country where it is
still in the infant stage.
"This conference brings together all sectors working in
the field of information technology," said Poorna Bhadra Adiga, officiating secretary
of Ministry for Science and Technology (MOST). "Poverty alleviation can be achieved
to a large extent through information technology."
However, he said that the private and community sectors
needed to take it on to themselves to provide services to the rural milieu. "The
government alone cannot achieve this task," said Adiga.
The three-day conference is being organised by Nepal
Engineering College (NEC), MOST, Nepal College for Information Technology (NCIT) and the
Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (RONAST).
"IT plays a dominant role in our lives," said L.M.
Patnaik of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He hoped that the conference would
create a wider awareness amongst academics, industrialists and policy-makers.
Altogether 68 full papers and 54 short papers are to be
presented at the conference amongst which 5 will be presented by Nepal. The papers will be
presented under 12 themes: Real time systems, mobile computing, information retrieval and
data, mining, natural language processing and speech technology, IT in rural development,
medical and bio-informatics, parallel and distributed systems, image processing, web
technology, soft computing, software engineering, and remote sensing and GIS.
"It is expected that 8,300 delegates will attend the
tutorials and technical sessions," said Jha. International participants from more
than nine countries including India, China, United Kingdom and Australia will attend the
meet.
Similarly, Ramesh Nath Pandey, Minister for Information and
Communication said that the conference should aim at analyzing the prospects of IT in
Nepal. "Issues like using IT in social and government services, and poverty
alleviation should be discussed," he said.
"The challenges of IT are very big for Nepal," said
Narendra Bikram Shah, Minister for Foreign Affairs. "Millions are yet to be familiar
with a tone of a dial, let alone the click of the mouse, making it a greater task."
Shah said that IT needed to be knowledge-based and through
the rapid advancement of technology would benefit the development of the country. Also
speaking on the occasion was Prof. Deepak Bhattarai, principal of NEC.
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