ASCENT 2016 Conference Themes

FTMS College – Cyberjaya Campus
Malaysia
Convened by
In Association with
Supported by
Preamble
After two decades of tentative attempts to reach international
agreement, the December 2015 COP21 UN climate summit in
Paris ended with encouraging, unanimous commitments by
almost 200 countries to contain global warming by year 2100 to
not more than 2°C above pre-industrialisation levels, and indeed
to ‘endeavour to limit’ temperature rise to just 1.5°C by then.
We are in the ‘last chance saloon’ where scientists tell us our
planet is already 1°C above pre-industrial levels. The nations of
the world have in effect pledged to stop emitting greenhouse
gases within the next fifty years.
Encouraging as this is, it is one thing to commit and it is quite
another to deliver, notwithstanding the legal underpinnings of the
Paris agreement. To achieve these outcomes, the world needs
innovative, imaginative, concerted and diverse measures by
everybody. Developed nations, whose emissions jump-started
global warming and continue to exacerbate the problem, must
take the lead to support developing nations financially as they
wean themselves off carbon dependency. They must now
reduce their emissions to meet their newly agreed targets. In
short, whole world needs to prioritise innovation to achieve these
goals.
The challenge is indeed immense and multifaceted and.
ASCENT 2016 aims to be a forum to explore how business, I.T.
and education can play their parts in rising to this and related
sustainability challenges.
Objectives
• To encourage quality research on the roles of business, I.T.,
and education in building a sustainable world through
innovation.
• To showcase Malaysia’s dedication to greening the
environment and enhancing corporate social responsibilities.
• To provide opportunities and encouraging kindred spirits
dedicated to furthering sustainability goals through quality
research studies.
Significance
Impact
• Immediate need to enhance research and development
activities in support of Malaysia Vision 2020.
• Greater need to conduct research in technology support of
education at corporate, community and national level.
• Need to identify reasons for the high failure rate of SMEs and
Small Business in developing nations.
• Need to improve applications in various software development
strategies.
• Enriching the existing research literature.
• Enabling the drafting of successful business policy and
strategy in various directions.
• Creating or extending networks and new business
opportunities.
ASCENT International Conference
ASCENT is an annual international conference organized by FTMS
College, with a humble beginning in 2013 and is now entering its
fourth year. In essence, it is organized as an effort to provide a
platform and a forum for academicians and practitioners to discuss
and present their works and research findings on extant issues and
future trends related to business, IT and education. Papers
presented were published in Conference Proceedings and selected
papers were submitted for publications in academic journals. This
conference is supported by the Ministry of Higher Education,
Malaysia and the Malaysia Convention and Exhibition Bureau,
Ministry of Tourism, Malaysia.
ASCENT 2016 is the continuation of these efforts and to celebrate
the commitments shown by 200 countries to contain global warming,
we choose Innovating to Build a Sustainable World as the theme
for the conference. As such, ASCENT 2016 invites scholars and
practitioners to contribute ideas and research findings that address
the impacts of business, IT and education on global warming and
vice versa.
Notwithstanding, crucial though it is, global warming is far from being
the only sustainability challenge. Depleted global resources,
population growth, an aging population, pandemic risks, super bugs,
global terrorism, and friction between nations and between ethnic
and other groups are amongst other threats to global sustainability often not unrelated to climate change. Hence, ASCENT 2016
welcomes submissions from other disciplines that will provide
insights from scholarship and research that business, I.T. and
education can make to contain these wider sustainability risks.
Call for Papers
Authors are invited to submit their original research papers, case
studies, reviews, work in progress, reports, abstracts, students’
papers or research proposals within the broad scope of the
conference. Work which reflects emerging technologies and trends
in the fields of business management, information systems and
education is most appropriate. Please send a soft copy in Microsoft
Word format after preparing the same as per submission guidelines,
to the email address: [email protected] Please provide all your
details (Name, address, contact number, email ID, qualifications,
etc.)
