1. The CIT98 was attended by 231 participants and more than 50 honorary/student participants. There were more than 40 participants from abroad (10 countries). Out of 40 say 25 were from Indian origin.

2. There were eight tutorials organized at four to five venues in Bhubaneswar and attended by more than 200 participants. Most of the participants were local. The tutorials were mostly free.

3. There were 40 papers presented in two days (two parallel sessions on many slots) by speakers whose papers were reviewed and accepted. The acceptance rate of full papers were 38%.

4. Total seven invited talks were delivered by experts from abroad and India in addition to three key note addresses. The Keynote speakers were: Prof. Jayadev Misra, UT Austin; Mr. Jnan R. Dash, Oracle Corp., USA; and Mr. H. Chowdary, IT advisor to AP Govt.

5. The conference Proceedings was published by Tata McGraw Hill Pub, New Delhi with a nice cover designed by oriya artist Mr. Pravin Badhia from San Jose. The proceeding came out as a book with title "Trends in Information Technology".

6. There were two interesting Panel discussions on education and industries organised on 22nd and 23rd after-noons. Persons from Govt., academics, industries and media participated.

7. The conf was inaugurated by industry minister of Orissa in which the DoE Secretary, New Delhi was the chief guest. Prof. Jayadev Misra and Mr. Jnan R Dash were felicitated for their contributions in the field of information technology. On 21st December evening, Chief Minister gave a state dinner to the participants that was attended by 150 delegates and guests at state guest house. Most secretaries of Govt. of Orissa related to industries and IT attended it including chief secretary. Addl. Chief Secretary was the guest during valedictory function.

8. All India Online had co-sponsored the conf and was present at the hotel lobby to demonstrate internet access and provided e-mail communications for participants. It was nice experience to many local students who surfed the internet first time.

9. From India, participations were seen from 4 IITs, IISC Bangalore, Jadavpur Univ, many national R&D organizations, defense organizations, neighboring universities, multinational companies from metros and some financial institutions. Faculty and students of most academic institutions of Orissa were attending the conference. Persons from Infosys and Satyam participated too.

10. We were able to offer a good number of conference fellowships to students from Orissa and Indian institutions due the donations from following persons in North America. Somdutt Behura, Triswampit Mitra, Lalu Mansingha, Manoj Sahu, Asutosh Dutta, Pradeep Lenka, Brajendra Panda and Suchitra Patnaik.

11. Though we started with a very modest sum of Rs.10,000/- transferred from oits to cit98 as seed money, we got an amount of about five lakhs from sponsorship and advertisements in the souvenir (souvenir is another publication besides the proceedings). Co-sponsorers were: Oracle India, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Indian Institute of Sience and Industrial Technology ( Mr. Bhagat), All India On Line, C-DAC Pune, OEC, Orissa Computer Academy, BBSR, ITAO, SIDB Bhubaneswar, Silcon Inst of Info. tech, Bhubaneswar, Oricom, IBM Training School, BBSR, IEDSO-USA, RCM BBSR and NIST Berhampur, most of whom contributed and all of whom participated in the Conference. We are thankful to them for the support. We shall have about 1 lakh saving from CIT98 surplus for OITS that should go for its activities and organising CIT99.

12. The participants and guests were provided with lunches at Hotel venue near the swimming pool all the three days. The banquet was organized at khandagiri with bonfire and barbeque in open air cave. The banquet was preceded by an Oddisi program performed by Cuttack troupe which was organised by IISIT, BBSR.

Rabi Mahapatra

Program Chair, CIT'98

Department of Computer Science Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3112, Email: rabi@cs.tamu.edu