
WIUT-UoW Computing Conference 2022:
Digitalisation and Digital Transformation over Silk Road
18 May 2022
WIUT-UW Computing Conference 2022: Digitalisation and Digital Transformation over Silk Road aims to bring together academics, students, professionals and digital business developers to debate and discuss trends, achievements, challenges and solutions in digitalilsation and digital transformation of public services, businesses and broader society focusing on the enhancement of life standards of people and opportunities for industries in the countries over Silk Road and beyond.
The Conference is a joint initiative between Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT) and the University of Westminster in London (UoW). This conference is organised to broaden and strengthen university-research-industry links among organisations, businesses and individuals contributing to the expansion of digital economy in national and international marketplace.
There are six main sub-thematic areas within this conference call:
- 1) Digitalisation and digital transformation in industry, public services, healthcare, education and social life;
- 2) Present and future of business analytics, decision science, data engineering, and AI;
- 3) Interactive Application (Game & Serious Game design) Design and Development applied in various domains (education, healthcare, culture) including various technologies (2D, 3D, mobile, VR, AR, XR);
- 4) Trends in development and management of business information systems;
- 5) Advances and challenges in the provision of cybersecurity and digital sustainability in public and private enterprises;
- 6) Requisites for development of distributed computing, cloud computing and big data in Central Asia.
The conference organisers recognise the importance of providing opportunities to disseminate the research findings of this initiative to students and scholars around the globe.
Accepted contributions will appear in Conference proceedings published by University of Westminster Press. Selected presentations will be invited to submit full papers for their proposals to a special issue of Silk Road: A Journal of Eurasian Studies (https://silkroadjournal.online/)
Silk Road: A Journal of Eurasian Development, published by the University of Westminster Press, exists to promote evidence-based scholarly research in social sciences and public policy studies that make the affairs of the Great Silk Road countries an area of significant interest, scholarship and impact. The journal supports the Conference activities and a special conference issue will be commissioned – SilkRoaDigital2022.
Direct link to join the conference:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89633025097?pwd=Ede1WTE4SnxYiHzRXDX3X-bm7WBpNC.1
Meeting ID: 896 3302 5097
Passcode: 893340

Dr. Barbara Villarini is a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Westminster. She has been working for the last 10 years on image and video processing, focusing on medical imaging computing, image quality assessment and 3D reconstruction publishing in international journals and conferences. After receiving her PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Perugia (Italy), she joined the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC) at the University College London, working on novel applications of image-guidance system for minimally-invasive cancer diagnosis and treatment. Her multidisciplinary team won a number of awards for contributions to research and cancer care, including the prestigious British Medical Journal award of Innovation Team of the Year (2015). In 2020 she has been awarded the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. Currently her research interests include combining image-processing techniques with machine-learning algorithms in order to improve wellbeing and health care.

Dr. Daphne Economou is senior lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Westminster since January 2006.
Academic qualifications: Fellow of Higher Education Academy, since 2014, PhD in Virtual Reality Systems Design from the Manchester Metropolitan University in 2001, MA. in Design for Interactive Media (Multimedia), Middlesex University in 1996.
She has published a long list of journal papers, peer-reviewed international conference papers and she served as program committee member in several international conferences. She has industrial experience as Human Factors Engineer at Sony Broadcast and Development Research Labs, Basingstoke UK and she is member of British Computer Society, IEEE and British Interactive Media Association (BIMA). She has been involved in the programme committee of several international conferences and she has organised and chaired workshops in IEEE international conferences related to serious games.

Sophie Triantaphillidou is a Professor in Imaging Science at the University of Westminster, UK, where she leads the Computational Vision and Imaging Technology research group. She studied Computer Science in Athens, Greece and later obtained a BSc in Imaging Science and a PhD (2001) in the field of Digital Image Quality, both from the University of Westminster. Her group’s research is interdisciplinary, exploring interrelationships between imaging system performance and image quality, image content, and image perception by human and machine vision systems.
She has developed, led and taught in several courses in imaging related fields; she is currently the module leader if the Final Year Project module in CSE department. She has led research collaborations with the Royal Photographic Society (RPS, UK), Nokia (Finland), Ministry of Defence (UK), Home Office (UK), Transport for London (UK), Huawei (China). She is the recipient of several research awards, including the Davies Medal for “significant contribution to digital imaging science”, awarded by the RPS.