ASCENT 2016 Conference Themes
Business
I.T. and Engineering
Business is in pole position to contribute. Its environment is
constantly changing. In fact the only certainty is that the future is
uncertain. The history of business is littered with many examples of
companies that failed to adapt and so failed altogether. Conversely,
there are already plenty of evidence of profitable businesses being
built around innovation in ‘the green economy’ which has now
become ‘the new normal’.
The story of I.T. has been excellent stories in terms of continued growth
in productivity. I.T. has made amazing contributions to the quality of life
across the world. Engineering is now being depended upon to deliver
the nations’ promises about a sustainable, green future, and not least
I.T. and software engineering.
While it is partly a matter of building businesses that profit from the
new green economy, it has also now become equally important for
businesses to embrace CSR and ESG into their DNA for their own
good and public interest. CSR and ESG can no longer be seen as
mere tokenism and PR spin. CSR and ESG are now related to
innovation for energy conservation, recycling, sustainable utilization
of resources, avoidance of exploitation and pollution, achieving worklife balance, good corporate citizenship, good governance – and so
on within each and every business and cross all supply chains.
Tomorrow’s world depends on today’s corporate social responsibility.
It is now widely accepted that it is grossly inadequate for businesses
to leave it entirely to governments to legislate for sustainability. And
so Milton Friedman’s dictum is now seen as seriously passé – even if
once it might have seemed more apt. In 1970 Milton Friedman, the
arch doyen of the Chicago free market school, contended that:
‘There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use
its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits,
so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say,
engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.’
ASCENT 2016 sets out to be a forum to discuss these issues. All
businesses can and must do much better. Ethics must be at the core
of things and across all spectrums and involving all players in
business. Supplier, customers and regulators must conduct
themselves ethically and no efforts must be spared to promote ethics
and good governance in business. ASCENT 2016 welcomes
submissions to do with ‘building a sustainable world’ relating to any of
these parties.
The industrial revolution’s substitution of machines for what people used
to do, and more recently the replacement by electronic devices and
software of what machines had done, have had truly dramatic and
positive impacts upon productivity and upon the utilization of scarce
resources. Few industries have a better track record for innovation. To
this, I.T has become so much more productive in both hardware and
software. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, was not exaggerating
when in 1965 he espoused Moore’s law that projected a doubling of the
number of components per integrated circuit every two years.
Of course there are downside risks in all of this. For instance, electronic
devices use scarce rare-earth metals and recycling can be problematic.
Obsolete IT equipment poses a recycling challenge. Recently we have
become acutely aware of the power of social media and big data for
good but also for ill. Arguably cybercrime, alongside other sustainability
concerns, is becoming an existential threat.
ASCENT 2016 welcomes papers on the future of IT as a driver of
sustainability. Beside, ASCENT 2016 welcomes participants from all
branches of engineering, especially s on how I.T. can deliver a better
world. In addition, ASCENT 2016 is particularly interested in the
interconnectedness of IT with other branches of engineering and with
the other sub-themes of this conference, namely I.T.’s interconnectivity
with the roles of business and education in greening the globe. For
instance, computer modelling has been a principal engine driving our
predictions of future global warming. And IT is enabling the
development of new, sophisticated educational scaffolds and
educational mediums, for instance in the form of MOOCs.
Finally, ASCENT 2016 conference is open to contributions which seek
to explain how engineering can and must contribute to greening the
planet.
Education
Last but not least, the new ASCENT journal Education, Learning and Training, and the associated track at the ASCENT 2016 conference, present
opportunities to explore the role of education in identifying and giving effect to the business, I.T. and other changes that the green movement demands.
In the wake of the 2007/8 global financial crisis, business schools belatedly turned their attention to teaching and researching business ethics. Now
educators need to give substance to sustainability issues which are an important component of ethical behaviour. We educate tomorrow’s leaders
today. And, of course, driven by the demands of their more socially responsible students, many universities now have a strong story to tell about the
greening of their universities as businesses.
Developing nations are rightly very conscious of the priority of nation building. We are building sustainable nations and we must start in our schools.
