The Federal University of Technology (FUT) Minna, has hosted the first Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) Springer Conference in West Africa.
The conference, third in the series of the International Conference on Information Technology (ICTA), was organized by the School of Information and Communication Technology (SICT) and held virtually from 24th to 26th November, 2020.
The theme of the conference was “Leveraging Emerging Technology for Sustainable Digitisation of Society.”
Declaring the biennial conference open on Wednesday, November 25, 2020, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Prof. Abdullahi Bala, said that the institution was delighted that SICT was able to organize the conference despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Represented by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Administration), Prof. Emmanuel Emeka Udensi, Bala disclosed that FUTMinna was working very hard on ICT and its applications with a view to combining online teaching with the face-to-face approach, in line with the present global realities.
He, therefore, expressed the hope that the outcomes of the conference will help enhance people’s capacity.
Earlier. the Dean, SICT, FUTMinna, Prof. Nicholas Iwokwagh explained that ICTA was a biennial conference which provides a platform for intellectual discourse and cross fertilization of ideas for scholars in the field of Information and Communication within and outside Nigeria.
Prof. Iwokwagh said the importance of this year’s conference cannot be over emphasized in the light of the digital transformation that is sweeping across the nations of the world.
“We anticipate that it will stimulate research and deepen the conversation on how best Emerging Technologies could be leveraged in the context of strategy, policy, and diplomacy to contribute to the sustainable digitization of a globalized world.’’
He disclosed that a total of 158 submissions were received from 12 countries including: Germany, South Korea, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, Pakistan, Argentina, South Africa and India and each paper was carefully reviewed by members of the Technical/Editorial Committee before acceptance for presentation.
He thanked the Vice-Chancellor for his helpful disposition and support for the programmes and projects of SICT.
One of the General Chairs of the conference, Prof. Sanjay Misra of Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, had disclosed that more than 30 of the conference papers were authored by scholars outside Nigeria.
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Prof. Misra, a former Head, Department of Computer Engineering, FUTMinna noted that with the diversity of participants the conference, as earlier planned, would have afforded researchers from different parts of the world to meet physically and see the beauty of Nigeria and FUTMinna, were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic.
He thanked Prof. Iwokwagh for his motivation which brought the idea of the conference to fruition.
The conference Keynote addresses were presented by Professors Vincenzo Piuri, Universiti degli Studi di Milano, Italy; Andrew Ware University of South Wales, UK and Osvaldo Gervasi, University of Perugia, Italy.
Some of the papers presented at the conference included: Gamifying users’ learning experience of Scrum; Developer Mental Health: Scooping review; Drug Verification System using Quick Response; Privacy Preservation in Mobile-Based Learning Systems: Current Trends, Methodologies, Challenges, Opportunities and Future Direction: A Review; A Novel Approach to News Archiving from Newswires and Visualizing Multilevel Test-to-Code Relations amongst others.
The Next Edition reports that FUTMinna had recently partnered Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State to host the 3rd International Conference of Applied Informatics (ICAI), the first of its kind in Africa.
