Biography: Minoru Okada received the B.E. degree in communications engineering from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan, in 1990. He received the M.E and Ph.D. degrees in communications engineering from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1992 and 1998, respectively. From 1993 to 2000, he was a Research Associate at Osaka University. From 1999 to 2000, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at University of Southampton, U.K. In 2000, he joined the Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan, as an Associate Professor and became a Professor in 2006. His research interest is wireless communications, including WLAN, digital broadcasting, and satellite communications. Dr. Okada is a member of the Institute of Image, Information, and Television Engineers of Japan (ITEJ), the Institute of Television Engineers of Japan, the Institute of Electrical, Information, and Communication Engineers of Japan (IEICE), and the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ). He received the Young Engineer Award from IEICE in 1999.

Biography: Dr. Ilsun YOU received the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Dankook University, Seoul, Korea, in 1997 and 2002, respectively. He received the second PhD degree from Kyushu University, Japan, in 2012. Now, he is a full professor at Department of Information Security, Cryptology, and Mathematics, Kookmin University. He has served or is currently serving as a Steering Chair, General Chair or a Program Chair of international conferences and symposiums such as MobiSec’16-21, WISA’19-20, ProvSec’18, ACM MIST’15-17 and so forth. Dr. YOU is the EiC of Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA) and Journal of Internet Services and Information Security (JISIS) while serving as an associate EiC of Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing (IASC). He is in the Editorial Board for Information Sciences, International Journal of Intelligent Systems, IEEE Access, International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, Computing and Informatics, and Journal of High Speed Networks. Especially, he has focused on 5/6G security, security for wireless networks & mobile internet, IoT/CPS security and so forth while publishing more than 180 papers in these areas. He is a Fellow of the IET and a Senior member of the IEEE.

Biography: Dr. Abdelaziz Bouras is Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering with a joint appointment as PreAward Manager at the university Office of Research Support, helping to ensure the achievement of the university research vision, mission and strategic goals.
He has been conferred the Chiangmai University Honoris Causa degree in Science, by HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindorn, and the PhD and Habilitation degrees in Computer Science from University of Lyon - France. Professor Bouras was also the holder of the ICT Chair position of the Ministry of ICT until Sept. 2016. Before joining QU, he was full Professor (Exceptional Class) at University of Lyon, where he was successively deputy Director of PRISMA and DISP “Information and Decision Systems” research laboratories and Director of the “Innovation and Knowledge Transfer Center” for university/industry collaboration. His current research interests focus on architectures for lifecycle engineering and information modeling, including intelligent products, digital preservation, data analytics and blockchains for PLM and Supply Chains. He managed numerous international projects related to these fields (EU FP7, QF Foundation, Bilateral, etc) and co-supervised more than thirty PhD studies. Professor Bouras is currently the Chair of the IFIP WG5.1 Working Group on ICT Lifecycle management. He received several international recognition awards and regularly serves as expert for research/education evaluation agencies in Europe, Asia and America.

Gaming, engaging students and learning the programming ropes while solving sustainability challenges.

Biography: This talk will demonstrate how the complex, highly creative activity of designing and creating games can engage students in the classroom and provides a scaffolding examplar learning programming and the fundamentals of software development while having fun. We also discuss how games engage students in solving today's societal challenges, such as climate change, recycling, food security, water waste, and greening the students' mindset (meaning-making students are more aware of issues related to sustainability development). A pool of 12 games created by students in the class will be presented (Gamipod, SecurityAware, Zoom+Blackboard@Games, and the platform UAEwithoutPlastic). These games were developed by students from Canada (Concordia University), Ecuador (ESPE), France (UTT), Switzerland (Lausanne University), Finland (LUT), Germany (Rostock), Spain (Polytechnic Madrid), and Jordan (Hashemite University). Students attended code camps, software engineering classes, games programming and design, computer graphics, and HCI/UX design. The presentation will also draw a roadmap for using gamification in education, gamification of design as a tool for active learning, and game development as a hub for bridging the gaps between academic teaching offers and industry needs. The students in the classes designed games in 15 weeks organized in four SCRUM Sprints of 3/5 weeks; prototyping techniques and UX design thinking methods were intensively used to stimulate students’ creativity. Students use Unity, ThreeJs, and Alice as development tools, and in which we consider games as puzzle-based coding applications. Altogether, those design thinking techniques and the development tools support the active learning approach, including (1) learning through creative exploration of a scaffolding examplar, (2) teaching logical and computational thinking skills and fundamental principles of programming, (3) smooth immersion in data structure, algorithms complexity, and the grounds of software engineering.
Prof. Seffah has been an HCI and human-centric software engineering professor in Canada and various European universities. Prof Seffah co-authored eight books and more than 200 publications. He supervised 15 PhDs and more than 100 masters, many are academic professors, and some are in leading positions in industry and Europe. Prof. Seffah’s most fundamental contribution to research is a theory of design (the Design is right and the Right); rights are those quality constructs that quantity software systems quality from a human perspective, including usability, usefulness, accessibility, acceptability, usable security, privacy, as well as sustainability. He built various research and teaching labs and living fab/labs for co-creation, innovation, and engineering using a user-centric/user experience design thinking and innovation-by-design approach. Prof.’s last keynote talks include A Roadmap Interdisciplinary Research for a Smarter Planet and Education, problem-based learning, and gamification of the sustainability challenge.