The 19th International Conference on Web-Based Learning (ICWL 2020) and the 5th International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Education (SETE 2020), hosted by Springer LNCS and HKWS and organized by NingboTech, were held on campus from October 22nd to 24th. Professor ZHANG Xianmin, Vice President of the university, and Professor Ramamohanarao Kotagiri, Academician of the University of Melbourne (Australia) served as Honorary Chairmen, while Professor PANG Chaoyi, Dean of the School of Computer and Data Engineering of NingboTech, and Professor Elvira Popescu of the University of Craiova (Romania) chaired the conferences.
On behalf of NingboTech, Professor ZHANG addressed the assembly in the opening ceremony, during which he commended that the conferences were of great significance and help as they served as a platform for experts and scholars, who should all the more take on responsibilities in this special time of pandemic prevention and control, to discuss topics like how to integrate online and offline teaching and how to innovate and reform online learning technologies.
Professor Dragan Gasevic of Monash University (Australia), Professor HUANG Kaizhu of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Professor Chin-Chung Tsai of National Taiwan Normal University were invited to deliver key-note speeches under respective themes of “The Promise of Learning Analytics in the Age of AI”, “Adversarial Machine Learning and Its applications for Robust Pattern Recognition”, “The Role of Conceptions of Learning in Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments”. Attendees had in-depth discussions and exchanges over new sectors like “assessment technologies for online-learning”, “cloud-based learning technologies” and “construction technologies for online learning”.
After three-day intensive discussions and exchanges of views, the conferences, which received 93 papers and were attended by over 200 experts and scholars from countries and regions like US, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Australia, Canada, Romania, Estonia, Thailand, Hong Kong (China) and Taiwan (China), eventually came to an end. Current Political News Translation Model Based on Attention Mechanism written by a student under the instruction of Professor CAI Liang of NingboTech was selected as the best paper in the student category. It was also announced that the next ICWL and SETE would be held in Macao, China.
As prestigious and influential academic gatherings in the world and in Asia particularly, the conferences were committed to offering an open and integrated platform to scholars dedicated to researches on education technologies. This year’s conferences were conducive in strengthening cooperation between NingboTech and institutions of higher learning along Belt and Road Initiative route including from Central and Eastern Europe. By holding such conferences like, it’s expected that relevant subjects and disciplines could enjoy transformative development and that the university could be more influential on the international academic arena.
