The conference got underway with the address of the co-chairs of the event Dr.Kalyanasundram (INFITT) and Prof.Ulrike Niklas (Institute of Indology and Tamil Studies-IITS). Prof.Urlike highlighted that IITS hosts the largest Tamil collections of over 60,000 which is the largest outside Tamilnadu. Dr.Kalyanasundram recalled the founding of INFITT in 2000, the objectives and the past 7 conferences held around the world (Singapore, Chennai, Malaysia, USA) and the outcomes.

Prof.Dr.Bongartz in her address welcomed the international gathering to Cologne City and she spoke about the city’s India initiative program which is encouraging several Indian IT companies for setting up their European Hub in Cologne. Companies including Wipro and Mindtree have done so already.

Prof.M.Anandakrishnan who is leading the Tamilnadu government official delegation conveyed the greeting from Tamilnadu government and invited INFITT to organize TIC 2010 alongside World Classical Tamil Conference 2010 in Coimbatore, India. Tamilnadu government will extend full support to INFITT for the facilities. Prof.Anandakrishnan in his welcome address urged the assembled scholars to do path-breaking trend-setting innovations in Tamil IT and not be content with catching up with others. He called to attention that more than 100,000 engineering projects are done each year in Tamilnadu, but less than 100 alone are related to Tamil language technologies.

Dr.Vasu Ranganathan (University of Pennsylvania and Chair of Conference Program Committee) highlighted the difficult task of the committee in selecting from the numerous papers of esteemed technical standards in diverse contemporary issues facing Tamil IT researchers. Dr.Vasu reported that majority of the papers for the conference were from Tamilnadu and thanked all the participants for their travel to Germany.

In the plenary session talks, Mr.Muthu Nedumaran (Malaysia, Former Chair INFITT) to the excitement of the audience demonstrated Tamil enabling 3G Mobile devices such as iPhone, Android, Nokia for News applications. Prof. A.G.Ramakrishnan (Indian Institute of Science, Benguluru) demonstrated a major technical breakthrough of live changing implications for the blind and illiterate through IT. The audience were spell bound when Prof.Ramakrihnan’s computer read out a text from a Tamil book (Text to Speech) and then recognized his handwriting on the screen. Prof.Thomas Malten (IITS) showed the various online Sanskrit, Tamil Dictionaries made available by IITS, the University of Cologne has made available the tools used to prepare these texts.