Omer Rana is a Professor of Performance Engineering and the International Dean for the Middle East at Cardiff University, UK. He is on the Strategic Advisory Group of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) International. His research interests include high performance distributed computing (particularly cloud and edge computing) and intelligent systems.

Rana has contributed to specification and standardisation activities via the Open Grid Forum and worked as a software developer with London-based Marshall Bio-Technology Limited prior to joining Cardiff University. At MBT he developed specialist software to support biotech instrumentation. He is the cross-council projects director for the UK National EdgeAI Hub. He co-leads the cybersecurity and data science theme in the UK-US Global Centre for Clean Energy and Equitable Transportation Solutions (CLEETS).

Rana holds a PhD in Neural Computing and Parallel Architectures from Imperial College (London University, UK). He is the associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing and a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Internet Computing magazine and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

His keynote speech at iCETiC 25 will focus on Bringing AI to the masses: the rising importance of edge infrastructure .

Dr Biao Zeng (preferred name: Zeng) is an experimental psycholinguist and applied neuroscientist specializing in speech breathing and its role in naturalistic communication. He pioneered the "helicopter task" an innovative method for examining respiratory patterns during spontaneous speech. Zeng leads the Speech Breathing Network, supported by the Wales Innovation Network, and is an Applied Psychology Research and Innovation Group member. His interdisciplinary research spans audiovisual speech perception (including British Sign Language), and he integrates emerging technologies such as virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), eye-tracking, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to advance education and rehabilitation for vulnerable populations.

His invited speech at iCETiC 25 will focus on What Do We Talk About When We Talk About AI? A Three-Tier Analysis of the Helicopter Task .

Dr Peter Morgan Barnes is a research fellow at the University of Bristol, and has just completed an SP funded research project at Swansea University on historical interpretation within the Welsh heritage sector, Unsung Heritage. An art historian focusing on performed art and language, his book Pasticcio Opera in Britain: history and context (Manchester University Press, 2024) is going into paperback this January. He gave the John Bird Lecture at Cardiff University in 2022 and his journal article, 'Hyperliteracy in popular performance genres, 1770-1914', will be published by the Nineteenth-Century Music Review later this year.

Human language is a technology. Ever since Walter Ong published Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in 1982, it has been viewed in this way and, just as events such as the printing press, the conflation of intelligence with literacy, programmes for democratising literacy and the consequent rise of mass literacy brought profound changes to this technology, the digital revolution has done the same. Until the 1980s, scholarship had taken an essentialist view of human language, believing that the human imaginative capacity, its relationship of words to image and the relationship between words and emotion had remained largely unchanging across time. This is no longer believed; technological changes have been shown to alter human relationships with language in profound ways, reconfiguring human psychologies and even neural processes.

Emerging digital technologies are doing precisely this, and it has been argued by Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen among others, (Multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication, 2004), that mass literacy is giving way to hyperliteracy. Humanity is developing different ways of reading keyboards and online content from that used in pre-digital society, both physically and cognitively. A different relationship with language itself is emerging as a result, although skeuomorphism - pre-digital relationships with digital language - is still common. The presentation will examine hyperliteracy as an emerging technology, how it is perceived politically, and its consequences for the industry.