A SERIES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY EVENTS START IN ARMENIA

YEREVAN, AUGUST 1, NOYAN TAPAN. A series of events on the information
technologies (IT) sector started with a summer school for children
engaged in computer programming, which will be followed by an open
programming competition of schoolchildren scheduled for the first half
of August. Hovhannes Avoyan, Chairman of the Union of IT Enterprises,
Karen Vardanian, the union’s Executive Director and Bagrat Yengibarian,
Director of the Enterprise Incubator Foundation, stated this at a
joint press conference on July 27. They said that these events will
be continued in the second half of August by the programming school
and competition, while the third All-Armenian open competition with
the participation of young programmers aged 30 years and under will
take place in early September. An internation conference on IT will
be held in Yerevan on September 20 within the framework of the third
Armenia-Diaspora Forum. The RA President’s educational awards in the
IT sector will be given on September 26, and the first semiconductor
eqipment design competition among students will take place on September
27. An international conference "The Development of IT in Countries
without Outlet to Sea" will be held in Yerevan on October 3-6, and the
gala-show of winners of the 3rd Eurasian contest of the World Summit
on the Information Society will take place on October 5-7. The 2nd
international DigiTec exhibition of information, telecommunication
and high technologies is scheduled for October 6-8. The 2006 events
dedicated to the IT sector will finish with a competition among
Armenian higher educational institutions (on October 8) and the Open
Source Programming Festival (on October 14). K.

Vardanian attached special importance to holding DigiTec, noting the
existence of all prerequisites for granting an international status
to this exhibition, with 11 big foreign companies having submitted
bids for participation in this event, including Mitsubishi-Electric,
Microsoft, National Instruments, Festo, Synopsys, Virage Logic. He
expressed a hope that the number of participants in Digitec will
double compared with 37 ones last year. Last year Digitec became the
largest IT exhibition in the South Caucasian region. In B.

Yengibarian’s words, the international conference on IT to be held
in September will mainly be dedicated to development of wireless
technologies. Such famous international companies as Sun Microsystems,
Microsoft, Intel, Alcatel will take part in the conference.