Marking the 100th birth anniversary of all-time great Irish-American computer programmer Kathleen (Kay) McNulty Antonelli, the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Lovely Professional University organized its 5th International Conference on Computing Sciences (ICCS)–“Kathleen 100”. His Excellency, Julius Pranevičius, Ambassador of the Republic of Lithuania to India inaugurated the conference by paying homage to the great programmer, and anticipated grand outcomes through its conduction. LPU Chancellor Mr Ashok Mittal congratulated all teachers and students at the CSE School for conducting a globally beneficial conference.
The conference was aimed to facilitate scientists, researchers, academicians, industrialists, and students across the globe. International and national keynote speakers at the conference shared illustrious advancements and challenges in diverse aspects of computer science and engineering. It vehemently witnessed exchange of innovative ideas among the CSE researchers and provided opportunity to experts and industry leaders for sharing their experiences and success stories.
While initiating the event, it was briefed out by Senior Dean at LPU School of CSE Prof Dr Rajeev Sobti that Kathleen is recognized as one of the first six women programmers of the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer- ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). She was selected by the US Army during World War II to work for performing ballistics calculations. Her story of computational success, particularly as a “human computer” in early days of computing, was nearly lost to history and now LPU has presented due distinguishable credentials to the same.
Kathleen’s efforts and ENIAC’s development are instrumental in sparking revolution in computer science and electrical engineering that continues to this day. In this context, Dr. Syed Saif Abrar, Advisory Systems Engineering, IBM India, talked on the topic-“From Kathleen to Exascale Supercomputing”. He informed that this latest computing handles today’s new massive converged modelling, simulation, AI and analytics workloads. Desiring institutions to be agile and faculty to be updated, he wanted all CSE students and teachers to be ever on the alert for the next revolutions in the field.
Passionate about IT skilling, Founder & CEO of CodeTantra, Ramana Telidevara revealed his missionary zeal of quality education for all. He talked about the most innovative technical skilling platform – CodeTantra. He conveyed that it has developed a disruptive technology for addressing ITSkill Gap. Its distantly monitored online examination is a superb example in this regard, especially in the days like those of COVID-19 pandemic. Keynote speaker at the conference, Prof Salil Kanhere from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia shared his paper on ‘Block-chains for Cyber-Physical Systems: Applications, Opportunities and Challenges’. Prof Uwe Aickelin from the University of Melbourne, Australia talked about “Artificial Intelligence for Medical Data Mining and Decision Support”. Prof. Ernesto Damiani from Khalifa University, UAE, shared his thoughts about ‘Modelling Threats to Machine Learning Systems’.
Prof Rupert Ward from the University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom; Prof Dr Mohammad S. Obaidat from the College of Computing and Informatics University of Sharjah; and, Prof Vincenzo Piuri from the Department of Informatics, University of Milan (Italy) also participated through their video messages. In all 246 international and national research papers were received at the conference, which are accepted to publish in the ‘Journal of Discrete Mathematical Sciences & Cryptography.