Tamas Kiss is a Professor of Distributed Computing at the School of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the University Research Centre for Parallel Computing. Since 2020 he is an Editor in Chief at the Journal of Grid Computing published by Springer Nature. He holds a PhD in Distributed Computing, and MSc Degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. The leading research outputs of his team (in collaboration with various research groups in Europe) in the past few years have been the MiCADO cloud orchestrator solution that enables the automated deployment and run-time management of microservices-based applications in heterogeneous cloud infrastructures, and the CloudSME and CloudiFacturing platforms that support manufacturing and engineering companies to utilise cloud-based high-performance computing services to run simulation and optimisation applications.

Russell McMahon has been teaching IT related subject matter since 1980 and has been a faculty member in the School of Information Technology at the University of Cincinnati since 1999. He is the assistant director for the undergraduate BSIT program. Prior coming to UC he has taught at several area high schools and spent more than 8 years in the IT world. He is very active in the IT-related user group community having served on the boards of multiple groups. Since 2018, he has served as the host chair for the local Cincinnati SQL Server annual conference. In 2014, he spent 6 months working at three universities in three different countries (Rwanda, Kenya, and South Africa) in Africa doing IT curriculum development and giving talks on creative problem solving. In the past 2 years, he has given workshops on improvisation for scientist and technologist to enhance their communication and teamwork skills. He spoke at the 2018 eLearning Africa conference held in Kigali and he was a keynote speaker at the 2019 Congreso Internacional de Ingeneria de Systems (CIIS) in Lima, Peru. In February-2019 served as a Fulbright Specialist at Miras University in Shymkent, Kazakhstan where he worked with the computing faculty to help with their technical English and teaching as well as he taught improvisation techniques to students and faculty.

Thierry serves on the Editorial Board of various healthcare modelling and informatics journals, and has edited several special issues of internationally recognised journals. He is member of the NIHR Peer Review panel, and was a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College 1996-2016 and expert evaluator for the EU FP7 ICT programme (2013). Keen promoter of the use of data driven modelling and simulation approaches for the management of healthcare, he is also Chair of the Operational Research Health and Social Services Special Interest Group, and founding member of the Cumberland Initiative, and MASHnet, the UK network for Modelling And Simulation in Healthcare.
Important Dates
Conference date: 18 May 2022
Deadline to submit an application form (extended abstract): 15th March 2022
Notification of acceptance: 30th April 2022
Full paper submission to the Silk Road: A Journal of Eurasian Development: 30th June 2022
*Please note that acceptance of and extended abstract does not guarantee acceptance of a full paper to the journal. Please follow journal submission guidelines at https://silkroadjournal.online/submissions/ for full paper submission.
The mode of the Conference
The conference will be organized at Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT), Uzbekistan, in a hybrid mode, bringing in-person and virtual participants (online) together.
Conference Participation
Invited participants may join the conference as presenters or attendees. There is NO conference registration fee. Conference participants willing to join the conference in-person in Tashkent are expected to cover their travel, accommodation and other related costs themselves. Conference organizers will provide administrative support (such as a visa support letter) for potential participants from outside of Uzbekistan.
About Organizers
Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT) is the first international university in Uzbekistan and first in Central Asia to offer Western education, with United Kingdom (UK) qualifications. WIUT`s mission is to provide International Standards of Education and Research Opportunities that contribute to the Intellectual, Social and Professional development of the Central Asian communities as well as Global Community.
University of Westminster (UoW) was the first polytechnic in London and one of the first in the UK, established to educate the working people of London. UoW has a long and proud history of international collaboration and global engagement through research partnerships and from colleagues, students and alumni from across the world. Today UoW continues to provide a grounded, holistic education so that people from every background can realise their true potential.
Organising Committee Members:
Daphne Economou (UoW)
Thierry Chaussalet (UoW)
Ikrom Rikhsiboev (WIUT)
Dilshod Ibragimov (WIUT)
Abdumalik Djumanov (WIUT)
Tamas Kiss (UoW)
Sophie Triantaphillidou (UoW)
Kamalini Sivagurunathan (UoW)
Barbara Villarini (UoW)
Alexandra Psarrou (UoW)
Vassiliki Bouki (UoW)
Salma Chahed (UoW)
Ito Wasito (WIUT)
Ayoobkhan Mohamed Uvaze Ahamed (WIUT)
Akmal Salikhov (WIUT)
Akhtem Useinov (WIUT)
Contact
Tel: +99871 238 74 15
Email: silkroadigital2022@wiut.uz