Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists

You are holding the Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientist and Information Technologists. The creation of the Proceedings of the SAICSIT 2010 Conference is really a testament to the enthusiasm and collegial spirit amongst the computing research community in South Africa and our many friends internationally. One of the main objectives of the South African Institute of Computer Scientist and Information Technologist is to build research capacity in our region by providing researchers with the vehicles to get feedback on, or present their research, either through a presentation at the Annual SAICSIT Conference or as a paper in the South African Computer Journal. The last time I wrote a preface to the Proceedings of the SAICSIT Conference was in 2004. Whilst in the process of compiling the conference programme and managing the collation of the final papers for SAICSIT 2010, I could not help but notice how far we have come in the last 6 years. And I am not the only one who noticed the change: several reviewers also commented on the vast improvement in the quality of papers being submitted for review. Not only has the quality of the papers submitted improved a great deal since 2004, with the accepted full research papers of comparable standard to that of other leading international conferences, the demographics of our authors have also changed. We are progressing slowly but surely with regards to transformation. A large proportion of papers in this proceedings has one or more black authors, and the authors have gained this position not by being given special treatment, but by competing on an equal footing through a double blind peer-review process. And we have made major inroads into Africa. Where we had not a single full research paper emanating from an African author (other than South Africa) in 2004, this proceedings is filled with several African papers. Although many of the first authors list a South African university as their affiliation, they come from all over Africa: Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, etc. Our programme is further boosted this year by the presence of three distinguished international researchers as keynote speakers: Prof Jan Dietz, Emeritus Professor of Information Systems Design at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands; Dr Virpi Roto, Principal Researcher at Nokia Research Center in Helsinki, Finland; and Dr Jonathan Donner, Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group (TEM) at Microsoft Research India. The pre-conference day include the Postgraduate Symposium (where 19 masters and doctoral students will present their work), an Enterprise Architecture Knowledge Development Workshop (supported by the NRF), a Workshop on ICT Uses in Warfare and the Safeguarding of Peace, A Tutorial on User Experience (UX) presented by Dr Virpi Roto, a Tutorial on Enterprise Engineering by Prof Jan Dietz, and a Grid Computing Tutorial presented by Dr Bruce Becker, Coordinator of the South African National Grid.