Flagship Conference Research Articles

Guest Editorial

This is a special issue of the SAIEE Africa Research Journal (ARJ) featuring selected best articles that were initially presented at the 26 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> Southern African Power Universities Engineering Conference (SAUPEC). The conference was hosted by the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg during the period 24–26 January 2018. Since its inception in 1990, SAUPEC has become an annual flagship conference for the power engineering community in Southern Africa.

Technology Focus: Health, Safety, and Environment (August 2019)

Technology Focus You may have noticed that the Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) Technology Focus section is larger than most. This is because nearly every SPE conference produces important HSE papers. For instance, papers chosen for this issue come from SPE’s Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, and the International Petroleum Technology Conference. In addition, since the early 1990s, SPE’s HSE discipline has produced a flagship biennial international conference, for which preparations are under way. The 2020 SPE International Conference and Exhibition on Health, Safety, Environment, and Sustainability, with the theme of “Generating•Pride and Enabling Engagement,” will be a rich•source of•quality•papers. The 2019 SPE president, Sami Alnuaim, has made sustainability and industry pride central to his term. Paper SPE 191537 addresses necessary transitions in resource management to facilitate sustainability, and pride in the industry was treated in depth in the March issue of JPT. Certainly, one key source of pride is the industry’s contribution to enabling socioeconomic development in many nations and the consequent improvement in individual quality of life around the world. A critical support role within the upstream sector of the highly complex oil and gas value chain is played by the thousands of people who work in HSE and sustainability. The HSE performance of the industry has improved dramatically over the decades because of technological advances and a greater understanding of systems, processes, and human performance. Professional development of the HSE function is gaining momentum within SPE. It is a standalone primary discipline but also a popular secondary discipline because HSE and sustainability affect us all. No matter our role, we all need expertise in these topics. Reflecting the maturing of the discipline, more events than ever are featuring HSE and sustainability content. A core community of volunteers is constantly working on new events and ways to advance industry practice and support. Last November, SPE signed a memorandum of understanding with both the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers and IPIECA to support the role it can play in enabling their work and extending their reach. More HSE-centered special sessions and program tracks exist at technical conferences. Further developments, including growing study groups at the country level, are in the works. In June, at the Gaia Summit, SPE played host to 50 thought leaders and change agents from the industry and its stakeholders to consider the current state of the industry in relation to achieving sustainable development. The group worked together for 2 days to consider how to contribute to the industry in a way that will be on the right side of history. How can we capitalize on deserved pride in how the industry contributes to society? How can the industry earn the admiration of critics? What is the principled, responsible way forward that draws on the brainpower, infrastructure, values, and capability of the entire industry and its stakeholders? Along with pride, engagement is also critical for this discipline. The current SPE Strategic Plan revised SPE’s role in enabling industry engagement, both internally and externally. Those dedicated to HSE and sustainability are already called upon to engage employees in making safe behaviors routine. Now, this call will push the engagement even further. Leaders are engaged to lead—to engage external parties with regard to their concerns. Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. SPE 195412 Leveraging Technology To Manage Health, Safety, and Human-Rights Risks: A Differentiated Approach to Managing Fatigue by Norsayani M. Yaakob, Petronas, et al. SPE 193082 Proactive Application of Human-Performance Science in Risk-Assessment Process Within Dynamic Operations of an Oilfield Service Provider by Abdelsalam Yasseen, Baker Hughes, a GE Company, et al. SPE 191463 Overview of Industry Advancements in Environmental Awareness by Richard Haut, Houston Advanced Research Center, et al.

Society news: SAS 2019

IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium (SAS) is one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society (IMS). SAS brings together sensor developers, innovators and users, providing a forum for the exploration of new applications in sensor technology. The conference focuses on sensors, sensing methodologies, sensor fabrication technologies, and sensor applications. This year's conference, which was the 14th in a series for this global event and involved Europe, USA, and Oceania, was held in Sophia Antipolis, France from March 11–13, 2019.

Special Issue: Highlights From ASME CIE 2018

Special Issue: Highlights From ASME CIE 2018

Guest Editorial Selected Papers From Regional Flagship Conferences of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (ICECS 2017, LASCAS 2018, and NEWCAS 2018)

This issue represents selected papers from three Regional Flagship Conferences of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2017 and 2018: International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (ICECS) 2017 held in Batumi, Georgia, on 5–8 December 2017; Latin American Symposium on Circuits and Systems (LASCAS) 2018 held in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on 25–28 February 2018 and International NEWCAS Conference held in Montreal, Canada on 24–27 June 2018. The authors of the best papers presented at these conferences were invited to contribute to this special issue. It includes 19 papers across the technical topics relevant to the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society: analog, digital and mixed-signal circuits, computer-aided design, power electronics, signal processing and circuits and systems for communications.

Guest Editorial Special Issue on the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems 2018

This special issue is a collection of selected papers presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2018 that was held in Florence, Italy, on 27-30 May 2018. As the flagship conference of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), ISCAS attracts researchers across all the main themes associated with the circuits and systems domain. ISCAS 2018 was attended by more than a thousand delegates presenting their papers on analog, mixed signal and digital circuits, communication systems, signal processing, power circuits and systems, and many other relevant and timely topics.

