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Hon. Dr. J. Muswere, officially opens the 11th International Conference on Communication and Information Science

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The Minister of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services, Hon. Dr. J. Muswere, has officially opened the 11th International Conference on Communication and Information Science , a two day conference running under the theme: "Re-imagining Communication and Information Science in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)".

 Minister Muswere, who was the Guest of Honour and accompanied by his Deputy Minister Hon. O. Marupi, called on conference participants made up of communication science students, researchers, academics, and information and communication scientists from various fields,  to embrace the new digital revolution brought on by advancements such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) but to also be mindful of using it towards home grown solutions to local challenges.
“This conference must turn ideation and philosophy into practical sustainable solutions to African problems.” Hon. Dr. Muswere said. “We must re-imagine the use of AI and information science being championed from students, scholars, and researchers from Africa.” he added.

The conference which started on Thursday 12th of September, is being hosted by NUST’s Faculty of Communication and Information Science as a hybrid (in person and virtual) interactive seminar where over a dozen intellectual papers on the impact that AI on the communication landscape are being presented by experts in the field.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) which has become part and parcel of most of our daily computing activities, refers to computer systems “that can understand a natural language or perceive and comprehend a visual scene; and systems that perform other types of feat that require human type of Intelligence” (Echedom and Okuinghae,2021: 244).

Some of our computers and mobile phones have AI features which we are unaware of. These features include speech recognition functions, and grammar checks for example on Microsoft Word among other features. Compared to natural human intelligence, AI is “consistent, less expensive, has the ease of duplication and dissemination, can be documented and can perform certain tasks much faster and better than the human” (Avneet, 2015: 79).

Within the broader field of communication and information science, AI is used in fields such as journalism (Broussard et al., 2019), library (Echedom and Okuinghae, 2021), records management (Mosweu, 2021) and publishing (Zhao and Prabhashini, 2019) among others. While there have been positive discourses around AI, its negative implications on “employment, democracy and equality” (Kerr et al., 2020: 1) have not been overlooked considering that every innovation or technology has its own challenges. The growth, adoption and utilisation of AI in the field of communication is unique to each society and therefore, societies can learn from each other through debates and knowledge exchange on their encounters with AI.

Through this hashtag#ICCIS conference, NUST seeks to give the communication sectors an opportunity to reflect on AI broadly, sharing experiences and lessons learned, new ways of thinking and pathways for exploring opportunities associated with the technology while addressing related challenges.

 hashtag#ICCIS hashtag#AI hashtag#4IR hashtag#5IR hashtag#studyatnust hashtag#ChooseNUST hashtag#ThinkInOtherTerms.

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