The 2011 International Conference on IT in Asia (CITA)

The International Conference on IT in Asia is a regular series of biennial conference being planned to bring together professionals and executives to share and exchange ideas and information pertaining to the roles of ICTs within the prevailing challenges of development faced by the region. This international forum introduced and organized by the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak aims to investigate how the technology can be adapted to improve local needs as well as to bring technology within reach of the communities.

CITA covers various areas such as data mining, high performance computing, image processing, distributed computing, language technology, wired and wireless technologies. Researchers and industry practitioners in these fields are invited to participate, to share and collaborate research works with experts in this conference.
The quality of papers submitted is assured to be of high standard. Submission of full paper is required and will go through strict review by the chosen international programme committee. In the last three conferences, the following full paper submissions and acceptance rates are:

CITA’09: 138 full papers submitted (36.9% acceptance rate)
CITA’07: 160 full papers submitted (27.5% acceptance rate)
CITA’05: 156 full papers submitted (38.5% acceptance rate)

The theme for its 7th run is chosen to be “ Emerging Convergences and Singularity of Forms ” which will be held on the 12th – 14th July 2011 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia.

In today's world we see a convergence of a variety of dimensions of technologies, standards, protocols and architectures leading to the emergence of advanced tools, techniques and platforms that are poised to transform the world that we live in. Beyond the convergence of media, protocols, platforms, transmissions forms, etc., we are now moving into a world of singularity of forms and structure. The prospects of the intensifying convergences across all dimensions in as many ways and forms will require the re-engineering of all aspects of our lives. Imagine a world where every entity speaking the same language with a means of connecting to anything and everything on a singular common platform.

Emerging convergences include the following; software embedding into all sorts of appliances, devices and hardware, the overlap between real and virtual worlds, the ubiquitous networks and infrastructure providing pervasive access and control, multi-modal integration for knowledge discovery, connected meaning-aware Web of things and singular advanced informatics applied across a variety of fields.

One should also not overlook the social implications of the convergence and converging technologies. Issues of concerns include privacy, widespread data mining, knowledge gaps and divides. There are many lessons that we could learn from nature to shape the future directions. A question that we may want to pose is, is there not a simpler way of doings things by harnessing the singularity of forms.