Academics from countries such as Germany, Ghana and Spain have arrived in South Africa this week for the seventh Information Technologies in Environmental Engineering (ITEE) International Conference.
The South African energy crisis will be in the spotlight as international industry and academia descend on Port Elizabeth for the global conference which, for the first time, is being held outside Europe.
The ITEE conference aims to highlight the impact companies and other large organisations have on limited global resources. Setting up smart home and organisational environments to efficiently manage the consumption of scarce resources such as water and electricity will also be a focus at the two-day conference, held from July 14 to 16.
Organisers believe it is significant that the conference is being hosted in Africa, given the importance of protecting the continent’s increasingly scarce resources.
Co-chairperson of this year’s conference, Dr Brenda Scholtz, a senior lecturer in the NMMU Computing Sciences Department, said the aims of the conference included bringing academics, government and industry together to witness how information and communications technologies [ICT] had evolved to better manage and analyse corporations’ resource management and impact.
“ITEE 2015 aims to bring researchers in academia, industry and government from various countries together to present and discuss how ICT has evolved to support science for natural resource management, environmental engineering, scientific simulation and integrated assessment studies,” said Scholtz.
Scholtz is joined as co-chairperson of the conference by Prof. Dr. Jorge Marx Gómez, of Germany’s Oldenburg University.
The ITEE theme for 2015 is “Technologies for a sustainable future”, with the main topics being Green IS and green IT; environmental engineering; sustainability reporting systems; Environmental Management IS; social sustainability through ICT and development; and mobile applications for social or environmental sustainability, to name a few.
Presenters include the likes of international researcher in tyre recycling, Dr Alexandra Pehlken of Germany, while NMMU Phd student Cainos Mukandatsama will present research on technologies which support intelligent energy management and increase energy efficiency.
“These technologies can support people and increase awareness of the impact of their activities, both positive and negative. Intelligent energy management and the Internet of things [IoT] can be used to support and monitor a user’s everyday activities that impact on the environment,” said Mukandatsama, who has recently returned from Oldenburg University.
NMMU’s Science faculty was originally linked with Oldenburg University through Oldenburg University’s DevSus – short for Developing Sustainability – project. As a result of this project, NMMU became the first university in South Africa to host a similar programme to that of Oldenburg’s Masters in Environmental Information Systems.
“The topic of sustainability is becoming increasingly relevant to industry,” said NMMU Computing Sciences Department head, Prof. Jean Greyling. “Companies and even universities have to report on sustainability nowadays.”
Greyling said his department was conducting research on how the university consumed water and energy, using custom-made mobile applications to collect the data.
“This in turn helps us understand how we as an organisation can manage our consumption of these precious resources more efficiently. The same goes for industry, which is why this year the conference is open to companies, rather than just academia,” said Greyling.
Companies presenting experts include the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Africa, KPMG, PwC, and Allen Grey, to name a few, with the likes of Volkswagen South Africa, UTi and SYSPRO also in attendance.
Alan Straton
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