Dear IIMA friends
A Happy New Year to you all!
We hope that you are all well. I am sure that we are all pleased to see the back of the year 2020 and in the UK we are delighted to see the roll out of the new vaccines to address the COVID pandemic. Clearly 2020 has been a challenge for many of us and it has certainly had an impact on the way we work here in the UK with home working and online classes becoming the norm.
As we look forward to 2021 I wanted to set out some thoughts that I hope will feature in your plans for this year and give you something to look forward to!
Conference – October 2021
We had to postpone the majority of the conference in 2020. We did manage a short online version (iima.org/wp/31st)
We expect to have our 32nd annual conference in Utrecht, Netherlands. This is always a highlight and the chance to visit Europe again will be special. Remember the fantastic times we have had before – Conference 2021 will be extra special for the wait! The IIMA conference is a great opportunity to share and debate our work in this very supportive and inspiring community.
Look out for the full call for papers. Please book this in your schedule and start to plan that paper you wish to submit.
Monday, October 18 – Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Theme: Human-Centric Digitalisation (Human-Centric Digitalisation – IIMA)
Symposium & Webinars on the following topics
We were delighted to have four webinar / symposiums last year. One thought provoking discussion session on Ethics and AI, another panel symposium on Open Data in addressing the pandemic, an excellent talk on Digital Leadership and Alison Munsch led a very helpful session on online teaching and learning.
Look out for the next ones. We have one coming up (27th January) on Cybersecurity hosted by Vincent Nestler. This will be based on the NICE Challenge Project (nice-challenge.com). It is a project he leads, and it is an excellent free resource for any educational organization to use.
We are then planning two further sessions on “Big Data: Lessons from the future” in February and another one on a linked topic of “Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning” in March or April.
These sessions are really helpful opportunities to test out some early work, develop ideas for your next research project, to hear from some experts, researchers or practitioners about their field … so help us to learn and share, and to keep the community alive during these unusual times. These can be the springboard for your conference paper. If you would like to host a session or give a talk, please let us know.
Submission of Papers
And if you have been completing work then don’t forget to keep your papers coming in to the two journals – a presentation in a symposium could be the basis for developing a fuller paper. See for guidelines and information on how to submit: Call for Papers – IIMA
So our best wishes for a healthy and successful 2021 – and most of all I look forward to it being the time we can all meet again.
Professor Ian Allison
President IIMA