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.

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