Over 600 attendees from 27 countries | 11 papers discussed and accredited
Conference promotes Egyptian-African cooperation to keep abreast of software industry
The Software Engineering Competence Center (known as SECC), within the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), issued a closure report on the results of the Federated Africa and Middle East Conference on Software Engineering (FAMECSE), a hybrid conference organized by the Center last June with in-person and remote attendees in Egypt and Uganda. FAMECSE aims to support and strengthen the software engineering community regionally.
In the conference report,SECC stated 11 software engineering (SE) research papers were discussed and accredited. Submitted papers were presented to FAMECSE technical committee. Research topics included: enterprise architecture (EA) role in the digital age, Blockchain analytics architecture for FinTech, smart university reference architecture, and Agile requirements engineering with prototyping and enriched user stories. A range of topics was also submitted by various experts and researchers from universities and educational institutions in Egypt, Uganda, Tunisia, The Netherlands, and Rwanda.
Many prominent personalities, practitioners, researchers and thought leaders in software engineering took part in the Conference. Speakers included: Hasan Yasar, Tech Director, Adjunct Faculty Member at Carnegie Mellon; Sekou Lionel Remy, Research Scientist, IBM Research – Africa; Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUk; Mohamed Hassan Kassab, Assoc Prof of Software Engineering, Penn State University, Malvern; Eric Van Veenendaal, TMMi Foundation CEO; Tendai Makasi, PhD, School of Information Systems, Faculty of Science, Queensland University of Technology; Sally Hassan, Senior Quality Engineer, SECC; Tiziana Margaria, Chair of Software Systems – Department Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick; Xin Xia, Director and Chief Expert of the Software Engineering Application Technology Lab at Huawei, China; Silverio Martinnez-Fernandez, Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech; along with many others specialized in latest tech trends and best practices of emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence.
The theme of the first Federated African and Middle East Conference on Software Engineering (FAMECSE 2022) is “Software Engineering in the Era of Artificial Intelligence”. FAMECSE 2022 conference aims at exploring how innovation in software engineering can support Artificial Intelligence development, and how AI can provide innovative solutions to advance Software Engineering practices and techniques.
In its two days, FAMECSE 2022 program, more than 600 specialists and professionals from 27 countries attended in-person at one of locations: Sultan Hussein Kamel Palace, Cairo, and Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, or through Hopin virtual venue platform.
Eng. Amr Mahfouz, CEO of the Information Technology Industry Development Agency, inaugurated the Conference and praised the efforts made to merge Africa and Middle East Conference on Software Engineering (AMECSE) with African Conference on Software Engineering (ACSE) to bring the Federated Africa and Middle East Conference on Software Engineering (FAMECSE). Mahfouz explained the importance of the conference as it reflects the depth of historical relations between the two countries in various fields.
In his keynote speech, Mahfouz demonstrated that Coronavirus pandemic did not negatively impact the software industry. Reports showcased that the pool of professional software developers increased by 4% year on year across Africa despite the outbreak of Covid-19. However, the global demand for IT-related talent and skills grew. Thereby this great demand created more remote work opportunities for African software developers.
Mahfouz also stated that ITIDA supports and promotes the software industry and provides an IT business conducive environment. Software engineering services, value-added services and other international business services contributed more than $4.5 billion into the Egyptian exports last year.
Makerere University in Uganda co-organized FAMECSE together with ITIDA and SECC in Cairo. Sponsors were Giza Systems, Huawei, Xceed, and Fixed Solutions. The Conference was also set up jointly with ACM SIGSOFT.
The FAMECSE Conference is a venue for practitioners and researchers to present and share the latest innovations, trends, and experiences in software engineering. In this context, AI plays a great role in enhancing the way Software Engineering practices are done and implemented. On the other hand, exploiting AI in practice has triggered the need for a new Software Engineering practices and techniques in order to handle the special nature of AI-based applications.
