Mechatronics symposium opens in Sharjah

The Eighth International Symposium on Mechatronics and Its Applications, ISMA12, opened on Tuesday, April 10, 2012 at the Main Building of American University of Sharjah (AUS). “I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you all to AUS,” said Dr. Peter Heath, AUS Chancellor, at the opening of the symposium. “Even though our university is only 15 years old, this is our eighth mechatronics symposium. This is a sign of our accelerated growth, the dedication of our faculty and a result of meaningful relations we have formed between AUS and local as well as international partners in academia and industry, especially our friends from EMAL who are sponsoring this symposium.” The opening ceremony was also attended by Saeed Fadhil Al Mazroui the CEO of Emirates Alumnium, EMAL, Salem Yousef Al Qaseer, Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs and other senior officials. In the three days of the event, the symposium will cover a broad range of topics, including autonomous systems and robotics, sensors and fusion, wireless sensor and actuator networks, mechatronics applications and automation, system dynamics and control, signal and image processing applications, as well as micro-electro-mechanical (MEMs) systems and nano-electro-mechanical (NEMs) systems technologies and their applications. “We are proud to be sponsoring this symposium because we, at EMAL, believe in technology as a way to improve our business. That is why we have been involved with ISMA since 2006, hoping that our participation will give us new ideas on how to better apply new technologies in our operations,” said Yousef Bastaki, EMAL Vice President, Projects. “We support technical exploration for better utilization of our limited resources and we believe this symposium will help towards that goal.” The technical sessions include the presentation of 44 papers selected from about 78 submitted papers. To ensure quality, papers were selected based on the outcome of at least two peer reviews for every submitted paper. The accepted papers come from various institutions and research centers from 17 countries including Afghanistan, Canada, France, Hungary, India, Iran, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Poland, Qatar, Sudan, Trinidad and Tobago, UAE, UK and USA. Four keynote speeches will also be featured during the symposium; ‘Applications of the Consensus Variable Approach to Coordination and Control - UAVs, Autonomous Mobile Radios, and Energy-Efficient Buildings’ by Dr. Kevin L. Moore, Dean of the College of Engineering and Computational Sciences, Colorado School of Mines in Colorado; ‘Enhancing Human Machine Interaction via Mechatronic Actuation’ by Dr. Masayoshi Tomizuka, Associate Dean of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley; ‘Coordination of Multiple Heterogeneous Autonomous Vehicles’ by Dr. Rafael Fierro, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico; and ‘Advanced Service Robotics and Automation’ by Dr. Toshio Fukuda from the Department of Micro-Nano Systems Engineering at Nagoya University in Japan. devices.