The Tamil Internet Conference 2011 that begins in the US on Thursday will discuss web assisted Tamil teaching and learning among others.

"With the increasing number of Tamil users in the internet and modern gadgets, this conference will bring together software developers, academicians and users of these softwares," Badri Seshadri, one of the organisers who shortlisted the research papers, said.

The United States-based International Forum for Information Technology (INFITT) in Tamil organises the conference every year, alternatively in India and abroad.

Last year, the conference was held alongside the World Classical Tamil Conference in Coimbatore. This year INFITT is organising it in the University of Pennsylvania between June 17-19.

"We received over 150 research papers from across the world this year and have shortlisted 50 papers for presentation," Kavi Arasan, Chairman, International Organising Committee told PTI over phone.

Topics such as web assisted Tamil teaching and learning, creation of Tamil blogs, making Wiki documents in Tamil, text to speech, machine translation, among others, are going to be discussed by experts in the fields, said K Kalyanasundaram, Chair, Programme Committee.

Among those participating in the event are academicians and technocrats from MGoogle to invest USD 280 mn in residential solar installationsicrosoft, Anna University, Chennai and Tamil Virtual University,