Dissemination of knowledge is a vital aspect in the development of science and technology. A brilliant idea or a great discovery will be soon forgotten if it is not shared properly, after rigorous scrutiny, at a suitable forum and shared with the appropriate scientific community. This is the essence of a conference: to provide a forum to scrutinize and disseminate scientific and technological knowledge. In the modern era, it is not sufficient to communicate knowledge with a small group in a region or a country. The value of a conference is increased multi-fold if the conference is truly international – reaching a wider and more global community. This is the aim of an “international conference”: to provide a portal to communicate ideas at a global scale.

The Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Peradeniya has been the pioneer of development of technology and the advancement of the science of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and related areas. Ten years ago, in 2006, the Department organized the first International Conference in Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS),whichwas inaugurated under the visionary leadership and the futuristic thinking of the then Head of the Department, Dr. SanathAlahakoon.

In 2007, the conference was again hosted by the Department. From there onwards to-date, the conference was alternatively hosted by the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Peradeniya and a prestigious University in India. In 2008, it was hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur; in 2010 by the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Mangalore;in 2012 by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras; Chennai and in 2014 by theAtalBihari Vajpayee Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management (IIITM) Gwalior.

This conference is technically supported by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) which is the largest professional network in the world. Therefore, the publications made in ICIIS conferences will be archived in the IEEE Xplore digital library enabling them to be accessed and referred to by the scientists worldwide.

This year, the conference was inaugurated on 18th December 2015 at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Peradeniya, marking the 10th anniversary of a long journey of providing the most effective forum in the region to disseminate new knowledge and share expertise among researchers, scientists and engineers in the academia and in the industry in a wide spectrum of sub disciplines in Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

With the vision to promote innovation for engineering, the theme of the conference has been selected as "Sustainable Development through Next Generation Integrated Engineering". Next generation challenges in energy, transport, communications, consumer electronics, computing, healthcare and manufacturing industries demand integration of diverse engineering solutions that are socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. These topics are discussed in this conference at different levels.

For ICIIS2015, 234 papers were received from 17 different countries. After a rigorous review process conducted by the veteran international review panel, only 111 were selected by the technical program committee for regular oral paper presentations. The presented papers will be submitted to the IEEE eXplore database. The accepted papers where the authors are from foreign countries including India, Australia, Pakistan, Japan, United Kingdom, Finland, Italy, Canada, United States of America, Norway, Switzerland, Malaysia, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Peoples Republic of China, and France were presented in five sessions, where each session will have four parallel sessions. The papers includedthe following invited papers.

The conference had five keynote speeches by world renowned researchers and academics including IEEE distinguished lecturers, where all of them were from the North Americal continent. They were,

There were two parallel special sessions to discuss next generation integrated engineering applications in the field of communications and electric power systems. The resource persons of the 5G Wireless System: Path to a Truly Networked Society were Prof. AnttiT ölli, Prof. Nandana Rajatheva, Prof. Marian Codreanu and Dr. Ari Pouttu of Olu University, Finland and Dr. Anil Fernando, University of Surrey, UK. The session on Renewable Energy Integration and Smart Grids was conducted by Prof. Kithsiri Liyanage, Prof. Janaka Ekanayake, and Dr. Prabath Binduhewa of University of Peradeniya, and Dr. Dharshana Muthumuni, Manitoba HVDC Research Centre, Canada. They both were well attended by the conference participants and local industries.

In addition, on December 17th, the day before the conference, four parallel pre-conference workshops, titled “Data Mining”, “Bio Medical Engineering”, “Deep Learning for Image Analysis”, and “Advances in High Power Electronics and its Applications”were conducted by eminent panels of experts from local and foreign universities and leading global organizations such as General Electric, Germany.

To mark the 10th anniversary, there will be a special issue in the ACTA Press International Journal of Control and Intelligent Systems consisting of journal versions of 10 papers of ICIIS2015 selected by the editorial board of the journal.

Since inception, organizers of ICIIS have been working on making every effort to maintain very high academic standards. As a result, with an average acceptance ratio of 44%, today ICIIS is the only IEEE hosted conference in Sri Lanka and one of the best conferences in the Asia Pacific region with the h-index being 12. Hence this is a conference where the participants can be proud of being a part of ICIIS.

While maintaining high academic standards, the conference has been very generous to the participants especially to the local and regional participants by offering highly subsidized registration fees. A special gratitude is paid here to the Gold sponsor: Sri Lanka Telecom Mobitel, the Silver sponsor: International Research Centre of the University of Peradeniya, Bronze sponsors: LTL Holdings Pvt Ltd., and the Lanka Electricity Company (LECO), and the Technical Partners: Sustainable Energy Authority of Sri Lanka and MAS Active for their generous contributions.