The conference aimed at supporting and stimulating active productive research set to strengthen the technical foundations of engineers and scientists in the continent, through developing strong technical foundations and skills, leading to new small to medium enterprises within the African sub-continent. It also seeked to encourage the emergence of functionally skilled technocrats within the continent.

Post-graduate researchers were invited to present their papers, with students competing for best papers, receiving awards on their presentations.

Some of the topics discussed at the workshop included the following;

• Grant Proposal writing
• Disruptive Internet of Things – Application, Architecture and Future Trends
• How to make a drone

While the plenary sessions tackled; Dynamic TCP Pacing for Delay Intolerant Cloud Communications; Scalable Dataspace Construction; Computational Intelligence Application on Prediction of Global Solar Radiation among other topics.

Alumni Eric Mabusi presented his paper that addressed Secure Distributed Data Exchange Protocol (SDXP) – The Secure Distributed Data Exchange Protocol (SDXP), is a way for an organization to exchange data securely for better decision making in technology items. For example a router in a company can share information with government in confronting of a fraudulent activity or law enforcement within a country or between countries sharing specific detailed or general data of activities  like theft, terrorism etc.

The conference culminated with plenary sessions that allowed for research presentations that tackled; Unknown scanning computer worm detection using machine learning and Darkspace networking traffic; Techniques for evaluation and selection of partners for construction projects; Security evaluation for instant messaging encryption algorithm and finally; An Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for securing data.