Prepared by: Rabindra Nath Shaw, Chair for IEEE GUCON 2021.
This 4th edition of GUCON received a massive response of 1386 papers from more than 37 countries. More than 500 reviewers from all over the world completed the review process of these papers. 248 best quality papers were accepted after the review process. The paper acceptance ratio is 17%. In this three-day mega event, 7 keynote sessions have been organized. The keynote speakers were all distinguished professors from all over the world (USA, Australia, UK, Italy, Canada, Estonia, Malaysia), including the Vice President of IEEE Computer Society, USA. The conference was organized virtually on an online WebEx platform adhering to the COVID-19 pandemic guidelines. All 248 accepted papers have been presented virtually in 35 technical sessions. Two session chairs were present in each of these 35 technical sessions.
The inaugural session of GUCON 2021 began with speeches of distinguished guest professors. The vote of thanks was proposed by Prof. Venkatesh Babu (Pro-Vice Chancellor, Galgotias University, India). The conference commenced with two back to back keynote speeches on ‘Evolving distribution grid’ by Prof. Danny Sutanto (University of Wollongong, Australia) and ‘Feasibility of 73 GHz and 140 GHz millimeter-wave technologies for fog radio access networks’ by Prof. Kaharudin Bin Dimyati (Universiti Malaya, Malaysia). This was followed by concurrent paper presentation panels in 10 technical sessions. On the first day 69 papers were presented with the participation of more than 200 authors.
The second day began with two keynote speeches on ‘Technology and processes to reliably reduce societal harm in the social media industry’ by Dr. Andre Oboler (Vice President MGA, IEEE Computer Society, USA) and ‘A soft robotics approach to understand how the brain conditions the body to make real-time computation more efficient’ by Prof. Dr Thrishantha Nanayakkara (Imperial College, UK). This was followed by concurrent paper presentation panels in 10 technical sessions. Overall, 67 papers were presented on the second day with the participation of more than 200 authors.
The third day started with 15 parallel technical sessions with 112 papers in total. At the end of the technical sessions, the following keynote speeches were delivered: ‘Data security and privacy in emerging scenarios’ by Prof. Pierangela Samarati, (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy), and ‘Role of power electronics and advanced machine learning techniques for smart battery’ by Prof. Sheldon Williamson (Ontario Tech University, Canada). The keynote sessions were attended by a large number of students and researchers. GUCON 2021 concluded with the vote of thanks by the conference chair.