ITE

It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to the 15th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE 2014) and the 3rd Annual Conference on Research in Information Technology (RIIT 2014). The theme this year is "Riding the Wave of Change in Information Technology" and the many quality submissions we received allowed us to assemble one of the strongest programs in the history of the conferences. As in past years, the synergies between research and education in information technology are prevalent, and several themes emerged from the accepted submissions. Networking, security, and development remain popular with researchers, and interest in mobile computing, resource measurement and management, capstone courses, and personalization has grown.

The call for participation attracted 111 submissions, 72 of which were submitted to SIGITE and 39 to RIIT. Both numbers represent a larger pool than in recent years, demonstrating that the conferences are of great interest in the community. Ninety-five of the submissions were papers, with 59 papers submitted to SIGITE and 36 papers submitted to RIIT. SIGITE has 27 papers in its program for an acceptance rate of 46% and RIIT has 14 papers for an acceptance rate of 39%. All of the authors presenting should be congratulated on their excellent work.

A conference cannot happen without the help of its reviewers, and this year was no exception. Fiftyfive reviewers worked diligently to ensure that every paper had at least three independent reviews. It was a significant effort to produce the 317 reviews that ended up in the system, and we thank the reviewers from the bottom of our heart. New to the conferences this year was a meta review process, in which 13 diligent meta reviewers together examined all reviews for each submission and reconciled those reviews into a coherent message for each author. We hope the meta review process enabled authors to have more substantive feedback on their work, whether it appears in the final program or not.

The conference runs from Thursday to Saturday and each day offers something of interest to attendees. On Thursday our keynote speaker is Dr. Flavio Villanustre, Vice-President of Technology Architecture & Product for LexisNexis and HPCC Systems. The day continues with a workshop on end-user development activities and paper sessions for both SIGITE and RIIT. Thursday concludes with a reception, which we know will be useful for networking with colleagues old and new. Friday introduces a new presentation format, lightning talks on research in progress, at the conferences. There are also paper sessions for SIGITE and RIIT, a poster session in the afternoon and, of course, more opportunities for networking during lunch and the breaks. Saturday offers a three-hour workshop on process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) as well as a panel on mobile computing courses and some excellent SIGITE papers. We also hope that you stay for the closing session where we will share our plans for SIGITE/RIIT 2015 in Chicago.

We hope you find the conference presentations interesting and thought-provoking, you reconnect with colleagues you know, you find new collaborators, and you submit the work that results to SIGITE or RIIT next year. The excellence you see at SIGITE/RIIT 2014 depends on your energy and effort, and we thank you for letting us be a part of it.