Jalandhar: The School of Computer Application at Lovely Professional University (LPU) organized its 2nd International Conference on Networks, Intelligence, and Computing (ICONIC-2024) at the Shanti Devi Mittal Auditorium. Organized as Bartik 100, the conference marked the 100th birth anniversary of Jean Bartik, who was one of the original six programmers for the ENIAC- the first computer of its kind. She began work at the University of Pennsylvania, first manually and then using ENIAC to do so. Bartik and her colleagues developed and codified many of the initial fundamentals of programming while working.

Held in hybrid mode, the conference provided a common platform for scientists, researchers, academicians, industrialists, and students to assimilate the knowledge. LPU’s Pro-Chancellor Smt. Rashmi Mittal inaugurated the conference by releasing an abstract book. On this occasion, Mrs Mittal was accompanied by LPU’s Vice-Pro Chancellor Prof Dr. LR Gupta, and Austria’s Prof Dr Radu Prodan from the Institute of Information Technology, University of Klagenfurt.

The released book contains briefs about various computer applications that are to help the global society in innumerable ways. Some of the topics relate to predicting diabetes early; smart parking systems; lung infection prediction; malware detection, enhancing cyber security; recognizing human activity in ATMs; reality in breast surgery education; multiple eye diseases; hearing loss; and, many more

Dr Radu addressed the conference as a keynote speaker. While talking with the hundreds of students attending the conference from across India, Dr Radu talked about sustainable computing by illustrating all about new developments in information technology. A PhD in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck, Dr Rado’s current research interests include parallel and distributed systems, cloud computing, high-performance scientific computing, and software tool optimization.

Prof Dr L R Gupta desired a definite road map for students to make them future-ready. He hinted that the biggest challenge before all is to standardize norms and regulations for generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) modes.

It was also shared that presently we all live in a digital world estimated to host around 4.5 billion Internet users and 10 billion of mobile connections 2.5 billion of data every day. Managing and extracting value from the sheer amount of raw data requires deep software analysis. The talks provided an overview on optimizing system software support for extreme-scale data processing applications. The focus stayed on social media, entertainment and streaming, engaging billions of people expected to grow to 4.41 billion in 2025.