The Durban University of Technology (DUT) recently hosted the Sixth Annual Information Communication Technology and Society Conference (ICTAS2022). This international conference was held virtually over two days.
DUT prides itself for being the consistent hosts of the ICTAS which is the only Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conference in Africa to be hosted by the same university annually. The previous ICTAS conferences have also proven to be a huge success as all papers presented in them were accepted and published by IEEE Xplore, a digital library that provides access to technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science and electronics.
The ICTAS2022 featured four distinguished keynote speakers, Dr Halina Kwaśnicka of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in Poland, Professor Fausto Giunchiglia of the University of Trento in Italy, Professor Carlos Guardiolaof Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain and Professor Francesco Petruccione of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
The first keynote speaker was Dr Kwaśnicka whose address was entitled: Explainable artificial intelligence: The road to artificial intelligence you can trust. Delivering the second address was Prof Giunchiglia who spoke on: Diversity, bias, online social relations and related issues. Speaking about Connecting the internal combustion engine was Prof Guardiola. The last keynote speaker was Prof Petruccione whose presentation was titled: Quantum technology and the 4th industrial revolution.
In attendance was also an international panel of reviewers and experts within the ICT field, whom assisted to maintain the high quality of articles included in the ICTAS proceedings, indexed by Scopus, with an H-index of 5. The articles were accredited by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) in South Africa and were published online by the IEEE Xplore.
“Responses to the call for submission of manuscripts had been down from the previous years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic conferences globally have suffered. The acceptance rate of all submissions is 47.22% with manifold manuscripts from prestigious institutions not being accepted due to the high standards of the review panel,” said the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Accounting and Informatics at DUT, Professor Oludayo Olugbara.
Furthermore, Prof Olugbara stated that the conference proceedings, which have been submitted to IEEE Xplore for online publication, contains a wide spectrum of unique contributions on themes in ICT with real societal impact. In addition, the topics covered machine learning, ICT for development, digital image processing, human-computer interaction, the internet of things, cybersecurity, and electronic engineering.
Regarding the overall assessment of the conference, Prof Olugbara indicated that the online survey conducted during the conference confirmed that it was well-organised, it fulfilled the needs of the researchers and was of a very high standard.
Congratulations to all the team members: Prof Millham (Chair), Dr Heukelman (Programme Chair), Dr Alveen Singh (Programme Director), Dr Wing (Treasurer), Dr Timothy Adeliyi (Keynote Chair), Mrs Robyn Thompson (Registration Chair), Mrs Subashnie Soobramoney (Publicity Chair) and Mrs Ugeshni Moodley (Logistics Chair).
Pictured: Attendees at the ICTAS2022
Simangele Zuma
