++++ THE DEADLINE WAS EXTENDED UNTIL April 15, 2011 ++++

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First Call for Papers for the
IEEE AFRICON 2011 Special Session on Robotics and
Artificial Intelligence in Africa

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2011
++++ NEW DEADLINE: April 15, 2011
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General Information
===================

The IEEE Region 8 AFRICON celebrates their 10th anniversary and was held
before in Kenya, the Ivory Coast, Swaziland, South Africa, Botswana, and
Namibia. This time it will take place in Livingstone, Zambia. See
http://www.africon2011.co.za for further details. We are happy to
announce the special track on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
research at AFRICON 2011.

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence research in the African context has
not yet reached its full potential. During this special session, we
intend to bring the African Robotics and AI community together and
discuss the various aspects of robotics and artificial intelligence in
the African context. Both are cutting-edge fields and well-established
in industrialized countries. However, they seem to be under-represented
in Africa, despite their great potential for capacity building and
education. With this special session, we aim at bringing together
interested researchers who are active in both fields and connect them
with each other. Further, the focus of this special session is on
robotics and AI in education and we want to invite interested researcher
from all over the world to contribute to this aspect.

In particular, we intend to address the following:

* Current research results from African researchers in the fields.
* Robotics and AI in education that could make an impact for Africa.
* Robotics competitions relevant in the African context (e.g. Robocup
Junior or IEEE Robocomp).
* The role of open source in development of Robotics and AI in Africa.
* The role of Robotics and AI for the economic development in the context
of 21st century production and manufacturing in Africa (Automation,
Mining industries, etc.)
* Successful robotics and AI co-operation projects between African
institutions and institutions in the rest of the world.


Important Dates
===============

* Paper submission: March 31, 2011
* Notification of Acceptance: May 15, 2011
* Camera-ready copy due: June 30, 2011
* Technical Session: September 13 – 15, 2011


Submission Details
==================

Prospective authors are invited to electronically submit full papers of
their work in English (6 pages, ~4500 words, in pdf format), following
the instructions available on the web site. Accepted papers will be
published in an IEEE proceedings volume that will be indexed by EI and
IEEE Xplore, and will be available at the time of the conference.

For further information visit the session’s website at:
* http://www.africon2011.co.za/info/specialsessions?id=5
and the main conferene website at:
* http://www.africon2011.co.za/

Further submission info is given here:
* http://ieee-ies.org///submit-cgi-bin/authorlogin.pl?event=AFRICON11


Session Chairs
==============

Alexander Ferrein, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Thomas Meyer, CSIR-Meraka Institute, South Africa
Billy Okal, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany