This issue presents selected papers from the 4th IEEE-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Conference held in the Kingdom of Bahrain from 11 to 14 November 2007. The conference was a forum for professional engineers, scientists and academics engaged in research and development to convene and present their latest scholarly work and applications in industry.
The main tracks of the conference were Electric Power and Control, Communications and Signal Processing, Computer Engineering, Electronics, E-applications, Engineering Education and Industrial Technology Applications. In addition to the regular technical program, 16 distinguished keynote and invited speakers representing government, industry and academia addressed state of the art topics of the conference. These topics included Renewable Energy, Next Generation/4G Technologies, Engineering Education, Semiconductors in the Era of Nanotechnology, Pulse Power Applications to Process Industry, WiMax Technology, Standards and Future Wireless Communications.
A total of 233 papers were received from 30 countries in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and North America. The review process involved 155 experts from all over the world. Each paper was reviewed by two independent reviewers and the final decision was endorsed by the track chair. The acceptance rate was 54% which reflected the high standards of the conference. The accepted papers were presented in 13 parallel oral sessions, seven industrial technology and applications sessions and one poster session. Out of the presented papers, only 13 papers were chosen for possible publication in this issue. The authors of the 13 papers were then asked to submit an extended version of their papers. Only eight papers were selected for publication after being subjected to another round of peer review process.
The Technical Committee of the 4th IEEE GCC Conference would like to thank all the participating authors and the distinguished speakers for accepting our invitation and contributing to this special issue. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to the many people in the international advisory committee and the panel of reviewers. We hope that this issue would contribute to the world body of knowledge and advance the research and development efforts in electrical and computer engineering.