The 25th annual symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA) will be held in conjunction with the 6th Workshop on African Language Technology (AfLaT) and the 7th conference of Robotics and Mechatronics (RobMech) on 27 and 28 November 2014 at the Lagoon Beach Hotel in Cape Town (https://www.lagoonbeachhotel.co.za).

In addition to PRASA, AfLaT and RobMech, the 11th FASTAR workshop will take place from 1-5 December in Stellenbosch to make provision for interested parties to attend all four events. See https://www.fastar.org/wiki/index.php?title=FASTAR_2014 for more information on this workshop.

Fees
No fees are payable by delegates that attend and present. However, delegates attending, but not presenting, incur a cost of R1,000 per delegate (subject to change if additional funding is secured). Registration is limited to 150 delegates, and the conference dinner is limited to 100 on a first come first serve basis. Delegates are responsible for their own accommodation and transport.

Registration will open in October, authors of accepted papers are registered first.

Important dates and deadlines
29 September 2014:(extended) The deadline for the submission of full papers/ abstracts for work-in-progress/posters. Use this link for submission.
1 October 2014: Conference registration opens.
21 October 2014: Notification of acceptance of papers and abstracts will be provided to authors via e-mail.
1 November 2014: Deadline for registration.
14 November 2014: Final date for submission of camera ready papers.

Topics
For PRASA, we invite you to submit original papers in any related area, including but not limited to:
• Classifiers and related topics
• Speech processing
• Speech recognition
• Text to speech systems
• Natural language processing
• Computer vision and image processing
• Bio-pattern recognition
• Bioinformatics
• Signal processing
• Remote sensing
• Artificial intelligence
• Machine learning
• En-user applications and systems

For the AfLaT workshop, we invite submissions on any topic related to language and speech technology, specifically for African languages, including, but not limited to, the following:
• Corpora and corpus annotation
• Machine readable lexicons
• Morphological analysers
• Spelling checkers
• Part of speech taggers and parsers
• Applications such as machine translation, information extraction, information retrieval, computer-assisted language learning and question answering
• The role of language technologies in economic development, education, healthcare, and emergency and public services
• Documentation of endangered languages and the use of language technologies to enhance language vitality
• The combination of language and speech technology with mobile phone technology.

For RobMech, any and all Robotics and Mechatronics topics will be considered, topics will include but are not limited to:
• FMS Artificial Intelligence
• Knowledge Based Systems
• Information Technology Applied to Manufacturing
• Computer-Aided Engineering Education
• Sensors and Applications
• Robots and Automation
• Lean Manufacturing Logistics
• Modelling and Simulation Scheduling
• Rapid Prototype
• Management of Technology
• Operations Management
• Education and Training
• Agile Manufacturing
• Mechatronics
• Distributed Control Systems
• Energy and
• Manufacturing Neural Networks
• Mobile robotics
• Mining robotics

Format
Submitted papers must follow the IEEE conference proceedings (templates available here) and be submitted in PDF format. The following formats are invited in English, the official conference language:
• Papers: original and unpublished research contributions, incomplete research, on-going research or ideas for future research in order to generate feedback limited to a minimum of four (4) pages and a maximum of six (6) pages; and
• Poster and demonstration session: on-going research and demonstration of software, applications, hardware, and other technology. Only abstracts are required for this session.

PLEASE NOTE:
All papers will be submitted to a blind, peer-review process.
The length of a presentation is 15-20 minutes, including questions and feedback
Students are encouraged to submit papers, posters and demonstrations.
Detailed submission requirements are available on the relevant websites.

Contact Details
E-mail: 2014prasa [at] gmail [dot] com; robmech2014 [at] gmail [dot] com; info [at] aflat [dot] org;
Conference Websites: https://www.prasa.org, https://www.robmech.co.za, https://www.aflat.org