The University's Centre for Efficiency and Performance Engineering (CEPE) overcame the problems posed by the coronavirus pandemic to successfully co-host an international conference online.
Academics from CEPE teamed up with colleagues from the Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai to run the IncoME-Ⅴ & CEPE Net-2020 from 23 to 25 October, which was originally scheduled to be held in China last April.
The conference was then moved to September, but with the pandemic still ongoing it was decided that running the whole event in the digital space was viable.
Keynote speeches on shared expertise
Over 200 people from universities and other institutions around the world attended the conference over the course of two and a half days. The event included eight keynote speeches on a diverse array of issues that CEPE and its partners shared their expertise in, including:
- cutting edge technologies for signal processing and data analytics
- Internet of Things technology
- 5G and edge computing
- energy harvesting
- pipeline inspection
"Coronavirus has meant that a lot of conferences and meetings we would have attended in normal circumstances have been cancelled or postponed, but we felt that moving this online was possible," says Dr Guojin Feng, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computing and Engineering.
Nearly 100 technical papers discussed
Other sessions diversified even further, with 95 technical papers covering condition monitoring, deep learning, energy harvesting, vibration analysis, diagnosis for rotating machinery, lubricity modelling and monitoring, maintenance & performance optimisation. Two novel sessions that especially gained much interest and feedback covered international research opportunities, and a workshop on modulation signal analysis, led by Prof. Andrew Ball and Prof. Fengshou Gu, respectively.
"We would normally have held this annually face-to-face, but even in spite of coronavirus we have proved that we can still hold this as an online event," adds Dr Feng. "It's giving people a positive picture of the research we work in, even with the pandemic - we can still work together. It might be a new style for conferences in the future."
Next year's conference will be held in Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China.
Dr Feng also paid tribute to conference chair and co-chairs Prof. Baoshan Huang, Prof. Jyoti K Sinha, Prof. Andrew Ball, Prof. Fulei Chu, Prof. Xin Chen, session chairs, keynote chairs, keynote speakers, all the committee members, all sponsors and all participants for their dedication to the success of the conference. The hard work of Prof. Fengshou Gu and his team all helped ensure that a range of online activities all proceeded successfully.