Our children and their children will depend on what we offer educationally today. It is a tall order for educators as we are asking our students to do not
as we and our predecessors have done, but as we are now starting to espouse. It will be a tall order for our students to take their educators seriously: it
requires an overt commitment by educators.
The pedagogy of learning, as it is related to sustainability issues, is now surely the new wave of pedagogy to be developed and applied in our schools,
universities and in our educational programmes within businesses. We would like ASCENT 2016 to share with participants how this is developing.
Business Sub Themes
General
Business and International Management
• Innovative businesses
• Bribery and corruption
• Design characteristics of a business amenable to innovation
• Demographics of population age distributions
• Green businesses
• Sustainable utilisation of resources
• The place of law and regulation in promoting sustainability
• Monitoring progress between nations at greening their
businesses
• Whistleblowing
• Management fraud
• Extrapolating future business changes to implement the
2015 COP21 UN climate summit
• Impact on business of projected future population growth
• Modelling depletion of natural resources
• Exploitation of staff
• Green sustainable supply chains
• Issues relating to work-life-balance
• Ethical suppliers
• Ethical customers
• Critical business risks and their mitigation
• Issues related to recycling
• Issues relating to pollution
• Business consequences of predicted climate change
• Opportunities to profit from the new green economy
• Business continuity planning for critical dislocation
• Organizational Behaviour Concepts and Issues
• Corporate policies and strategies for building sustainable
businesses
• Organizational Change Management
• Case studies on energy efficiency measures
• International Business Issues
• Case studies on recycling
• Social and Cultural Changes
• Corporate social responsibility of businesses
• CSR/ESG
• Systems and Operations Management
• Research Methods and Related Issues
• Strategic Management Issues
• Entrepreneur and Innovation
• Decision Making and Problem Solving
• Economic Concepts and Related Issues
• International Environmental Sustainability
• High Performance Work Practices
• CSR Related Issues
• Education Related Issues
Marketing Management
• Sustainability and the value proposition
• Importance of social media in Marketing
• Customer Perceived Value
• IT & Marketing
• Customer Value Proposition
• Retail Marketing Issues
• International Marketing
• Consumer Behaviours Issues
• Marketing Mix Adaptation Vs Standardization
• 2B Marketing
• Relationship variables in Marketing
• CRM
• Integrated Marketing Communications
• Corporate Governance
Human Resource Management
• Human Resource Management Practices
• Employment Laws and Related
• International Human Resources
• Employee Relations
• Reward Management Issues
• Ethics of Employees
Professional Accounting
• Ethics in Accounting
• Costing & Management Accounting
Accounting and Finance
• Accounting for corporate social responsibility
• Accountability of the board for sustainability
• Ethical investment
• Integrated reporting
• Corporate sustainability reports
• International Financial Management
• Financial Management Issues
• Auditing
• Accounting Standard and Reporting Issues
• Environmental auditing
• Strategic Financial Management
• Role of internal audit in CSR/ESG
I.T. and Engineering Sub Themes
• Future innovation in I.T.
• Expert Systems
• Greening I.T.
• Game Theory
• The record of I.T. delivering a better world
• Graph Theory
• Cybercrime and other threats
• Grid Computing
• Other forms of computer crime
• Green Information Technology
• I.T. and the future nature of work
• Networks
• Implications of social media for global sustainability
• Implications of big data for global sustainability
• Parallel Computing
• Operating Systems
• Sustainability threats caused by I.T.
