CHENNAI, INDIA: Chennai will be witnessing a major conference ‘Connect 2008’, on the eve of the annual Information and Communication Technology (ICT) event.

Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in association with the Government of Tamil Nadu will conduct the 8th edition of this event between Sep 11-13 at the Chennai Trade Center. M Karunanidhi, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu will inaugurate the conference and Andimuthu Raja, Union Minister for Communications and IT, and Jyotiraditya Scindia, Minister of State for Communications will address during the conference.

It may be noted that the current IT policy of the state was based on the deliberations of the ‘Connect 2006’. And based on the deliberations of ‘Connect 2007’ the Government of Tamil Nadu has come out with a proposal of starting an ICT academy, which would collaborate with the industry people and restructure college curricula to suit the industry requirements.

The first course of the academy would be launched during October and the portal for the academy will be inaugurated during the eve of Connect 2008. Subu D Subramanian, Chairman, Connect 2008 said that the ICT academy will have prominent members from companies such as Dell, Nokia, HP to name a few.

The theme for Connect 2008 is ‘Global Competitiveness and Equitable Growth-Driven by Innovation’. The three-day conference will focus on the emerging markets (global opportunities); culture of innovation (building research and design capabilities); building capabilities and capacity for growth; achieving equitable growth and India@75 (vision for Tamil Nadu).

Two other important events will happen concurrently with Connect 2008. One is the Computer Society of India (CSI) Annual Convention, which returns to Chennai after 12 years, in association with the South East Asia Regional Computer Confederation (SEARCC).

The other event is ‘Taitronics India’ organized by the Taiwan Trade Center, which will showcase consumer electronics, auto parts accessories, electrical appliances and machinery, electronic components and services related to wireless and broadband. The CSI Annual Convention will be held between Sep 10-13.

The theme for the convention is ‘Connected Society’ and will focus on inclusive growth, leveraging the benefits of technology.

The technology sessions are designed to cover topics like virtualization, disaster management, mobile application development, collaborative systems, infrastructure management, enterprise computing trends, and adaptive infrastructure, etc.

The theme-related sessions cover topics such as e-choupal, aSQUA, e-waste, green computing, local language computing, changing with technology, micro banking, ICT in cricket, technology for games, healthcare delivery innovations, telemedicine, information assurance and IT outsourcing.

The sessions for the tutorials will include handheld computers, venture funding, IT infrastructure library (ITIL), e-health, business process management (BPM), Web 2.0.

The tutorials are organized on Sep 10, 2008 in IMAGE Auditoriam, MRC Nagar, Chennai and the Annul Convention will take place in the Chennai Trade Center in concurrence with Connect 2008 and Taitronics Expo.