10th International Conference- Confluence 2020 on the theme “Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering” commences at Amity University

In order to abreast the budding IT and Engineering professionals on the latest and upcoming trends in the next few years and also to foster research relations between industry-academia, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Amity School of Engineering and Technology (ASET) in association with AWS – Amazon organized “Confluence 2020”- 10th International Conference on the theme “Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering” at University campus, Sector 125 Noida.

The aim of the three day conference is to bring Scholars, Scientists and Industrialists in the IT industry to a common platform wherein they will deliberate upon to the need for further development & research in the field and the growing need for IT security.

Welcoming the gathering, Dr. (Prof.) Balvinder Shukla, Vice Chancellor, Amity University Uttar Pradesh said that initially, the industrial revolutions had a huge gap of century and decades occurrence but now, with advancement of technology the revolution is happening at a rapid speed along with some complexities which are challenging for industry as well as for educational institutions. She remarked that it is the responsibility of educational institutions to develop and nurture future manpower as per industrial requirements and for that, there is a need to change pedagogy and assessment methodologies that will subsequently, create a bridge between theoretical learning and practical knowledge. “Moreover, the industry-academia collaboration and collaboration between educational institutions across the globe will be important, thereby exposing budding talent to global learning which is the need of the hour.” Dr. Shukla opined.

Delivering his keynote address on ‘Robot Audition and It’s Deployment’, Dr. Kazuhiro Nakadai, Professor, Honda Research Institute, Japan said that robot audition is a research field that focuses on developing technologies that make robots to hear sounds though their own ears, i.e. microphones. He added that this research teams up the domain of robotics, artificial intelligence and signal processing. Dr. Nakadai shared that at Honda, a robot audition software is being developed that can listen to several things at once. The resulting software called HARK is open-sourced for academia and has been applied to a robot that can listen to three simultaneous meal orders and to a musical robot that can play ensemble by cancelling its own playing sounds and improving the beat-tracking of human performance. He emphasized that robot audition should be more robust against more realistic environments, like in-door and out-door, moving sound sources and moving robots. He stressed upon collaboration between academic and industrial research for progress of robot audition.

Speaking on the occasion, Prof.(Dr.) Bernhard Pfahringer, Waikato University, New Zealand advised the paper presenters to keep their presentations simple, illustrious and to the point. He added that there would be occasions when papers would be rejected by examiners or journals but one shouldn’t lose hope and focus on exploring the topic of research further which will help them develop as an individual and the research outcome will help the society, at large.

Prof. (Dr.) Mike Hinchey, Director of Lero & Professor, University of Limerick, Ireland talked about ‘Building Resilient Space Exploration Missions’ and highlighted that space exploration missions represent some of the largest, most ambitious and most costly engineering systems, yet developed. He mentioned that NASA spends 60% of the budget on monitoring the earth from space. He added that developing space systems is a complex task, driven by standards and safety requirements to ensure reliability of sophisticated hardware and software. Dr. Hinchey touched upon new approaches to build missions which would be far more ambitious and are more resilient in harsh environments. He shared that future NASA missions will focus on the development of swarm-based spacecraft systems comprising multiple self-organizing and autonomous spacecraft.

Dr. (Prof.) Abhay Bansal, Jt Head, ASET informed that this Conference has received over 600 research papers from across the world including countries like United States of America, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, South Korea, UAE, Greece, Spain, Oman, Yemen amongst others. After carefully examining the papers, 147 papers have been selected for presentation which will also be uploaded at IEEE Explore Digital Library. He apprised that the field of cloud computing, data and engineering is expanding and creating enormous job opportunities but currently, the industry is facing lack of manpower. Dr. Bansal mentioned that there are 4 million jobs in USA, around 2.2 million jobs in India and by end of 2020, it will be a 400 billion global market. He urged the students to explore the field and nurture the skills accordingly since the career growth is immense in the field as the demand for professionals is high but the supply is less.

On the occasion, eminent academicians including Prof.(Dr.) John Domingue, Professor, Open University, UK; Dr. Kazuhiro Nakadai, Professor, Honda Research Institute, Japan; Prof.(Dr.) Bernhard Pfahringer, Waikato University, New Zealand; Dr. (Prof.) Parosh Abdullah, Uppsala University, Sweden and Prof. (Dr.) Ankit Agrawal, North Western University, USA were conferred upon honorary professorships.

During the second day of the conference, i.e Thursday January 30, 2020, a panel discussion on ‘Higher Education and Opportunity Abroad’ will be held at E-2 Auditorium from 10.00am onwards, followed by keynote addresses by Prof. (Dr.) Marita Turpin, University of Pretoria, South Africa on ‘Making the Fourth Industrial Revolution tangible by Introducing IoT Technology and Maker Spaces: Case Studies in University Education’; Prof. (Dr.) David Chesney, University of Michigan, USA on ‘The Intersection of Form, Function and Cost’; Prof. (Dr.) Ljiljana Brankovic, University of New castle, Australia on “Mathematics of Privacy’ and others.