Dr Patrick Then
KUCHING: Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus will host the Society for Design and Process Science (SDPS) conference next year, expecting to attract 200 participants from around the world.
Themed ‘Innovative Healthy Societies from Renewable Energy, Integrative ICT/Bioinformatics, Effective Healthcare, and Sustainable Development’, the conference will be held from June 15 to 20, 2014.
Delegates including those from Europe, USA, Canada and South America are expected to converge on the university.
SDPS is a non-profit organisation founded in 1995 and offers collaborative environments for strengthening the links between research and practice, and between scientific, cultural and social knowledge.
A delegation from Swinburne Sarawak will travel to Sao Paulo for its conference in October.
While its annual conferences have been held around the globe, this will be the first time Southeast Asia has been chosen.
“Our site inspection team was most impressed by both the facilities and people available for our 19th international conference. On behalf of SDPS, we want to thank everyone who helped us during our visit and look forward to a very successful conference next year in Kuching,” said SDPS senior advisor and treasurer Stan Gatchel, who recently visited Swinburne Sarawak.
Dr Patrick Then, the associate dean for the computing faculty at Swinburne Sarawak, who is also the organising chairperson for the conference, is upbeat about the event.
“The theme of the conference sits well with the research aspirations of Swinburne Sarawak. The university is a keen player on transformative education and research which focuses on making a positive difference to humankind.
“As a result, our courses have a strong emphasis on transformative education and we equip our students with industry relevant, real-life knowledge and skills,” said Then.
As the host for next year’s conference, he said that the university will be putting together the event, calling for and reviewing conference papers as well as selecting articles that will be presented.
In conjunction with the conference, SDPS will confer distinguished research awards to Malaysian scientists.
Then also said students will have a chance to get involved.
“They will have much to gain from the conference. Besides giving them exposure to the nitty-gritty of organising the event, they will also have a good opportunity to build networks,” he said.
Local institutions which have been invited include Unimas, Sains, IDS (Asia) Sdn Bhd, Sarawak General Hospital and the Clinical Research Centre (Sarawak), and local industry players.
The SDPS is an international professional society of scientists and engineers established in Austin, Texas by highly recognised visionaries including a Nobel laureate, a US National Medal of Technology and Innovation winner, and two pioneers in the field of software engineering.
While it has members around the globe, SDPS membership is by invitation only.