16th International Conference on Emerging Technologies 2021 was Held at Capital University

Capital University of Science and Technology (CUST) in collaboration with IEEE Islamabad section organized 16th International Conference on Emerging Technologies (ICET-2021) virtually on 22nd and 23rd December 2021 through Microsoft Teams online platform. The conference was a two-day event divided into 8 technical sessions with a scope covering new and emerging technologies in various research domains. Therefore, conference captured the interest of a large audience. The conference targeted research presentations by academic and professional researchers. The conference also included invited keynote talks from renowned academicians which enabled participants to learn about the latest trends in technology. The event started on 22nd December 2021 with the recitation of Holy Quran. After that, conference General Chair Professor Dr. Noor Muhammad Khan welcomed the participants of the conference and gave a brief introduction about the conference and the contribution of the Capital University of Science and Technology Islamabad in the R&D activities of the country. He emphasized on the importance of industry and academia collaboration in organizing such activities. He also highlighted the role of IEEE Islamabad section in the overall conference activity. He added that 5G technology has now truly taken off all the way across the world and is rapidly changing the way humans and non-human things communicate and exchange big data with each other giving rise to the R&D efforts in the emerging fields of IoTs, Artificial Intelligence and Smart Energy Systems. He emphasized that ICET-2021 will serve as an ideal technical forum for these fast- evolving fields at such a difficult time of COVID-19 pandemic.

After the welcome address, a keynote speech on the topic of ‘Research directives in Emerging Technologies’ was given by Professor Dr. Shoaib Ahmed Khan, chancellor CASE, Islamabad. He threw light on the prominent emerging technologies and their applications in solving the socio-economic problems in the country. After this, conference activities went under way.

A total of 40 research papers were presented online in 8 technical sessions in two days. Every session was chaired by two session chairs. Conference activities also included two tutorial talks by renowned researchers from the academia and industry. After two days of multiple technical sessions, finally the event was brought to a close on the evening of 23th December, 2021. In the closing ceremony, another keynote speech was given by Professor Dr. Celia Shahnaz, IEEE WIE Chair-Elect on the topic of ‘Research and Innovation for Women Empowerment to support Sustainable Development Goals’. She highlighted the role of women in the engineering field and portrayed numerous ways to increase their contribution through the IEEE platform. After the keynote talk, Dr. Saira Ahmed, member of the Evaluation Committee, announced the best paper awards in student and professional categories. She said the Evaluation Committee, after a rigorous evaluation and scrutiny process, selected the paper ‘Urdu Miner: An Application for Urdu Text mining’ as the best paper in student category and the paper ‘BirdView Retina-Net: Small-Scale Object Detector for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’ as the best paper in professional category. Dr. Saira congratulated the authors on their achievement. Finally, conference Co-Patron, Professor Dr. Mansoor Ahmed delivered the vote of thanks speech and applauded the hard work of the organizing team and their tireless endeavors in making this online conference a success. He also apprised the audience about the review criteria of all submitted papers. The review criteria included significance of the problem, novelty, clarity, completeness, and accuracy. He praised the performance of all the participants and acknowledged the fact that without such conferences it is very difficult for the industry to reach academia. Event was brought to a close on the concluding remarks by the conference General Chair Professor Dr. Noor Muhammad Khan.