Back from IEEE Africon Conference

I am back from Windhoek, Namibia where I presented a paper and co-chaired one of the technical sessions. I arrived in Windhoek at about 10:00hrs on 27 September, 2007 after a few hassles with traveling arrangements and connections.I managed to co-chair a session in the afternoon of the same day. The Chair was Mr Vinaye Armoogum from University of Technology Mauritius. He has become a great buddy already. I was, however, late for my presentation which I was supposed to have done a day earlier. I had to see the Program chair who asked me to present my paper in one of the remaining sessions on the closing day of the conference. Coincidentally, the session chair for the session was Professor Fambirai Takawira, my former head of School at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Vinaye, the guy with whom I chaired a session was also presenting in the same session. Being the last day of the conference, the attendance for this session was not good. My presentation was alright but not much better than the SATNAC 2006 one. Maybe, I am saying this because in my SATNAC 2006 presentation, I had a bigger audience and better feedback. In Windhoek, most people were just listening! After the conference, I spent a few days in South Africa and then came back to Malawi two days ago.

One great thing about the Africon conference is that, unlike SATNAC, it attracted a good number of participants from other continents.In my few days at the conference, I had seen a Mexico based professor, who presented his paper in the same session with me. I had also interacted and forged potential friendships with some guys from Slovenia, Europe. It was also great for me to chat with Dr John Ryan from Mzuzu University. We had lunch together.This gave me an opportunity to learn more about the MSc program in Information Theory, that he is coordinating at Mzuzu University. I will review this program on this blog in the coming weeks.

In conclusion, let me congratulate the IEEE Africon organizing committee for staging such an eventful conference. I hope the guys organizing the IEEE Africon 2009 conference, which will take place in Kenya, will make it even better. Let me also call upon all those African electrical, electronics and computer engineers, who have not yet joined IEEE , to join this institute and actively take part in its events. Africa misses out a great deal by your lack of participation in IEEE activities.

I am off to Africon

I will leave for Windhoek, Namibia where I will present my paper entitled Fuzzy Logic Congestion Control in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks: A Performance Evaluation at the IEEE Africon 2007. This will be a great experience for me having missed out on the IEEE Eurocon 2007 Conference. I will also co-chair a session on Signal Processing and Communications Systems. While away, my blogging activities will be limited, so bear with me as I will be back in full force next week.

I was supposed to join thousands of bloggers in a challenge to blog against abuse on the 27th of September 2007.My topic of choice on this day was Save Darfur but I will not publish it as yet because it is not a finished product. I do not want you my valued readers to read crap here. I will publish this one early next week.I hope BlogCatalog will bear with me.

Poland trip hits a snag, Namibia trip is on

Some months ago, I announced that two of my papers were accepted for presentation and publication at IEEE Eurocon and IEEE African conferences. IEEE Eurocon will take place in Warsaw, Poland from Sunday, September 9 to Wednesday September 12 while the IEEE Africon will take place in Windhoek, Namibia from September 26-28.

I am not happy to report that I have failed to travel to Warsaw to take part in IEEE EUROCON. I was scheduled to present my paper in the Telecommunications and Multimedia Systems poster session on the final day of the conference. My failure to attend this conference stems from the Polish bank's failure to process my conference registration fees in good time.There were fears that my paper could be withdrawn because of non-payment. However, after exchanging emails with the EUROCON registration chair for a period of more than one month, the Polish bank processed the fees and as a result, my paper was included in the list of papers to be published. Although this was good news, it did not go down well with the organization which would have sponsored my trip because registration wrangle did not leave them with enough time to process my travel grant application. If my travel grant application went in earlier, I would have been crossing the Mediterranean Sea by now on my way to Warsaw. I will surely miss this exciting conference. I will also miss senZations 2007, a summer school on applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which runs from September 10 -14. You see, I would have killed two birds with one stone in Warsaw. But the most important thing is that all things whether bad or good work together for our own good.

Now forget about my EUROCON problems because I will wind up this post on high note. The Meraka Institute in Pretoria has paid my conference registration fees , travel costs and accommodation for my participation in the IEEE Africon conference in Windhoek. I would like to thank them for helping me in this way. The AFRICON organizing team has also asked me to co-chair one of the sessions at the conference. This is the first time for me to take up such a responsibility at a conference :)