01/27/14

Fort Hays State University will host its first International Conference on Information Systems Engineering (iCISE) in May.

iCISE will gather researchers to present new ideas in the field of Information Systems Engineering, or ISE, sponsored by the South Asia Institute of Science and Engineering, a non-profit association promoting international education of science and engineering.

"Researchers worldwide will submit papers for review," said Conference Chair Dr. Houssain Kettani, professor of informatics and director of the Information Systems Engineering Program at FHSU. "Accepted papers will be published and authors are expected to come to the conference and present their findings."

The types of research papers approved for submission are technical papers, empirical evaluation papers, reports of experience and exploratory papers. Submissions will be peer-reviewed and evaluated for originality, technical and research content and depth, correctness, relevance to the conference, contributions, and readability.

Kettani, who entered the Department of Informatics in August 2012 as part of the newly formed Information Systems Engineering Bachelor of Science degree program, one of only two in the United States, used his experience as chair of dozens of similar conferences around the world to successfully lobby the iCISE for the conference here.

ISE, the effective use of information systems to streamline decision making, said Kettani, uses software, digital storage and retrieval, networks, human computer interaction, information security, digital design and electronic media, often overlapping with computer sciences, and various engineering disciplines.

Kettani, writing in another context, defines an information system as a "collection of hardware, software, data, people and procedures that work together to produce quality information." Information systems engineering, he said, is "the effective use or 'engineering' of information systems for a better understanding of data to optimize decision making."

Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Morocco, Kettani earned his bachelor's degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, North Cyprus, in 1998 before completing his master's degree and Doctorate, both in electrical engineering, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Before coming to FHSU, Kettani was an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of South Alabama, Mobile; assistant professor of computer science at Jackson State University, Jackson, Miss.; professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science and director of the Partnership Development Office at Polytechnic University, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

For more information, contact Kettani at h_kettani@fhsu.edu or visit http://www.fhsu.edu/informatics/ise/ and http://saise.org. The submission deadline is before January 31, 2014.