Special Issue for I2MTC 2018

The 35th IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technical Conference (I2MTC) was held in Houston, TX, USA, on May 22–25, 2018. I2MTC is the flagship conference of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society held every year since 1986. It is dedicated to advances in measurement methodologies, measurement systems, instrumentation, and sensors in all areas of science and technology. The I2MTC is proposed as a catalyst to promote interactions between industry and academia; a wide spectrum of academic research results is presented, with potential practical applications in current industrial technology, as well as industry and application-driven developments.

Generating a representative keyword subset pertaining to an academic conference series

The breadth and velocity of innovation has resulted in explosion of research documents day by day. Academic conferences are being arranged worldwide, most of them in regular intervals, thereby generating a huge volume of research documents. Extracting undiscovered knowledge from the conference papers and thereby finding the inter-relationship of conference research topics is a challenging task. This paper attempts towards knowledge discovery for the conference with the help of keywords mentioned in the papers presented therein. The scheme proposed here tries to include the entire set of conference research papers using a small subset of all available keywords. The correctness and complexity of the scheme are analyzed. Proof of concept is established through some flagship conference held annually round the globe. The performance is favourable when compared with available text mining methods, as far as practicable. Results indicate that the scheme could be useful in characterizing topical themes of academic conferences, which may benefit both participants and organizers.

Toward Bridging the Advertising Academician–Practitioner Gap

Abstract: Observers have long recognized the unfortunate gap between the interests and priorities of those who study advertising versus those who practice it. This long-standing separation, commonly referred to as the academician–practitioner gap, is deemed to be detrimental to both groups, and is considered significantly larger within the ranks of advertising as compared to other fields. Building on the work of Nyilasy and Reid (2009), the current study utilizes a two-step textual and content analysis of the proceedings from advertising's two flagship conferences—the American Academy of Advertising (3As) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As)—from 2010 to 2015 to identify potential changes in dissemination, as well as differences in knowledge content and form between the two groups. Results indicate there continues to be a sizable gap between academicians and practitioners in terms of topics of interest, the method and frequency of knowledge dissemination, as well as in the format and authorship of content. Recommendations on how to improve the flow of communication between academicians and practitioners, thus making knowledge creation more interdependent and reciprocal, are also suggested.

ITS+DM Hackathon (ITSC 2017): Lane Departure Prediction With Naturalistic Driving Data

On October 16th, 2017, in Yokohama, Japan, from 8:00 to 18:00, the first Intelligent Transportation Systems plus Data Mining challenge was organized under the umbrella of the 2017 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference, the flagship conference of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society. This activity was organized thanks to a three way collaboration between the ITS Society, Nagoya University, and the IEEE ITSC 2017 organizers. The twenty-three contestants, coming from eleven different countries, faced a classic Naturalistic Driving problem: Lane Departure detection. This paper presents the three best solutions produced. The solutions submitted by most of the participants were very diverse and interesting, but overall, the top ones concurred in the use of ensemble learning after a very interesting feature engineering phase. This hackathon formulation was complex in several ways. It was complex in terms of class imbalance, the challenge time duration and the fact that the provided dataset included only numerical measurements coming from the inertial unit in the testing car. That restriction made it difficult to expect outstanding results ? the best one was only slightly over 3% above baseline. However, the organizers thought that such complexities pushed participants to show their repertoire as data scientists, taking into consideration for example computer power load of the different algorithms tested, and overall yielding more interesting approaches to share with the community. Additionally, the most interesting learned lessons were shared, from both an organizational and technical point of view.

IEEE NetSoft 2017 special issue: Softwarization sustaining a hyper‐connected world: En route to 5G

IEEE NetSoft 2017 special issue: Softwarization sustaining a hyper‐connected world: En route to 5G

Lotfi Zadeh, the 2018 Flagship Conference, and Code Ocean [Editorial

Presents the introductory editorial for this issue of the publication.

Special Issue on the 2017 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference

The 34th IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technical Conference (I2MTC) was held in Turin, Italy, from May 22 to 25, 2017. I2MTC is the flagship conference of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society and has attracted researchers from many countries in the world, who are working on instrumentation and measurement, from novel measurement methods and instruments to new applications.

ISWC 2017: Riding the Waves of Wearables

The annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) is the flagship conference on all topics related to wearable computing and the ideal venue to present and learn about cutting-edge research in the field. The authors share their observations from the most recent gathering, held in September 2017 in Maui, Hawaii.