• Linguistic Computing
• Impact of I.T. on tomorrow’s education
• Multimedia
• The future of MOOCs
• Medical Cybernetics
• Impact of I.T. on tomorrow’s business model
• Quantum Computing
• Impact of I.T. on the nature of tomorrow’s work
• I.T. as a driver of progress in the developing world
• Reliability Theory
• Software Engineering
• Modelling climate change
• Systems Theory
• Modelling other aspects of sustainability
• Theory of Computation
• Applied Computing
• Wireless Computing
• Bioengineering
• Bio Cybernetics
• Remote Sensing
• Bioinformatics
• Genetics
• Cognitive Science
• Oceanography Technology Systems
• Computational Biology
• Waste Management Systems
• Cryptography
• Water Marine Sciences
• Cybernetics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Engineering Cybernetics
• Computational Statistics
• Ergonomics Humanities
• Computer Graphics
• Information Science
• Computer Security
• Knowledge Management
• Computer Vision
• Management Cybernetics
• Control Theory
• Human-computer Interaction
• Databases
• Information Retrieval
• Data mining
• Internet
• Distributed Computing
• Machine Learning
• Dynamical Systems
• Image Processing
Education Sub Themes
• Future innovation in education
• Relating Formal and Informal Learning
• Incorporating sustainability into curricula
• Interaction in Class Rooms
• The pedagogy of sustainability learning
• Teaching Strategies
• Modelling future need for educated communities
• The sustainability perspective of current educators
• Businesses as secondary and tertiary educators
• Teachers in Development of Inclusive Pedagogy
• Educators working with business on sustainability
• Changing sustainability perceptions by education
• Educating the educators on sustainability
• Learning and Lesson Study in Mathematics
• Teaching and researching business ethics
• Communicating Climate Change
• Understanding business ethics
• Classical Tales in English Classrooms
• The sustainability perspective of the new student generation
• Eco Behaviours in Schools or Education Institutions
Who Should Attend?
This Conference is designed for academicians,
researchers, educators, professionals from the private,
public and not-for-profit sectors, representatives of
international bodies, environmental groups and other
NGOs, think tanks, legislators and regulators,
technologists and scientists, education policy
development
representatives,
career/employment
officers, education advisers, library personnel, and open
learning specialists.
PUBLICATIONS
Selected conference papers will be published in IJABM,
ISSN 2289-3717, IJISE, ISSN 2289-3709 and IJELT. All
accepted papers will be published in conference
proceedings with ISBN. Participation certificate and
publication certificate will be issued separately.
PAPER IN ABSENTIA
Authors who cannot attend the conference in person, but
wish to present a paper in absentia are also encouraged
to send a paper as per the schedule. Papers on the
conference theme presented in absentia are eligible to
be included in Conference Materials. Authors need to
send the powerpoint presentation (15 slides) in his/her
absentia. Authors presenting papers in absentia will
receive the conference proceedings CD-ROM and
respective certificates by courier to a given address.
IMPORTANT DATES
Activity
Date
Submission of full paper
30th September 2016
Notification of Acceptance of Paper
One week after submission
Submission of final paper
17th October 2016
Author Registration
17th October 2016
Attendee Registration
1st November 2016
Conference Dates
24th & 25th November 2016
REGISTRATION FEE
Category
Fee
International Early Bird
USD 100
International
USD 150
Local Early Bird
USD 50
Local
USD 100
Publication Fees (Online & printed)
USD 100
FTMS Student
RM 25
• Standard rate registration fees (participants & presenters) include
conference admission, conference set, lunches and refreshments.
• *Student rate registration fees (participants & presenters) include
conference admission, conference set, lunches and refreshments.
• Accommodation fee is not included. Delegates to arrange their
accommodation.
Schedule at a Glance
Conference Day 1
Thursday, 24th November
08.00am – 09.00am
09.00am – 09.45am
10.00am – 10.45am
10.45am – 11.00am
11.00am – 01.00pm
01.00pm – 02.00pm
02.00pm – 03.00pm
03.00pm – 05.00pm
Registration
Continental Breakfast
Opening Ceremony
Coffee and Network
Parallel Presentation Sessions
Lunch
Common Session
Parallel Presentation Sessions
Conference Day 2
Friday, 25th November
08.00am – 09.00am
09.30am – 10.30am
10.30am – 11.15am
11.15am – 11.30am
11.30am – 12.30pm
12.30pm – 01.30pm
Continental Breakfast
Parallel Presentation Sessions
Common Session
Coffee and Network
Closing Ceremony
Lunch
Conference Panel
ORGANISER AND COLLABORATORS
FTMS, established in 1986 is one of Malaysia’s longest established private institutes
consisting of two divisions, one specializing in Academic Studies and the other in
Professional Studies. Through its collaborations with UK universities FTMS offers a
range of programmes from Foundation level through to Postgraduate. Today,
FTMSGlobal, through its 13 centres in 10 countries, serves more than 20,000 local and
international students across its campuses worldwide and boasts a team of 1,500 staff
members, guided by their passion to provide industry-driven education.
