PNC 2019 Annual Conference at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore Regionality and Digital Humanities: South-South Connections

The 2019 Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) Annual Conference and Joint Meetings will take place at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore from October 15 to 18. This will be the first time the PNC conference is held in Singapore. This year’s conference has been jointly organized by Academia Sinica and NTU, one of the top global research universities and renowned for its impactful research, education and innovation. The conference will be chaired by Prof. Chin-shing Huang, Chair of PNC and Vice President of Academia Sinica. Prof. Subra Suresh, President of NTU will deliver the welcome address in the opening ceremony.

PNC 2019 brings together scholars and researchers from fields including information technology, humanities, and social sciences, to discuss the main theme of Regionality and Digital Humanities: South-South Connections. The conference will explore on a range of topics, such as heritage and conservation, emergent digital cultures, digital arts and literary studies, historical geography and biodiversity. The event is expected to attract approximately 120 experts and scholars from 10 countries throughout the Pacific Rim region.

Five distinguished speakers will deliver keynote speeches at the conference. The first keynote speech entitled “A Cross-Discipliners Approach to Social Artificial Intelligence” will be delivered by Professor Vanessa Evers, Founding Director of NTU Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity (NISTH). Prof. Evers is an international expert in socially intelligent computing and human-computer interaction. In her talk, she will argue that social norms must be taken into account when designing artificially intelligent technology.

The second keynote speaker, Professor Bor-Chen Kuo, Director of Department of Information and Technology Education at Ministry of Education, Taiwan, will share the technology enhanced adaptive learning in Taiwan. Dr. Kuo is currently a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Institute of Educational Information and Measurement at National Taichung University of Education. His speech will focus on introducing Taiwan Competence based Adaptive Learning System (TCALS), which uses information technology to deliver customized resources and orchestrate learning activities in order to adapt the needs of individual learners. TCALS has been widely used for information and communications technology (ICT) instruction, flipped classroom, remedial instruction, and self-regulated learning in many primary and secondary schools.

The third keynote speaker, Professor Kenneth Dean, Raffles Professor of Humanities and Head of Chinese Studies Department at National University of Singapore (NUS), will outline the features of Singapore Historical GIS (SHGIS) and Singapore Biographical Database (SBDB) developed by NUS. Prof. Dean will further discuss the ongoing efforts to expand and link these online databases in the talk.

The fourth keynote speaker, Professor Yue-Gau Chen, Distinguished Research Fellow of Research Center for Environmental Change in Academia Sinica, has a long experience working on environment changes and earthquake geology. Prof. Chen will share valuable experiences in disaster management of building sustainable society by using information and communication technology.

On the third day of the conference, Dr. The Anh Dao, Vice President of Vietnam Academy of Agricultural Sciences, will address on the current agriculture biodiversity challenge and agro-ecology for climate change resilience and food security in ASEAN. Dr. Dao’s research has focused on agro-ecology farming systems, adaptation and mitigation for climate change of production system.

The scientific program will consist of thought-provoking keynote speeches, paper presentations, hands-on workshops as well as a poster session and demo. There will be 20 sessions to be explored at the conference, including workshops held by Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, Nanyang Technological University and collaborating institutions for scholars to exchange tools and techniques on digital humanities, spatiotemporal knowledge and maritime Buddhism.

Founded in 1993, the consortium was first initiated by the University of California, Berkeley in partnership with academia institutions in the Pacific Rims. Since 1997, the administrative operations of PNC have been transferred to Academia Sinica in Taiwan. PNC aims to establishing a platform for the sharing of information technologies and exchanges of academic resources among institutions of higher education in the Pacific Rim.