The 4th International Conference on Sustainable Agriculture and Environment (4th ICSAE)

PrefaceOn behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to express our sincere gratitude for all of your contributions and participation in the 4th International Conference of Sustainable Agriculture (ICSAE) which was held in Surakarta Indonesia, 10-12 August 2017. This conference belongs to ICSAE conference series that was already held in Surakarta Indonesia (2013), Konya Turkey (2015) and Warsaw Poland (2016). The International Conference on Sustainable Agriculture and Environment was aimed to provide a platform for researchers and academics as well as practicing professionals from all over the world, to present their research and professional development activities in agriculture, environment, food and other relevant subjects. This conference series was an effort to identify the ideas, practices and policies that constitute our concept of sustainable agriculture. We are doing this activity for two reasons: 1) to clarify the research agenda and priorities of our goal, and 2) to suggest practical approaches, which may be appropriate in moving toward a better concept of sustainable agriculture. The concept of sustainable agriculture itself is still evolving and thus, we published not as a definitive or final statement, but as an invitation to continue our dialogue.At this conference, there were 170 papers submitted from 15 different countries. Each paper proposal was evaluated by two reviewers and 120 papers were presented. However, only papers which meet the certain criteria were selected for published in this IOP Conference Proceeding Series. We would like to thank to all of our conference committees as well as to all participants without whom the conference won’t gain the current success. We are sure that, 4th ICSAE will be the flagship conference for researchers, students and professionals in the areas related to Agriculture & Environment. Their contributions have benefited our countries and the world by disseminating their research advancements and discoveries. Our ideas were network building and knowledge exchange in order to straighten existing partnership and foster new collaborations.

How do ideas flow around SIGMM conferences?

The ACM Multimedia conference just celebrated its quarter century in October 2017. This is a great opportunity to reflect on the intellectual influence of the conference, and the SIGMM community in general. The progress on big scholarly data allows us to make this task analytical. I download a data dump from Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) in February 2016. I find all papers from ACM Multimedia (MM), the SIGMM flagship conference - there are 4,346 publication entries from 1993 to 2015. I then search the entire MAG for: (1) any paper that appears in the reference list of these MM papers - 35,829 entries across 1,560 publication venues (including both journals and conferences), with an average of 8.24 per paper; (2) any paper that cites any of these MM papers - 46826 citations from 1694 publication venues, with an average of 10.77 citations per paper. This data allows us to profile the incoming (references) and outgoing (citations) influence in the community in detail.

Through the Looking Glass - The 2018 Edition: Trends in Solid-State Circuits from the 65th ISSCC

The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is the flagship conference of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. This year, for the 65th ISSCC, the theme is Silicon Engineering a Social World. Continued advances in solid-state circuits and systems have brought ever-more powerful communication and computational capabilities into mobile form factors. Such ubiquitous smart devices lie at the heart of a revolution shaping how we connect, collaborate, build relationships, and share information. These social technologies allow people to maintain connections and support networks not otherwise possible; they provide the ability to access information instantaneously and from any location, thereby helping to shape world events and culture, empowering citizens of all nations, and creating social networks that allow worldwide communities to develop and form bonds based on common interests.

Guest Editorial 2017 Special Issue on CASS Regional Flagship Conferences

Welcome to the 2017 Special Issue on the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) Regional Flagship Conferences, a collection of selected papers presented at the 2016 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (APCCAS 2016), held in Jeju, South Korea, October 25–28, 2016, the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Electronics Circuits and Systems (ICECS 2016), held in Monte Carlo, Monaco, December 11–14, 2016, and the 8th IEEE Latin American Symposium on Circuits and Systems (LASCAS 2017), held in Bariloche, Argentina, February 20–23, 2017. In APCCAS 2016, 212 papers were presented, selected from 310 papers submitted; in ICECS 2016, 191 papers were presented, selected from 353 papers submitted; in LASCAS 2017, 70 papers were presented, selected from 172 papers submitted.

New Cochairs, Expanding to New Activities [Student's Corner

Before I sat down to write this issue's Student's Corner column, I took some time to reflect back on the many great Student Activities Committee (SAC) events I have had the joy of planning and/or in which I have participated: the traditional Lunch with Leaders at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) flagship conferences; the pub crawl through historic parts of Stockholm, Sweden; a dragon boat race in Daejeon, South Korea (Figure 1); working with RAS leadership to better connect students and industry through the Society (Figure 2); and many more fantastic endeavors! I have enjoyed partaking in each event, but none of them would be possible without the hard work of many individuals-especially my fellow SAC members.

Faraday Discussions meeting Catalysis for Fuels.

Welcome to Africa was the motto when after more than 100 years the flag ship conference series of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Faraday Discussions was hosted for the first time on the African Continent. Under the fitting topic 'Catalysis for Fuels' over 120 delegates followed the invitation by the conference chair Prof. Graham Hutchings FRS (Cardiff Catalysis Institute), his organizing committee and the co-organizing DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Catalysis c*change (). In the presentations of 21 invited speakers and 59 posters, cutting edge research in the field of catalysis for fuels, designing new catalysts for synthetic fuels, hydrocarbon conversion in the production of synthetic fuels and novel photocatalysis was presented over the two-day meeting. The scene was set by the opening lecture of Prof. Enrique Iglesias (UC Berkeley) and wrapped-up with the concluding remarks by Philip Gibson (SASOL).