(MENAFN - Emirates News Agency (WAM)) The Eighth International Symposium on Mechatronics and Its Applications, ISMA12, opened on Tuesday, at the Main Building of American University of Sharjah (AUS).
Dr. Peter Heath, AUS Chancellor, said at the opening of the symposium: "I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you all to AUS. Even though our university is only 15 years old, this is our eighth mechatronics symposium.
This is a sign of our accelerated growth, the dedication of our faculty and a result of meaningful relations we have formed between AUS and local as well as international partners in academia and industry, especially our friends from EMAL who are sponsoring this symposium." The opening ceremony was also attended by Saeed Fadhil Al Mazroui the CEO of Emirates Alumnium, EMAL, Salem Yousef Al Qaseer, Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs and other senior officials. In the three days of the event, the symposium will cover a broad range of topics, including autonomous systems and robotics, sensors and fusion, wireless sensor and actuator networks, mechatronics applications and automation, system dynamics and control, signal and image processing applications, as well as micro-electro-mechanical (MEMs) systems and nano-electro-mechanical (NEMs) systems technologies and their applications.
"We are proud to be sponsoring this symposium because we, at EMAL, believe in technology as a way to improve our business. That is why we have been involved with ISMA since 2006, hoping that our participation will give us new ideas on how to better apply new technologies in our operations," said Yousef Bastaki, EMAL Vice President, Projects. "We support technical exploration for better utilization of our limited resources and we believe this symposium will help towards that goal." The technical sessions include the presentation of 44 papers selected from about 78 submitted papers. To ensure quality, papers were selected based on the outcome of at least two peer reviews for every submitted paper. The accepted papers come from various institutions and research centers from 17 countries including Afghanistan, Canada, France, Hungary, India, Iran, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Poland, Qatar, Sudan, Trinidad and Tobago, UAE, UK and USA.
Four keynote speeches will also be featured during the symposium; 'Applications of the Consensus Variable Approach to Coordination and Control - UAVs, Autonomous Mobile Radios, and Energy-Efficient Buildings' by Dr. Kevin L. Moore, Dean of the College of Engineering and Computational Sciences, Colorado School of Mines in Colorado; 'Enhancing Human Machine Interaction via Mechatronic Actuation' by Dr. Masayoshi Tomizuka, Associate Dean of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley; 'Coordination of Multiple Heterogeneous Autonomous Vehicles' by Dr. Rafael Fierro, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico; and 'Advanced Service Robotics and Automation' by Dr. Toshio Fukuda from the Department of Micro-Nano Systems Engineering at Nagoya University in Japan.
ISMA is an IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) indexed conference.
This annual symposium was founded by the AUS Mechatronics Program in response to the increasing need for mechatronics. ISMA provides a forum for engineers and technical managers from industry and academics to meet and discuss new high-tech trends and their effects on the technical development of the region. This year's symposium is the eighth of successful series of symposia started in 2004 as the AUS International Symposium on Mechatronics (AUS-ISM04). AUS-ISM04 was the first symposium of its kind to be established and held in the Middle East.
Mechatronics is identified as one of the top 10 emerging technologies that will change the world. This reflects the trends in modern products combining mechanics, electrics, opto-electronics, and digital signal processing and miniaturization of components and prefabricated parts.
Therefore, to survive in today's rapidly changing world, companies design and use products, or operate and select equipment, equipped with more "intelligence" and computational power. Intelligent components are improving system performance, comfort and safety with innovations such as decision making and complete autonomy. Mechatronics examples range from aerospace systems and sophisticated process control industry to home appliances and personal smart devices WAM/MN