The University of East London (UEL) is a modern, leading sporting university located in
the London Borough of Newham, East London, England, based at two campuses in
Stratford and Docklands areas. Established in 1898 as West Ham Technical Institute then
gained university status in 1992
UEL is one of UK’s leading modern universities. Its Among the top ten post-1992
universities for research. Recently the top university for investment on facilities per student.
UEL obtained QAA best possible award of “Broad Confidence” in management and quality
of programmes.
Ministry of Education Malaysia (MOEM) had established Department of Higher Education with
the intention of developing and creating a higher education environment to encourage the
establishment of centers of knowledge, and the development of competent, innovative and ethical
individuals thus fulfilling national and international aspirations.
Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) was first established
in 1973 as the Ministry of Technology, Research and Local Government. In 1976, in
line with new functions and responsibilities pertaining to environmental matters, the
Ministry then changed its name to Ministry of Science, Technology and
Environment (MOSTE). On 27th March 2004, the Cabinet agreed to the
restructuring of MOSTE and the name was changed to Ministry of Science,
Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) in order to lead the National ICT Development
function, Multimedia and Innovation. In 2007, the science and technology function
was divided into Biotechnology, ICT, Industry, Sea to Space and S&T Services
clusters.
Established by the Malaysian Ministry of Tourism, MyCEB's role is to further promote and position
Malaysia internationally as the preferred destination for meetings, incentives, conventions, exhibition
including major events. We are here to assist local and international meeting and event planners bid
for, secure and stage their international events successfully in Malaysia.
ASCENT Testimonials
“A multi-disciplinary platform for academics to exchange ideas and research experience on
topical issues with practical relevance. I really liked the conference and hope to be able to take
part in it again. When I came back I did inform my colleagues about the conference and sent
them the links.”
- Rienold Behringer, United Kingdom
“The whole conference has been extremely successful and contributed to my research
experience. I therefore recommend all to participate in the future ASCENT conferences.
- Yeh Ying Cheah, China
“A wonderful opportunity for post-graduate students to present their research outcomes.”
- Puspa Rani, Singapore
“Very inspiring and a great example of inter-disciplinary approach. Wide geography of
participants is a big plus and advantage of the ASCENT 2013 Conference.”
- Hema Ramachandran, India
“A very well organized conference. It is beneficial (and) helpful for all groups of people:
Researchers, Businessmen, Students, Academics and practitioners. It is an appropriate way to
flourish and enhance your network and awareness of different people all over the world. I
thoroughly enjoyed all the conference, it was very well organised. Most of the presentations were
so engaging and very beneficial.”
- Hassan Miras, Maldives
“Thank you for such a thoughtful conference. I particularly enjoyed the opening session speakers
and the closing session speakers.”
- Dr. Munir Theeb, Libya
“ASCENT 2013 Conference was both educational and collegial.”
- Bojuwon Mustapha, Nigeria
“It is a great chance for meeting peers from all over the world and discuss issues from different
angels and with different backgrounds.”
- Tareq Almunais, Kuwait
“Very focussed event ; Good for Networking ; Well Organized ; Friendly! THANK YOU TOO!! It
was a super conference. Really enjoyed it. Hope all well and keep in touch.”
- Mathews Nkhoma, Vietnam
“I would like to congratulate you for the wonderful conference. I also would like to ask you to
thank Zainudin and Mohamad Noor for wonderful arrangements.”
- A. A. M. Nufile, Sri Lanka