Speakers

	Prince Moyo is a General Manager for Power Delivery Engineering at Eskom, the state power utility of Eskom in South Africa, where he has been since 1997. He is responsible for all commodity specifications and standards used by transmission and distribution, from low voltage at 765kV, infrastructure designs as well as construction execution and operational support. His teams include substations, overhead lines, protection and control, high voltage plant, planning GIS, design base and project integration. Prince’s experience ranges from standardization, project design, project management and operations in the transmission and distribution environments. He is a member of C1 Study Committee and stream leader in the C1.34 working group. As chairman of Cigre SANC, Prince is an ex-officio member of all sub-committees. He also serves on the South African committee of the IEC and is a Council Member of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers, where he has chaired several committees. He is a registered professional engineer with the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA).
	Dr Robert P. Schumaker is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Tyler. He received his PhD in MIS from the University of Arizona in 2007, an MBA degree in Management and International Business from the University of Akron in 2001, and a Bachelors of Science degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 1997. Rob is also the Associate Editor for Decision Support Systems, past editor for Communications of the International Information Management Association, has authored a book on Sports Data Mining, several book chapters, multiple journal articles in DSS, ACM TOIS, CACM and JASIST as well as had his research featured in the Wall Street Journal and numerous other media outlets. In textual-financial prediction, Rob created the AZFinText system to examine the relationship between financial news articles and their impact on stock market prices. This project utilizes various textual representation schemes, price prediction models and machine learning techniques to accomplish profitability in extreme near-term trading. Based on the premise that unexpected news events can shape the price of a stock, this system capitalizes on automatically identifying the relevant keywords in the news article and then executing a trade well-before human traders have a chance to read the news article. Robert P. Schumaker is a Senior Member and has been a member of ACM since 2004. He has been involved with ACM through publishing articles in ACM outlets such as ACM Transactions on Information Systems and Communications of the ACM. Rob also started a professional ACM chapter in the Greater Hartford Connecticut area.
	Dr Surendra Thakur (Colin) completed a DTech in Information Technology, of which his research focused on “System Architecture for Secure Mobile Internet Voting”. Additionally, Colin has presented various papers with reference to RFID and has received the Best Paper Award at the DUT Informatics Conference in the years 2007 and 2008. Colin has served on many executive forums over the years such as EXCO, SENATE, Faculty Board, etc. He was also the National Treasurer of the Computer Society of South Africa (CSSA) for a year, and later on the Chair of the KZN Computer Society of South Africa for three years, and Vice-Chairman for two years. Colin is currently the Director of the NEMISA KZN e-Skills CoLab at the Durban University of Technology which is tasked with e-skills in general, and particularly on the e-enablement of government services for effective service delivery, with a focus on e-democracy and e-participation. Collin has also conceptualized and introduced InvoTech, an innovation incubator at DUT, where one of his patents is being registered.
	Prof. Dr Reggie Davidrajuh has a master degree in Control Systems, and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering. At present, he is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Dr. Davidrajuh is the editor of the journal International Journal of Business and Systems Research. Also, he serves on the editorial committees of five journals, such as Expert Systems with Applications (ESWA) and Archives of Control Sciences (ACS), a Quarterly of Polish Academy of Sciences. Dr. Davidrajuh has published over 150 publications in the diverse areas such as supply chain, e-commerce, e-government, modeling and simulation, discrete event systems, green power generation, etc. His current research interests are “Modeling, Simulation, and Performance Analysis of Discrete-Event Systems.” GPenSIM is a tool he developed for modeling of discrete event systems, which is used by several universities around the world. Dr. Davidrajuh is a Senior Membership of IEEE and a Fellow of British Computer Society. More details about him could be obtained from his homepage: http://www.davidrajuh.net/reggie.
	Dr Anand Nayyar hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the area of wireless sensor networks and swarm intelligence. He is currently working as Professor of Computer Science at the Graduate School at the Duy Tan University in Da Nang, Vietnam. He has published extensively in various national and international conferences. He has also published several books in different areas of computer science. He is an editorial board member of many journals and has reviewed thousands of papers for conferences and journals. He is regularly invited to deliver keynote speeches by various universities, societies and committees. His current fields of interests include: wireless sensor networks, mobile adhoc networks, swarm intelligence, cloud computing, network security, wireless communications, Internet of Things (IoT), distributed computing and big data analytics. He is also a certified professional in CCNA, MCSE and Oracle certifications, amongst many others